A little more than 25 years ago, Orion Pictures released RoboCop, a grimly hysterical, hyper-violent satire masquerading as an action film. And despite spawning two sequels, a television series, some anime, and now a remake, the film's success was inimitable. This is partly because RoboCop only really became a great film as it was made. Director Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall, Basic Instinct) worked tirelessly to revise scenes while actors like Kurtwood Smith, who plays Clarence Boddecker, the film's main heavy, improvised some of the movie's best lines. In time for the new, inevitably inferior RoboCop's release today, Esquire.com talked to four of the original 1987 film's creators: director Paul Verhoeven; co-writer Michael Miner; stuntwoman Jeannie Epper; and actor Kurtwood Smith.

RoboCop's an American Jesus." —Paul Verhoeven

MICHAEL MINER (MM): I was only on the set for two weeks. [Co-writer] Ed [Neumeier] was on the set the whole time. I was getting ready to direct a low-budget film myself. I had also been offered the job directing second-unit on RoboCop but decided against it. I didn't want to make potato chip commercials for three more years. Ed was a story editor at Universal Pictures, I was a film school graduate directing music videos. They were these heavy metal videos by Night Ranger, Y&T... metal bands of the Bay Area. We had budgets between $35,000 and $100,000. Alcatrazz was another one — I was a camera operator for them. Those were really awful 20-hour days surrounded by people that ran on cocaine and cigarettes. Thank God I didn't have to do too many of them.

Ed was looking at a package of student films, and mine was among them. We talked on the phone, and decided to have lunch, which is when we realized we were working on similar ideas. Ed's idea was called RoboCop, mine was called SuperCop. So we sat down, nights and weekends. And in three months, we had a spec script, in December 1984. We did two more drafts. [Director] Paul [Verhoeven] had just done Flesh+Blood [1985]. Ed and I were two of only a handful of people in the theater when we went to see it. After they sent him our first script, he read it, threw it in the trash. But his psychologist wife Martine [Tours] convinced him to take another look. Luckily, we got him onboard. I used to say to Ed that foreign filmmakers — [Roman] Polanski, Milos Forman, Michael Apted — do America better than Americans. I said, "Look at [Verhoeven's] Soldier of Orange. Paul can really do it. He can really do the violence."

PAUL VERHOEVEN (PV): I was feeling insecure at first about RoboCop as it was unlike anything I'd done before. My wife and I were on holiday in the Côte d'Azur, and I read a page or less of the script. I felt that it was very, how shall we say, Americana, not so much for me. I went for a long swim, and my wife had been reading the script all that time. She said to me, "I think you're looking at this the wrong way. There's enough there, soul-wise, about losing your identity and finding it again." I didn't recognize that in the beginning. That was the main issue: finding the philosophical background to the film, because I couldn't find it. It was so far away from what I was accustomed to making. And that got me to really start reading it with a dictionary, because there were a lot of words I didn't understand. I started to read it, and I slowly started to discover that I could do that movie. The most important scene for me was the one where Murphy comes back to his house, and he has memories of his child, and wife. That to me is like finding the lost Garden of Eden, like a lost paradise.

MM: English is Paul's second language, so he kept asking us, "What does this joke mean? What does that joke mean?" He was a slave to the script. He wasn't trying to rewrite the script the way that American directors say that they rewrite with the camera. Ed will agree with me on this, but Paul was executing what was on the page.

Kurtwood Smith as Nazi-inspired baddie Clarence.



KURTWOOD SMITH (KS): This role was an exciting prospect for me. My career was just getting started. I had done some television work, and one other film [Flashpoint] with a substantial role in it, but it didn't do particularly well at the box office. I hadn't done anything big at that point. I thought RoboCop was going to be a B-movie, but that was fine. It looked like it would be fine. They read me for both Clarence and Dick Jones. Dick Jones was a little closer to the character I played in my previous film. I didn't know who Paul Verhoeven was until I got the role. But after that, I watched his Dutch films, and thought, "Oh wow, this is going to be a much more exciting film! This guy's terrific!" I was in Williamstown, Massachusetts, doing a TV show, and went directly from there to the set in Dallas.

I didn't really know what I was getting into. But they gave us a great deal of freedom, and I tried that out on my first day. It's the scene where I've been arrested, and [Robocop] says, "Book him, he's a cop killer." It was a little trying. The make-up girl and I had to put a lot of little scars on my face without having shot the scene where I get them. But I got this idea that I wanted to spit blood on the desk and say, "Just give me my fucking phone call." I asked Paul, "What if I spat blood on the desk?" And he said [in Transylvanian accent] "Ooh... you want to spit blood!" He got this little smile on his face, and we did it. It was an interesting reaction, but it got Paul and I off to the right start, working on the set.

