Original subtitles

[♪♪♪♪♪]

ED: I think the character is a modern knight in armor.

VERHOEVEN: We were so on target. The movie is so precise.

RANDY: The Verhoeven mantra on RoboCop was blood.

I want more fucking blood.

MAN 1: I never met anybody

that had a good time making RoboCop.

MICHAEL: The '80s in America were a tipping point.

PETER: It had this prescient dark side.

That's the lightning in the bottle.

NANCY: It's a character that's a wonderful, unique hero.

RONNY: One of the really iconic movies around.

MAN 2: It lives because of its theme.

And the theme is executed right down the line.

ED: There's a sincere purity about his goals,

and yet he promises action.

[♪♪♪♪♪]

ED: I'd been thinking about, sort of, action movies

and strangely business in 1980.

And in particular, I was thinking

about how could I do a movie where there was business

and action together.

I'm Ed Neumeier, and I'm the co-screenwriter

and co-producer of RoboCop.

I was very interested in science fiction,

and I was working as a reader at Warner Brothers.

It was then called TBS. It was shared.

Both Columbia Pictures and Warner Brothers

were on it a lot.

And that's where Blade Runner was shot.

In 1981, when I was on the set of Blade Runner,

I wasn't really working on the movie,

but I was kind of pretending to.

I remember asking someone on the set,

"So, what's this movie about?"

And they said, "Oh, it's about a robot."

And I went, "Oh, cool, a robot."

Because I always had liked robots.

And then they pointed at Sean Young,

and they said, "That's the robot."

And I went, "Oh, no, that can't be the robot.

I know what a robot looks like."

And on the set of Blade Runner,

I had the idea for RoboCop.

And later that night,

I saw that blue car which they call a spinner.

And there was something to a young man

that was very seductive about that.

The name RoboCop came to my mind,

and kind of an image of the character.

And I give a lot of credit to Ridley Scott's art direction,

to really creating a mood where suddenly,

you have this idea about something else.

And then it took about four years

of thinking about this plot, and story, and the character

until it really germinated into an idea

I started writing down.

But eventually, I got a better job,

and I became an executive, a junior executive at Universal.

I was reading a lot of comic books for a studio.

They came to me one day, and said,

"Ed, read these comic books."

These, sort of, modern, neurotic superhero.

Iron Man, Machine Man , because the superhero

had, sort of, trouble being a superhero.

Even though he had all these powers,

there was, like, something going on inside.

So, he was, sort of, like a superhero with a headache.

You know, I kind of showed up suddenly,

and I'm wearing a suit, and I'm a little nervous

about, "Why am I here?"

Because I didn't really feel like an executive type,

but it was a good job.

Yes, sir.

You can, sort of, see

in the executive scenes in RoboCop

that there is that young character

who eventually gets shot, you know?

I kind of saw myself as Kinney.

Too bad about Kenny, huh?

That's life in a big city.

It was while I was there

that I was really doing a lot of the plotting,

and that's where I met Michael Miner.

My name is Michael Miner, and I co-wrote RoboCop.

ED: Miner was older than me,

but he was then a young filmmaker from UCLA,

where I had also gone.

Ed viewed a package of short films

that a bunch of UCLA filmmakers made,

and mine was one of them.

I started shooting music videos as a director camera operator.

Did about ten of them. They were heavy metal videos.

I made experimental films in the vein of Nicolas Rogue

and the French New Wave,

but was also heavily influenced by Philip K. Dick

and Jorge Luis Borges.

They were my, you would say, literary mentors.

The type of science fiction I was interested in

had a social aspect.

What it means to be human, what is reality,

whether reality as we see it is questionable,

all of those things.

I started developing an idea called Supercop ,

which was about an appliance that a human wears

that accelerates all of that person's

physical attributes.

And the crux of the drama was that it starts

affecting the psychology of the cops in psychotic ways.

He came to see me looking for a job,

but instead, I said,

"Hey, let's do a movie about a robot."

We had lunch, and we found out,

"Wow, we were thinking in these similar, sort of, vein

of what is the future of law enforcement.

And it was pretty much a, I won't say

love at first sight, but we really hit it off.

