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- What are your prime directives? - Serve the public trust.
Protect the innocent.
Thank you.
Uphold the law.
It's *** Jones!
It was considered just another low-budget science fiction movie with a silly title.
Perhaps you're aware of the RoboCop Program developed by myself?
RoboCop is a little like the guy who rides into a corrupt town and cleans it up.
Your move, creep.
To me, this was very clearly a metaphor of the knight in shining armour.
Let the woman go. You are under arrest.
It's just such incredibly good filmmaking.
It's as tight as a nest of Chinese boxes.
You can keep opening lids and finding different things,
but each one of those boxes is perfectly handcrafted.
That film is very well put together.
Although the movie is set in the future, like any movie it's a product of its time,
and this was a product of the Reagan era.
I say good business is where you find it.
I like violence, you know? I like violence in movies.
I wanted to show Satan killing Jesus.
Cinematic robots have a long and illustrious history.
Some of the earliest films, in fact,
either had mechanical people or artificial humans.
There is positively no human agency employed whatsoever in controlling it.
Something that people are dreaming of,
being a person... Mankind being a machine.
Musicians of the world, unite.
Automation is on the way.
I think there are two films that were important to me when I shot RoboCop,
which was The Day The Earth Stood Still,
and the other one was Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis.
You can see a lot of parallels, especially with the robot Lang invented.
Even as early as 1922, Lang sort of foretold and forecast
the Western culture's ambivalence about technology.
Maria is this beautiful, shining, durable construct
that at the same time is manipulative, and violent, and ***,
and all the darker elements of what started to creep into technology.
Ours is a male version of Fritz Lang.
We have a little bit more sophisticated outlook,
a bit more high-tech, but it's still very close.
RoboCop. Who is he? What is he? Where does he come from?
RoboCop was an idea I came up with when I was at Universal Pictures.
I couldn't stand my job, so I wrote a screenplay.
Michael Miner came in and said
"You wanna write a script about a robot? I like robots."
The first idea for RoboCop was a robot,
and then very quickly it became a man who became a robot.
Ed and I were thinking of two ideas independently.
He had an idea called RoboCop which was about a robot police officer.
What is this ***?
I had an idea called SuperCop, about a character who has an accident
and then is hooked up to an appliance that enhances his powers.
We were writing RoboCop when Terminator was being finished.
When the script was finished, we saw the film.
They're both post-modern robot films in the sense that the humour is very dark.
I think that the Cameron film is much more a horror film than RoboCop,
which to me is social satire with some very real emotions in it.
They brought it to Jonathan Kaplan, and he didn't want to do it,
so he suggested that they bring it to me.
Orion had produced The Terminator.
I'm sure the success of that film led them to take a chance.
We went over to Orion and they just said "OK, let's go."
I was like "Whoa, we sold the script."
We basically went right through the list of every halfway decent American director.
Every one of them turned it down.
I have a feeling most of them never got past the title page that said RoboCop.
They could just envision it on their résumé,
and thinking "No, no. I don't wanna go there."
Everybody had reservations about the title, because it was basically silly.
And no matter who you told the title to,
you could just see the expression on their face,
like "God, why are they involved with such a piece of junk?"
So we often thought about trying to come up with a better title, but it stuck.
I remember Orion saying "We can never sell it with that title. It's stupid."
But in the end, a title that tells you what the movie is is quite good.
Action! Go!
I'd always been this huge fan of Paul Verhoeven.
Barbara Boyle had just finished doing Flesh & Blood with him for Orion.
She said "Let me send it to Paul Verhoeven."
Paul was having trouble in Holland.
He just was not getting along with people in the film business there, I guess.
The first movies that I did, including Soldier of Orange,
were always financed by a government that was right-wing.
When the government changed to the left wing,
I started to have problems.
It started with Spetters. They thought it was decadent and perverted.
Paul's a director, he can direct actors. Beautiful camera work.
Keetje Tippel, Soldier of Orange, Spetters, Turkish Delight,
these are good pictures.
I can't imagine that Paul would want to do this picture, and sure enough he said no.
When I got finally that script of RoboCop and I read it,
I thought it was extremely silly and stupid.