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PV: The violence in the film is amplified because I thought it had to do with Jesus. Murphy, when he's still Murphy, is crucified. That's why the killing of Murphy is extremely violent, especially in the original version. I thought that I could move from there into his resurrection. RoboCop's an American Jesus. I don't believe in the resurrection of Jesus in any way. But I can see the value of that idea, the purity of that idea. So from an artistic point of view, it's absolutely true.

JEANNIE EPPER (JE): Stunt coordinator Gary Combs hired me and my brother [stuntman] Gary Epper for that film. Every girl in Hollywood wanted to work on that film, so I was very glad I got that part. That set was a little trippy. You had to watch your step with the surrounding elements. There's a lot of dripping, cold water that made it feel like you were in Alcatraz. But when you're working, you're having fun. You can see us driving around in the steel mill chase. I had a great time shooting that. I also do a fall down into some dirty water later in the film where I was falling through the air, then lying in a big puddle of water. It's been so many years, but it probably wasn't very nice. But ya gotta do it.

I worked directly with Paul, doubling for [actress] Nancy Allen throughout that film. She's a real sweetheart. I worked with her previously on 1941. I remember when John Belushi stepped off that airplane. That was a movie to get to work on! But in RoboCop, Gary Combs doubles for her in the scene where Allen falls into a pile of sandbags. They didn't know I injured myself at the steel mill the day before. I covered it up, and tried to move on. I ran into some raw steel. It was really sore. I would have done the stunt anyway, but Gary, as the stunt coordinator, gets the final say.

RoboCop

MM: The Mediabreak segments were Ed and I's attempt at very snarky, satirical humor. Ideas were bounced around organically, like gags in the writer's room for a sitcom, or Monty Python. Both Ed and I were in the room the whole time for those. There was a lot of back and forth. And Ed is an old hippy who protested the Vietnam War in the streets, with an FBI record and everything. Because we were in the midst of the Reagan era, I always characterize RoboCop as comic relief for a cynical time. [Economist] Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys ransacked the world, enabled by Reagan and the CIA. So when you have this cop who works for a corporation that insists "I own you," and he still does the right thing — that's the core of the film. That's the fanbase, the film's audience. Because they'd been so disenfranchised that it now felt like they could strike back.

PV: The one thing I felt very strongly about with the Mediabreak scenes was that the transition between scenes should be an extremely abrupt break from the narrative. You're taking the audience in another direction for a couple of minutes, and then you're back to the narrative. I thought that should be very harsh. I was thinking of Mondrian's paintings, with all these black lines separating colored squares. That was how I felt when I read it. In fact, the television ad that starts with footage of a claymation dinosaur really startled the Los Angeles Times' film critic. She complained to the projectionist that he'd put in a reel of the wrong movie. The critic had seen two-thirds of the movie already, so she knew what those kinds of harsh cuts would be like. But it was so jarring, that it still made her think she was watching the wrong movie!

KS: It said in the script that I had glasses. I thought, "That's very interesting. Why are they going out of their way to point that out?" The glasses wound up being a thing for me. I said to Ed Neumeier, "I really like the idea of the glasses. I hope we can keep that." What they never told me was what they said afterward, in articles written about me. They wanted that character to have a Himmler [Nazi military commander] look to him. I didn't know that, and I'm glad I didn't. I think I would have played him closer to the vest, had I known that. I took the glasses to mean that the guy had an intellectual, militaristic look to him, but was actually a sneering, smirking drug kingpin.

MM: [Character]Bixby Snyder was an American version of Benny Hill. We regurgitated Benny Hill, but with no boundaries. The bit where the girls say to him, "It's okay, we've had all our shots" was a gag about STDs. And the Stallone brain transplant joke, that we snuck into the pilot of the RoboCop TV show [the 1994 RoboCop: The Series]. In that bit, Stallone shows up on a talk show as a cross-dresser. But in the first film, we were just trying every gag we could think of.

KS: I always liked the scene where Clarence puts gum on the desk of Dick Jones's secretary. The gum was not in the script. That was another thing I added to it. I don't know why I decided to stick it on there. The character just thinks he's so cute, and funny, and he's actually being disgusting. I asked them to give my wife [Joan Pirkle] a part. We'd been living together, so she might as well have been my wife at the time. We'd been living together for 13 years before we got married; I guess we'd been together for 10 years by then. I asked if she could read for the part of Dick's secretary. Most of those roles were filled by locals, so the fact that she was there already helped.

PV: Kurtwood was great at improvising. Not every improvisation was great, and sometimes, what was written in the script was more than good enough. But sometimes, there were things that he did that were better than what I had in mind, or Michael Miner, or Ed Neumeier had in mind. There's the myth of how Hitchcock just shot whatever he wanted. But while I'm an enormous Hitchcock fan, times are different, and I feel you can get better scenes by encouraging actors to try things.