And one thing led to another.

And we started writing a script on nights and weekends

called RoboCop.

MICHAEL: Ed and I do very different things,

which is kind of what you want in a partnership.

I am full of frothy amount of ideas,

where Ed is more of a solid backstop,

and he's a no BS kind of guy.

So, part of our process was myself pitching things,

nine of which were pretty bad,

but the tenth one, when it landed,

it was usually, you know, something that Ed recognized

as a solid, dramatic piece.

And that was part of the glue of our partnership.

I actually told them

that somebody in my family had died,

so I could leave for two weeks and go write the first act,

which I did in San Anselmo, the town where I grew up.

And the funny part of it was that they sent me flowers,

which I felt very bad about.

MICHAEL: Ed had a very solid first act, including the torture murder.

I came along and filled in a lot of blanks

about the corporate conspiracy,

how the criminals, Clarence and Dick Jones,

linked up, had a kind of cabal to manipulate Delta City.

At times, it was very difficult,

because we were both in the room pacing, typing.

We would be late at night, tugging over specific lines,

specific jokes.

It was very hard.

But then there were other times when something came out, like,

"He's old, we're young, that's life."

I just blurted that out one day, and it just landed.

We struggled together to figure this thing out.

The great thing about the first drafts

of RoboCop was they were funny,

they were insightful,

they were critiquing social mores of the time,

particularly the Reagan era.

MICHAEL: If you know anything

about the '80s and Ronald Reagan,

everything was privatized.

The climate was ripe, I think. The country was ready.

They were tired of this BS, right?

And so, they were ready for this satire about Maricona.

ED: I later offered Universal the script,

and they said, "You've made a mistake.

And the mistake you've made is that the robot

should not look like a robot.

It should look like a man on the outside.

That's the way you do it," they said.

'Cause they'd dumped The Six Million Dollar Man,

and that's what they thought it should be.

But luckily, they didn't buy it.

MICHAEL: Terminator was about to come out.

And we consciously stayed away from it as long as we could.

There was an industry screening that we finally went to.

ED: We saw it halfway through the writing of the script.

There was a particular guy I was romancing,

who I was trying to get to buy RoboCop.

This guy named Stan Lee,

who was then working for Marvel Pictures.

And Marvel was not such a big going concern

at that moment, and they liked it,

but they didn't make an offer for it.

We took Stan Lee during that time

to Paramount Pictures

to see an early screening of Terminator.

And when we left the theater, Stan Lee turned to us, and said,

"Well, boys, you're never gonna beat that!"

And I was like, "Oh, shit."

And so, we went back to work, and we finished the script.

And in some ways, Terminator didn't hurt us,

it helped us.

Because for Orion, Terminator was this, sort of,

down-and-dirty movie

that they weren't even very happy about,

and then it made a lot of money.

And suddenly, they were like, "Oh. Well, that's not so bad."

I have no doubt whatsoever

that the reason why RoboCop was green-lighted at Orion

was because Terminator had done so well.

Later, Jim Cameron,

I think, thought we had copied him,

but it wasn't true,

because I had never read the Terminator script,

and we were-- you know, had plotted it completely

and were halfway done.

MICHAEL: The original spec was finished in December of 1984.

Unlike Columbia and Fox, who both passed,

Orion didn't have an apparatus to develop screenplays.

Orion essentially rose from the ashes

of United Artists, which was burnt to the ground

by Michael Cimino in Heaven's Gate.

And so, people like Mike Medavoy,

a couple of other people, formed Orion Pictures.

Orion were known for being a studio

that you went to if you had a special project

or if you wanted to get something done your way.

You were left alone.

A producer-driven company.

John Davison producing a movie makes you believe in God.

JOHN: John Davison, executive producer.

Because there was nobody more perfect

to produce this movie, and I did not know it.

However, I did know of John Davison

before I met him.

I knew a bunch of the Corman people,

and he was already respected in that crowd.

I got a job for New World Pictures,

was later in charge of production for him,

and started producing pictures for Roger Corman.

ED: So, the way we got it to him was,

a friend of mine was friends with a director

named Jonathan Kaplan.

