The Guardian quotes Paul Verhoeven, the director of Starship Troopers:The actors weren't even clear on what the giant arachnids would look like, since their "Bug" battles were filmed entirely with green screens, remembers one of the movie's stars, Denise Richards. Instead Verhoeven "would be there jumping up and down with a broom in the air so we would have a sense of how big they were."Verhoeven told one interviewer that he never actually read Robert Heinlein's original book . "I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring. It is really quite a bad book."