It wasn't too long into the shoot that I saw Paul [Verhoeven] explode." —Kurtwood Smith

PV: One of the most difficult things about making this film was the RoboCop suit. Ed Neumeier and I approached designer Rob Bottin to make the suit for us, and we had unrealistic expectations after reading too many Japanese comic books. So we initially thought that Bottin's approach was not sensational enough, and we started to criticize his design, which was already done. And because Bottin, who is an extremely talented and sensitive artist, was given such false advice, the making of the suit was very difficult. All my ideas were absolutely wrong, and it took us weeks and weeks to accept that. We were essentially sabotaging the suit, so when we started shooting, the suit wasn't ready. I'll take full responsibility for Bottin being late with the suit.

KS: I didn't know what was going on with Peter Weller when I first got to the set. They said, "This guy doesn't want you to call him anything but 'Robo' or 'Murphy.'" I thought, "Oh, boy." I thought I just wasn't going to bother talking to him. But we did our stuff... nobody bothered to introduce us. Peter is much too gregarious a guy to stick to that. After that, he was just regular, fun-filled Peter. We wound up getting along famously, but at first, I wasn't sure how that would go. It wasn't too long into the shoot that I saw Paul explode. I have to say, all of that never bothered me. Paul's insistence on what had been promised with regard to the filming of the movie was always what he was upset about. It wasn't just that he was crazy, he would just get upset when things weren't done the way they were supposed to. He never yelled at actors because we knew our lines, and did our job. He was never upset at us. But he got a reputation for yelling and screaming a lot, and it never concerned me. He was very engrossed in the film, so he was never very social. That doesn't mean he wasn't friendly, but he wasn't sitting around, shooting the shit.

PV: So Peter Weller, who had been working with [mime Moni Yakim] to learn how to walk in the suit, also had to use football equipment to move around in. But of course, the football outfit wasn't comparable, so he thought he'd be much more human in his costume. So by the time the suit arrived — I think it was two weeks into the shoot — Peter Weller had not been able to sit in the suit. So he was brought to the set at 4 a.m. the first day the suit was available. And he worked on it for 12 hours. This was the scene where he's introduced at the [police] precinct. He was extremely frustrated because everything he thought he could do, he couldn't do. Peter then tried to get a grip on the situation by improvising, but that improvisation didn't fit the script at all. He and I would later shake hands after all the animosity that came about because of the [suit-related] problems. So while the movie wasn't easy, I mostly remember it as a pleasant time. It was hard work, and long hours with an extremely good crew, and pleasant actors to work with, unlike [my previous film] Flesh+Blood, which was extremely difficult from beginning to end.

Paul Verhoeven getting rowdy on the set of RoboCop.



JE: The car chase scenes were my favorites in that movie. My brother Gary and I were both going through a very raw, horrific divorce. My husband ran off with my brother's wife. We didn't know whether to kill each other, or chase each other off a cliff. The car chases were a great way to get rid of all that stress. We were so happy to be together because we didn't blame each other, but we sort of did blame each other. All my friends were there, and I felt comfortable with everybody. That made me feel better.

PV: One extremely satisfactory scene is the one where RoboCop essentially walks over water at the steel mill. A day before filming, we saw that there were these big walls. And I came to think of them as the walls of Jerusalem. That wasn't in the script, but at that moment, we decided to write about him walking on water into the scene. We also invented the part where Clarence drops the steel bars on RoboCop's head at that moment. Those steel bars were just there, and hadn't been used for years. But seeing that scene come together — that was a beautiful moment.

KS: We shot in November, so the water was freezing. The air was cold, and the water was colder. I was a little freaked out because I remember wondering, "What's even in there?" At first I thought, "Oh, nice clean water! No debris, no algae!" Then I thought, "Well, why? Why would that be?" They were pretty careful about cleaning my eyes and stuff. I was mostly only up to my ankles, and only had to go in the water three or four times. That's certainly not the coldest water I've been in. But it was cold.

Cocaine was the drug du jour, and it was everywhere." —Michael Miner

MM: The cocaine warehouse was originally written as a former supermarket partly because we wanted to have RoboCop throw Clarence through floor-to-ceiling display windows. But for me, Detroit was the city destroyed by corporate America. Unlike any other major metropolitan area, you look at Detroit now, you see the city in ruins. Have you read the book ? It's an amazing five-year photographic study, and it's existentially haunting. There are abandoned opera houses, there are swimming pools filled with library books. So when you think about Mitt Romney coming from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, think of him as pissing on the head of union America. There are two kinds of people in America: the ones who want the big house on the hill, and will piss down on other Americans, and those who know what politics and power are all about.

MM: In the '80s, cocaine was the international drug. Cocaine was the drug du jour, and it was everywhere. I don't think there was any cocaine use on the set. There was a lot of cocaine being used on the sets of my music videos. It was on movie sets in the early '80s, but I think that commercials and music videos are different than features, where you're working for 30 to 40 days. I don't think it's sustainable to use for that long. It's not that kind of drug.