And Jonathan read it.

And Jonathan said, "You know, this is perfect

for John Davison."

And Jonathan sent it to me, said, "This thing isn't for me,

but, you know, maybe you'd be interested."

So, I read it, and I was.

ED: Jon Davison, I remember, called me, and he said...

JON OVER TELEPHONE: It sounds good.

Listen, let's make sure that the gang members

don't sound like they're all Black,

because I don't wanna make a racist movie.

And so I inserted a line

saying that there were several different colors.

We had a meeting with Orion, and suddenly,

they seemed to be serious about making the movie.

Well, I wanna make a picture

that I wouldn't mind watching, you know?

And I thought all along, "We're gonna change the title.

We're gonna change the title."

"So, what are you working on?" someone says to you.

And it was very hard to say, RoboCop.

'Cause it sounds cheap and cheesy.

A lot of directors wouldn't even look at it,

because they thought it was gonna really look bad

on their résumé.

When they got the script in the mail,

and they opened it up, it was RoboCop,

and they, you know, throw it in the corner.

ED: We couldn't get a director.

We had bad directors that we didn't want.

And then when we go, "Well, maybe that one,"

and then they go, "No, I can't do it.

I gotta do something else."

And so, we were always, almost being shut down,

because we just couldn't get a director.

I've always been of the opinion

that European and African-American directors

can criticize America better

than their American counterparts.

Orion had a relationship with Paul Verhoeven,

because they had just made his movie, Flesh and Blood.

So, I actually said,

"You should check out this guy, Paul Verhoeven,"

because I was a big fan of Soldier Orange.

There's one scene where he has somebody

throw a grenade into an outhouse and kill somebody.

Very scatological.

His violence is very up front and open.

The Europeans realized that a punch is a punch,

and a bullet is a bullet.

I'm Paul Verhoeven,

and I'm the director of RoboCop.

My career started somewhere in the late '60s, I would say,

but I made my first real movies in early '70s,

which was all in Holland.

I got into military service,

which was necessary at that time.

You were forced, you were drafted.

And I got myself in the film department.

So, I made a documentary,

Propaganda of the Dutch Marines.

And it was very successful,

and that basically brought me to television.

Then I got basically in contact with a German-Dutch producer,

Rob Hauer, and then we made a lot of movies.

But the committees at that time

were getting more and more left-winged,

that I would say fascist left-wing,

meant no art, no social contacts,

no this, no that.

And they started to refuse to give me money.

I had some contact with American studios.

I had even met Jon Davidson in one of my trips to Hollywood

when I saw things were going bad in Holland.

I prepared a little bit,

but I didn't have the guts to do it.

When the RoboCop script came in,

my wife, Martine, said to me,

"This is the possibility to go to the United States."

And I didn't like that at all.

In fact, I read 20, 30 pages,

and saw it as absolutely ridiculous.

He had done what many people do.

"Oh, my God!

It's called RoboCop," and throw it over his shoulder.

I mean, even the title, RoboCop, was so far away

from all the movies I had made, you know?

I worked in a very realistic style.

Basically, all the movies I did in Holland

were mostly realistic.

They were based often on biographies.

And so, I felt that this was out of my range.

And I thought, reading it, that it was silly.

VERHOEVEN: We were on holidays in the Côte d'Azur.

I was going for a swim, a long swim.

And then my wife took the script,

and then Martine read it, too.

And then she said, "You know, I think you make a mistake."

I think she read the scene

where Murphy gets his hand blown off,

and said, "You know, I think you'd like this,"

knowing her husband as she did.

VERHOEVEN: Finally, I started to look at it with a dictionary

because there were so many English words

that I didn't know.

And then it took perhaps a couple of weeks

for me to think, "Martine is right.

I can make it to something that interests me."

And that was really based on very specific elements

of the script with nearly biblical perspectives

that I saw in the movie finally.

Paul has a lifelong obsessional fascination

with the historical Jesus,

and he saw Robo as a Christian parable.

The scene that decided me

to really say, "Yes" to the movie

was when Murphy comes to his house.

For me, that was like lost paradise,

kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

And basically, we have this longing

for getting back there.