I threw it on the floor and said "I'm not going to shoot this kind of rubbish."
My wife picked up that script, RoboCop, and read it,
and she said "Yeah, this is perhaps not Shakespeare,
but it is a script with more layers than you think."
Martine said "There's decapitations, and people getting their arms ripped off."
"You'll like it." And indeed he said
"Well, I have never seen the hero get his hand blown off."
He sent a telegram saying he would do it, and no one was more shocked than I.
In Turkish Delight, Soldier of Orange, The Fourth Man and Spetters,
which are the most well-known in the United States,
you are really talking about people, and not special effects.
It's strange, because I had never done anything like that,
and it was not that I was craving to do it.
It was not that I thought "My God,
I remember these movies out of my youth and I want to do them myself."
I think in general I would say that I was not a big fan of science fiction.
Doesn't matter. We'll blank his memory.
If you look at Paul's work, there's nothing that indicates anything like this before,
and he effortlessly pulls that off.
He signed the release forms when he joined the force. He's legally dead.
We can do pretty much what we want to him.
This cynical, unblinking look at violence was something that Paul could do.
Ooh, guns, guns, guns.
A good director can adapt to any kind of genre, to any genre.
That's the key. If the guy's got talent, he can do anything.
And Paul can do anything.
I often say that he is a visceralist, not a visualist.
Kubrick's a visualist, he's very cold and concise,
and he wants you to see it, and study it.
Paul wants you to be reacting like "***, the next one might hit me."
As I started to work with the writers, I picked up so many layers and elements,
and I got really inspired by what was already on the paper,
by extending that, emphasising it, pushing it,
so that ultimately it might be my best American movie.
Foreign directors critique America better than Americans,
they approach it anthropologically.
That's another thing Paul brought to the material.
I have a lot of respect for Paul. He's the real deal, a real director.
He's totally focused.
It was really me thinking "OK, science fiction is not my genre,
but I think I understand something of the soul of RoboCop. "
And there is something artistic about the project,
and something humanitarian, if you want.
Murphy, transferring in from Metro South.
We had been looking for an actor that could do RoboCop for a very long time,
and we didn't make any progress.
For a moment we thought that we would take Michael Ironside.
We saw Michael Ironside and liked him a lot,
but he was a little too big, we thought, to fit the costume.
It was a given that they would have to find a certain body type,
because they were going to construct the Robo suit around the actor.
So you didn't want someone who was too large,
because you would have problems fitting the person into it, and being able to move.
After three, four months of searching we still hadn't found anybody,
and then somebody called us and said "Peter Weller is in New York."
"He might be interested."
Peter Weller made a bit of a splash
on a film called Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension,
and Jon Davison was aware of Peter's work in Buckaroo Banzai,
so he tested for it.
I pointed out that it would be a life of suffering and that he would not be happy.
Peter had martial arts training, so that was appealing.
We knew that a lot of his performance would be mime,
so we needed somebody who liked the idea of doing mime.
He started immediately to take lessons about choreographing his steps,
basically how he would have to walk with a RoboCop costume on.
Peter very much had in mind these quick, birdlike movements,
particularly when he is fighting.
Originally we had cast Stephanie Zimbalist in the role of Lewis,
and a couple of weeks before we started shooting, she pulled out.
So we were in a mad scramble to find someone to replace her,
and fortunately we found Nancy Allen, who was available.
I haven't really had a chance to introduce myself. I'm Anne Lewis.
Nancy Allen before that had been playing shallow, ***, teenage characters.
Carrie, of course, is her signature part.
But she was also known for having long, strawberry curls.
The very first thing Paul said to her was "Cut your hair."
Paul was trying again to take a performer with an established persona and tweak it.
You don't remember me, do you?
*** Jones, the character who Ronny *** plays,
is of the most evil, manipulative and corrupt of the OCP officials.
You just... *** with the wrong guy!
But prior to playing *** Jones,
Ronny *** for the most part had played the exact opposite type of character.
Wholesome family men, or country guitar-strumming ordinary guys.
Very, very nice characters.
I'm confident we can go to prototype in 90 days.
Rob Bottin, who created the suit,
sculpts everything in clay three-dimensionally.