JE: Cocaine wasn't being used on set, especially not with the stuntpeople. You couldn't be on drugs if you wanted to work with Gary Combs. That was one of his things: You don't work for me if you do drugs. We all knew that. If you're on cocaine, you don't work for Gary. It was a hard time because it was pretty widespread. I didn't know a lot of stuntmen who couldn't get a lot of work because of that, but everybody was doing it. But if you were on drugs, stunt coordinators wouldn't hire you.

KS: No, not on that film. I never saw anything like that going on on that film. That would have never gone over with Peter. The other guys in the gang were pretty clean. We hung out a lot. We went to restaurants, and we didn't drink at all. And if they did, it was pretty moderate.

PV: As it was written, the scene where RoboCop finds out about his killers by showing off a Polaroid just didn't work. I couldn't find a way to properly stylize it. It was too realistic, too normal. They weren't RoboCop enough. But shooting that stuff in a discotheque was very now at the time, though it was a little dangerous. I danced with the dancers in a frantic way to get people to do the same. People laughed, but I've also shown actors what I need in other films, with nudity, or an emotional scene. Later, in Starship Troopers, there's a scene where everybody's showering, everybody's naked. I did that because the actresses said, "Well, it's easy for you to ask us to take our clothes off while you stand over there." So I said, "If you shoot the scene, we'll take our trousers off, too." So I similarly showed my actors in RoboCop'sdiscotheque scene what I wanted by dancing with them. When that scene was done, people were still dancing, and I was dancing with them. My cinematographer just turned the camera, and as a joke, filmed me dancing. And the editor thought he could use it. So for a split second, I'm in the film.

$400?! You set fire to me, then you give me $400?!" —Kurtwood Smith

MM: There is one thing I'm still disappointed about. There were three drafts of the film's script where, during the gas station explosion, the Shell corporation sign blows up so that it said "Hell" in flames. We had it in the script, producer Jon Davison cleared it, and Paul even shot an insert of flames surrounding the word "Hell" instead of "Shell." And they didn't put it in the film. That's a quibble, though.

PV: The explosions we filmed during the riot scene were all bigger than anybody could have anticipated. I asked people to blow up all kinds of stuff in the face of the actors. But I think everybody underestimated the power of that last explosion. But they went really well. I mean, we were laughing all the time! It was chaos, but that's what the scene was about. But the explosions were so big, so idiotic that everybody had to laugh. It didn't reach the actors in any way, though.

JE: Eighty percent of the time stunts are exactly what the director says it is. Twenty percent of the time it's mostly like what they say it is. And then there are times when the director tells you it's gonna be an extra little somethin'. And the extra little somethin' turns into a big somethin'. There's no technique for how you fall down a hill — you just throw yourself down a hill.

KS: At the end of the street riot scene, they took my coat off because it was on fire. And afterward, they came to us in our tiny trailers, and they said they were going to give us stunt pay. Stunt pay was something like $400. "$400?! You set fire to me, then you give me $400?!"

The MPAA's treatment of the film gets more and more mythological every year. It was rejected eight times, not 11." —Paul Verhoeven

PV: The MPAA's treatment of the film gets more and more mythological every year. It was rejected eight times, not 11. This was my first American movie. I had already felt this kind of frustration on Flesh+Blood, which was also for Orion. That was already difficult, and I had a hard time because in Holland, there were no restrictions. That was very difficult for me to deal with. It was very unusual that people would tell me how to shoot my movie. But Orion said they wanted an R, not an X, and I understood that. So we went back to edit it. And each of those eight times we had to cut off a little more violence here, violence there. It was give and take, but I'm not sure if it was working with the MPAA, or working against them. They were very adamant.

But ultimately, as you can see in the ED-209 demonstration scene, the extreme nature of the violence is comical. There's fountains of blood in that scene. It was supposed to be a completely surrealistic scene. The idea of the machine shooting, and shooting well beyond reason is veering into Modern Times, Chaplin-style territory. I thought it was very funny, and the contemporary audiences laughed at it. They burst out laughing after ED-209 stops, and Morton says, "Somebody call Medical Concepts." But with the cut version, nobody laughed because the joke wasn't as funny anymore. The MPAA forced me to take all that out. They made it worse for the public by making it impossible to laugh it off. That was working with the MPAA.

JE: My accident with the steel beam comes back to me a lot. I was so worried, not because I was hurt, but because nobody knew I was hurt except my brother. He doctored me up, and the stunt coordinator stepped in, put my wardrobe on, and did that scene. I don't think too many people know he did that for me. He was that kind of guy: Stunt's gotta go on, so you gotta go and do it. That's how you work as a team.

Simon Abrams Simon Abrams is a film critic and author based in New York.

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