I started then to see in RoboCop kind of a Jesus.

It was raised four or five different levels

as soon as Paul came in

with his sophistication, with his technique,

his visceral way of telling a story.

And then I think, "Okay.

And then I'll do all the action,

and the bang, bang, and the shoot, shoot.

I'll take that, yeah."

"That has to be done, too."

Because English was his second language,

he asked Ed and I, "What does this joke mean?

What is this here?"

ED: At the initial meeting, he said, "Why is this funny?"

I think he didn't think it should be funny,

and that he was uncomfortable with it.

And I gave him a bunch of Judge Dredd comics,

and I gave him some other comics

of that period.

And I said, "You should read this,

'cause this is the spirit it's coming out of."

There's a whole new thing happening in comics,

and they're adult.

He'd read the comic books, and he went, "Ah. Oh, I see."

And he was very cool with that form.

And he understood

that we were doing something different.

And Paul, to his credit,

uh, was very loyal to the script.

Jon Davison called

all these special effects people, and said...

JON OVER TELEPHONE: "You wanna work on our movie?

We don't have any money, and I can't pay you."

[laughs]

Oh, my God. I can hire him. We can do this.

I can get this guy, you know, we got Phil.

PHIL: I had known Jon Davison for a number of years.

And we worked on Joe Dante's second film,

Piranha, together.

Jon was always a big fan of stop-motion animation.

He had been looking for projects for us

to work on over the years,

and RoboCop was one of the first ones that came up.

I worked with Rob Bottin on Piranha

when he was about 19 years old.

So, I thought, "Well, Rob would be a real interesting guy

to approach."

Because he's an incredibly talented guy.

I mean, he's an artist.

Jon Davison knew all those guys.

And that's what's amazing.

He knew Pete Kuran. He knew Rocco Gioffre.

He knew the entire team.

Look at the effects credits on that.

They're pretty good.

ED: I think we ultimately start

to talk about who could be in it,

and, you know, our movie was looked at, like,

"Well, you're not gonna get an A-lister to be in this."

VERHOEVEN: I mean, I came to the United States,

and I didn't know anybody.

I knew some actors, of course, basically, from American movies,

but I didn't know them.

We would certainly not be working on that level.

It had to be all the people that we could afford,

but all people that we could afford,

I wouldn't know in the first place.

They came in, ten minutes, they did a part of the scene,

"Thank you very much. Yes or no?"

JON: Orion had just released Terminator.

And so, they kept pushing, you know,

Arnold Schwarzenegger as RoboCop.

But then, of course,

when we were talking to Rob Bottin,

who built the costume, he said, "You know, what are you asking?

Basically, Arnold is already like this,

and I have added the costume,

and it will be like that, you know?

And it won't look good."

JON: We auditioned and taped a lot of people.

We knew we wanted, you know, a slim, sleek robot.

The suit bulks you up.

So, we needed somebody who was actually thinner

than the final shape we wanted to achieve.

ED: You know, we went through this whole long process,

and we looked at certain people.

We looked for a second at Keith Carradine,

but Paul thought that he was a little too folksy.

JON: And one of the people that flew down on their own dime

was Peter Fonda.

But we thought he might be just a little soft.

ED: David Carradine came in for RoboCop.

He was really funny. He's like, "Yeah.

Come on, guys. Let's just do it."

We saw everybody.

And Rutger Hauer, who Paul had worked with

on Flesh and Blood,

and either they'd had enough of each other

or they were scheduling differences,

but Rutger was never really considered.

Basically, the next choice was Michael Aronside,

because we had all seen him in this television series, V.

But when we were talking to Michael,

he had such other ideas at that time.

I won't say that they would want to rewrite the whole script,

but nearly.

And I remember wishing,

"I wish that an actor would really take this on

as a challenge and not get all wigged out

that, you know, you're not gonna see his eyes

all this time.

Everybody was always like, "Oh, he's got to see his eyes."

Even my writing partner would go,

"Well, can't he just lift up his helmet sometimes?"

And I said, "No, he can't! He can't do it.

Not until the helmet comes off."

That was, like, a big fight. So...