He started doing full-size sculptures of RoboCop, very little 2-D art.
We would go over, Ed Neumeier the writer, Paul Verhoeven and myself
would go over to Rob's shop and watch this thing progress.
I mean, for a while he looked like Judge Dredd.
For a while he looked like a real superhero
with a huge chest and shoulders.
But we always went back to sleek,
you know, like a product of Detroit, in a way.
If Braun had made a knight in shining armour, that's what he would look like.
Ed had found these Japanese comic books
where they make this kind of bulky robot with big shoulders, but then in steel.
Rob's costume, in the beginning, was like a modernistic version of Fritz Lang.
But we thought "We are going to do something better."
"These Japanese comic books will help us to make it really revolutionary,
instead of being influenced by the past."
And we *** it up completely.
That was a big artistic explosion between our group nearly and Rob Bottin,
who ultimately said "I cannot work this way."
Then I think we stepped backwards finally,
but we had lost already months by fooling around.
By the time we stepped backwards, we had lost 40, 50% of what was good.
So that was terrible. Rob Bottin was extremely frustrated.
I mean, he couldn't even talk to us any more, certainly not to me,
who he saw as the main guilty person.
Rob figured out that the way to do this
would be to create an undersuit that would be flexible,
and then to create a harness that fit over the undersuit
where you could hang solid pieces of the fibreglass exoskeleton.
Sometimes we were rubbing it with oil or wax or something that it really got shiny,
and I always put a lot of different lights from different directions
so that the appearance of the RoboCop was like a figure of reflections.
You could always see it outlined in light. It has a power.
I always got the camera very low, on very low angles,
and the lower the camera is, the more the camera looks up to him,
the bigger RoboCop appears.
We shot the movie in Dallas. We did go scout Detroit with Paul.
Although it did fairly well in the sort of seedy urban department,
it didn't have any futuristic skyline or any kind of modern look to it at all.
RoboCop was shot in Dallas from August through October of 1986,
which is the most humid, and the hottest, steamiest,
nastiest time to be in that part of the world.
The temperature on the days they were shooting was about 120º to 130º inside.
Peter was losing pounds of weight every day out of water dehydration.
He was constantly having to be hydrated.
Peter had a mime coach by the name of Moni Yakim,
and he wanted to work with Moni on practising basic robotic moves,
and to create a character through movement.
Peter and Moni rehearsed for many weeks before the start of filming.
Rob Bottin was supposed to deliver the suit
about two or three weeks before principal photography,
but, as these things go, the suit arrived on the day we needed it to be shot.
Rob was very much delayed because of our problems
that we had created partially ourselves,
and that's why the costume came so late to the set.
It took Peter 11 hours to get into the suit the first time,
because everything needed to be fitted, and adjusted, and changed, and shaved.
So by the time Peter walked out of the trailer door 11 hours later,
he was in a complete state because everything he had rehearsed with Moni
didn't work in this suit.
We had a terrible time. We had to stop production because we got in a conflict,
but the conflict was because he said "I can't do it, I don't know how to walk,"
and the production said "Well, have to shoot. No time."
He said "Well, I didn't get time to practise,"
and we said "That's a pity. We have to shoot anyhow."
It was so devastating, it was so frustrating,
and we were so insensitive that we didn't understand that could not be done.
It was only later that I realised we had done something completely inappropriate
and that Peter Weller had all the right of the world to protest.
And so ultimately Mike Medavoy said
"OK. Let's stop a couple of days, and you work with Peter."
So we started to work with the system, with the costume.
We had a video camera, we showed it to him, and slowly he got the confidence
and the ability to do it so that it looked good.
Paul and Rob weren't speaking to each other during the entire course of the film.
In fact, Rob stopped even coming down there at all,
and turned the whole thing over to what we called "the Robo team".
Action will be everybody shooting, yeah?
We took over 10, 12 empty buildings
and dressed them, and then had them rigged to explode.
We were all over the city blowing things up. We were on the news every night.
Something was exploding, or there was something going on.
Now fill it up on number seven.
The explosion at the gas station was big enough that it did set the building on fire.
The fire department did threaten to shut us down,
and our cameraman, Jost Vacano, said
"Well, that explosion. I don't think it's registered on film, you know."
"It wasn't really big enough for the camera to see."
So we looked at the dailies, and what you see is what's in the film.
RoboCop was a terrible experience in the production. Everyone had a terrible time.
It was hot, people were aggressively unpleasant,
no one was getting along,
the picture was over budget, it was over schedule.
People from Orion would come down and say
"Stop the bleeding, stop the bleeding,"
and then they would fly off, and the next weekend they'd fly down again.
And it was six-day weeks when we were in Pittsburgh,
and people were just exhausted and ready to kill each other.
Blow this ***'s head off.
When I came back, people said I looked dead. It was really hard.
Working on RoboCop was like being the victim of a violent crime.
You try to blank it out of your memory. I swore I'd never make another picture.
Fellow executives, it gives me great pleasure
to introduce you to the future of law enforcement.
ED-209.
ED-209 was supposed to look like these weird Japanese toys
that were these big robots that had gun arms,
and I just said "It looks something like that."
I always had this idea that it had a shark mouth and double machine guns,
and it looked like... What do you call it?
The gun pods and the rocket pods you saw on the side of Huey attack 'copters.
There's like a certain dumbness to it as well, a utilitarian stupidity to the thing.
I felt that basically having this kind of feeling,
there might be sensors here, but what does he see exactly?
He's partially blind, blind for what's happening in the world.
Law enforcement has a side that's blind,
and basically will just do like the Germans did in the Second World War.
When the officer says "Shoot these people", they would just do it.
You've got something that looks really swell,
and ED-209 does look ferocious and intimidating, which was intentional,
but it doesn't operate. It doesn't work very well.
It was supposed to be a big American product. It's a big thing, it's heavy.
Who cares if it worked or not?
Up until very recently, that's exactly what you could say about American cars.
Because bigger is better. 6000 SUX. An American tradition.
Automobiles get styled to be emotionally appealing,
and it's kind of strange that military equipment gets that same treatment.
The front grille on ED's face for a long time was the opposite way it is now.
It looked like he had a smile. We knew something was wrong.
"Oh, yeah. If we turn the grille upside down, he has a menacing presence."
What is that grille? You wouldn't put a big radiator on the face of a tank.
You might as well paint a bull's-eye around it and say "Hit me here."
What we were shooting was just a prop, but it couldn't really act.
People had to go up to it, or stand next to it, or touch it. That was the prop.
209 is programmed for urban pacification.
Paul Verhoeven, he was screaming.
Every time the robot was supposed to be moving, he would act it out.
If people weren't afraid of a giant prop, they were certainly afraid of him.
There were no computer-generated images, this was just stop motion.
I didn't know anything about stop motion. I had no idea.
I forgot for a long time that I had to solve that too.
There wasn't a lot of money,
so we couldn't get into really any fancy bluescreen photography.
The only way at that time of creating these artificial characters
was putting a guy in a suit, or building a big prop,
or doing a stop-motion animation puppet.
For the process of rear-screen photography, used on RoboCop,
you shoot a photographic background and project it onto a translucent screen.
You build a stage, put your stop-motion puppet in front of that,
light that puppet so that it matches the background,
and have any foreground objects you need to and shoot that.
Phil is like an actor, he delivers a performance,
and ED-209 was always to me kind of the clown.
The gag of falling downstairs, people find it so amusing
that he can't go down the stairs.
I think it wouldn't have been as funny if Phil hadn't been there to...
There's a shot where the thing is reaching, it's going... That's Phil.
We actually built a scale version of the stairs,
got all the dimensions and whatnot from the staircase they were using,
and built a miniature set, probably about four feet square.
Then we set the puppet up at the top of the stairs
and flipped him down the stairs.
There is, I believe, one, possibly two, stop-motion shots of RoboCop.
When you have RoboCop right in front, he used a miniature.
He had to help push up the gun and blow his arm off.
The final scene, where ED walks in from off-camera,
I got a call in the morning from Davison,
and Jon said "Can you do something funny?"
So we all backed some stuff off and found this little fan,
and glued that on to ED-209 and kept the little whirligig spinning the whole time
in a pretty much pantomime drunk gag,
where he hiccups and then he...
He falls over and does this little...
10,000 acres of wooded residential land were scorched in an instant
when a laser cannon aboard the Strategic Defense Peace Platform
misfired today during routine startup tests.
RoboCop is a satire of the '80s. Some people say it's a satire of Reaganomics.
We've entered into a contract with the city to run law enforcement.
But it's a satire of that era when everybody was getting rich
and everybody in business were being tough.
There's a new guy in town. His name's RoboCop.
Bob Morton was a character that had been around in my head for a while.
He doesn't have a name. He's got a program. He's product.
He is like the quintessential yuppie, only into consumption,
only into excess, into self-satisfaction, into furthering himself,
and he has no other agenda except himself,
which was what many yuppies were criticised for back in the 1980s.
Welcome to the club, Bob.
Businessmen read Asian martial arts books to learn to be better businessmen,
called each other killers, made hostile takeovers.
That's how it's done, Johnson. You see an opening, you go for it.
So I was trying to raise it to where they really were killing each other.
I'm cashing you out, Bob.
It's a cliché now, but at the time it was fun to watch the vicious yuppies.
*** Jones. He fumbled the ball and I was there to pick it up.
RoboCop was trying to write a funny movie
that was masquerading as a genre sci-fi, Terminator kind of movie.
You probably don't think I'm a very nice guy.
- Do you? - Buddy, I think you're slime.
Paul said he wanted to make Murphy's death the most violent scene imaginable
because you cannot have the resurrection until you have the crucifixion.
Paul really immersed himself in that part of the film,
killing the hero 25 minutes in.
The figure of Jesus has always fascinated me,
and the mythological narrative in the Gospels fascinates me too.
When I got the script, I started to realise that, in some way,
RoboCop had something to do, for me at least, with Jesus.
These themes of crucifixion.
Resurrection.
RoboCop.
Even at the end, when Murphy is walking over the water,
the line that Murphy says there...
I'm not arresting you any more.
I thought that was an American Jesus,
saying "OK, at a certain moment, we'll use the guns."
At the end he's an American Jesus, an American Jesus that uses his gun.
Dead or alive, you are coming with me.
We have to assume that Jesus himself
was surrounded by people that used swords.
We killed you!
Even if I say it's an American Jesus, we have to accept that Jesus,
probably at the end of his life, perhaps the last couple of months,
was not so different from a Che Guevara.
Jesus says "In the past I told you you don't have to worry about anything,
you'll get from people what you need."
"But now I tell you, if you have a cloak,
sell it, and buy a sword."
Even Jesus ultimately seemed to have promoted weapons.
Come quietly or there will be... trouble.
It is more or less a machine, and later it becomes more and more a human being.
You're a cop!
Cop!
It's the classic struggle for identity,
for people trying to assert their own individuality.
Yes, I am a cop.
And trying to retain that individuality
in a world that insists on being bland and superficial and violent and kneejerk.
His soul is real, and that makes the film so interesting,
that makes this character of RoboCop so interesting.
One element that was extremely important
was really the scenes where Murphy visits his house.
Welcome, shopper. Let's take a stroll through your new home.
Then you get these flashes of the past.
This kind of in-the-brain-going stuff
that you would participate in the brains of a half-man, half-robot
were extremely seductive to me
because I felt there nearly a theological significance,
meaning the search for the lost paradise.
Did they blank his memory? How much does he remember?
Who owns his personality once the memory is blanked?
Those are all existential questions that I thought were fun to explore in the script.
Do you have a name?
He's obviously in an existential dilemma.
He's being driven by forces that he doesn't understand.
And it's just his own life, his own humanity,
and eventually, of course, that breaks through.
Hey! Hey. Halt. Stop.
RoboCop is remembering that he's not a robot,
but remembering that somewhere in the part of the brain that's still alive
that he is Murphy.
He can never go back, he is always going to be something different.
He's not a man, he's not a machine, he's different.
He's his own creature, maybe.
In a wonderful revolutionary flourish,
the created turns on the creator, just like the Frankenstein myth.
You are under arrest.
But in this case on the side of law and order.
Aiding and abetting a known felon.
Which was kind of reactionary, in a way.
It became clear that we had a character who was half-machine, and half-human.
Can you do that, Dad?
It also became obvious that the machine elements would be represented suitably
by the synthesiser music and the electronic percussion.
The human part would be represented by an orchestra to make him more human.
I went through six or seven themes until we landed upon the RoboCop march.
Paul Verhoeven would walk around my studio like RoboCop,
and he would move his arms and his head
to just give me the idea of how he wanted it to be fluid.
It's a pretty cool way to approach it.
Making the violence over the top made it more palatable. It becomes humour.
I hate movies where violence is elliptic.
To see people shooting, and then you see somebody on the street, or like this,
without showing what damage a shot does,
I don't think that's a big advantage.
The original version of RoboCop
that ultimately was, let's say, changed because of the MPA,
the violence, of course, was much harsher in my cut...
...than it appeared in the theatres.
By making the violence less, by making the violence more elliptic,
you were taking away, let's say,
the burlesque or the grotesque of my staging
that was so much over the top that it was nearly kind of absurd.
When ED-209 shoots the guy in the boardroom,
it went on and on as the guy on the table is shot 60 times, and the next line was...
Somebody wanna call a paramedic?
I thought that worked so well because it was absurd.
The guy was gone. There was nothing left of him. He was completely exploded.
Don't touch him.
And then Mr Jones comes to the Old Man.
I'm sure it's only a glitch. A temporary setback.
That worked all much funnier when it was over the top.
You call this a glitch?
RoboCop is really fascism for liberals. The picture has a very liberal viewpoint,
and does it in the most violent way imaginable.
I don't make political statements. I think I reflect what's happening in society.
"Nukem". Get them before they get you.
This is my perception of the US.
We practically are the military.
This is what I feel was happening in the States.
I don't condemn it, and I don't admire it.
It's more that I see it, and I want to portray it.
Whoa! A new toy!
America without guns, that's not America.
And I don't wanna hear any more talk about strike.
We're not plumbers. We're police officers.
There was a police screening, and I thought they were gonna be offended
that we were making fun of their life-and-death stuff.
As it got closer, I got nervous, and what surprised me was they loved it.
So to have a blue-collar individual,
who has been stomped on by both the good guys and the bad guys,
come up and be empowered to do something
is very fulfilling for an unempowered audience.
I remember a preview in New York, in a very rough theatre,
with a lot of ethnic people, and pretty much blue-collar.
The summer's new superhero is America's new superhit movie.
It was so fascinating to see people participate.
An American audience is always more participant in the movies
than, for example, a Dutch audience.
They are much more inclined to yell something, or applaud, or scream.
At the end of the movie, when the man says to RoboCop
What's your name?
the whole audience, before he could answer,
yelled "Murphy!"
I believe the Boy Scouts of America
had some sort of presentation with RoboCop and Richard Nixon,
and I was never really sure what the details were.
But the meeting of the two just sort of boggles the mind.
When people have faith that the streets are policed
by incorruptible individuals, which in a way RoboCop was,
it renews a sense of community,
and I think that's where the film also touched people's unconscious,
because they felt there was somebody out there who was not corruptible.
- Pakistan is threatening my border! - That's it, buster. No more military aid.
It's more relevant now than it was, unfortunately.
The entire outer skin will be like this.
It's titanium, laminated with Kevlar.
You can't be a Luddite. You have to just say "It's here."
They're all wearing the Kevlar and stuff, and we put that in RoboCop
because it was the new army stuff.
The LAPD is becoming more paramilitary, they look like peacekeeping troops,
and I think it's because that's what the cities are demanding now.
We can expect 209 to become the hot military product for the next decade.
Now we have a more *** Jones vision of law enforcement,
a militarism in which no secrets get out,
which is really troubling when you think about it.
But America deserves that. It's a land of private property
where everything has to be owned, serial numbered, protected, controlled.
We're addicted to a pretty bad drug called capitalism.
Until we get over that, we're gonna need policing in the way that they are.
Thank you for your cooperation. Good night.