When you pick the actor, look at his jawline.

[laughs]

And we looked. We did, you know?

We were looking at the jawline all the time.

Because that's all you will see, isn't it?

You don't see his eyes anymore. You see only the jawline.

ED: Orion made a movie called Buckaroo Banzai

with Peter Weller in it.

No matter where you go...

...there you are.

ED: And they were suddenly interested in him

because that movie had done pretty well

in certain territories.

So, he came in right at the end,

and he wouldn't read on camera,

and he wouldn't read in front of everybody.

So, he read with me in front of Paul.

And there was a very tense reading between Peter and I.

I was, like, scared to read with him,

and... and should have been.

PETER: All right, are you ready?

Are you rolling?

Test, test, test.

Dead or alive, you are coming with me.

My career was essentially one of a jazz musician.

I wanted to be Miles Davis.

I went to North Texas State.

I ended my music career by going,

"I don't wanna get yelled at.

I'm not going to be Miles Davis.

I'm not that great. I'm good.

I can make some money,

but I don't wanna sit at a bandstand

the rest of my life."

So, I moved into acting and English

just to get out of school and stay out of Vietnam.

I worked in the theater right away,

and I loved the theater,

and I became a member of the actor's studio.

I get to do this amazing Western with Richard Lester.

Try to remember my face.

PETER: And then I meet Sidney Lemaître

for Just Tell Me What You Want.

And then I get to do Shoot the Moon

with Alan Parker,

one of the great feminist movies ever, ever, ever.

It's incredible.

PETER: And then George Cosmatos offers me An Unknown Origin.

I do Firstborn with Michael Aptek,

the great Michael Aptek.

And it goes into Buckaroo Banzai.

Evil!

You are a step up on the eighth dimension!

Get 'em!

Phenomenal experience.

I meet Paul, and Paul's like this.

You know, Paul's not like a laid-back,

"Hey, how are you doing" guy.

I'm in his office, and he says, "Why don't you audition?"

I said, "I'm not going to audition.

I do not get hired like that."

I said, "Do you get a vibe out of me?

'Cause I get a vibe out of you, and I know your movies."

At some point in time, he says, "Well, you're an athlete."

I said, "Yeah, I'm a marathon runner,

you know, and a ballet dancer.

Mediocre, but I can move."

It's really interesting.

And he says, "Well, can you move around this room?"

I said, "Yeah, I've taken a little bit of mime."

So, I move around the room. I do some moves for him, right?

The fact that Peter took it all seriously

and didn't mind all that stuff impressed me even then.

And he's a strong guy,

and he can be a tough character to deal with.

But without that commitment,

there wouldn't be a RoboCop either.

And that day is when RoboCop offer came in.

Originally, Stephanie Zimbalist was playing Lewis.

I'll do it for you.

ED: And she was a lovely and talented actress.

But she had a hold on her for another year of a show

she was doing called Remington Steele.

And she was suddenly unavailable to us.

And at the last second, it was a little bit,

"Oh, my God. What are we going to do?"

We were not trying to cast a, you know, like,

"It's the robot and the sexy girl,"

which is what the cliché would be.

And the part isn't really the sexy girl part.

It's the professional woman police officer part.

We saw everybody in town who didn't have a career yet,

and that was interesting.

So, I wasn't used to actually seeing people

I'd have seen in movies.

It was very rare for someone to come in

who was an actual movie star.

I've seen these big movie stars like Barbra Streisand, you know?

ED: And I remember meeting Nancy, and she came in with her agent.

May we come in?

And I was like, "Oh, wow.

She's Nancy Allen."

Thanks.

I wasn't looking,

but I was so thrilled to have somebody

send me something that I did not have to put on

black lingerie one more time.

And not that I don't like black lingerie,

but I thought,

"There's more to me than that, really?"

Uh, and to the opportunity to play a woman of strength.

Now, I've always tried to add something strong

to my characters, but sometimes, you're limited.

PETER: I knew Nancy Allen's work. I was a fan.

And you meet Nancy Allen, and she is so charming.

And then you find out that Nancy Allen's born

on your birthday.

Hey. Now, she's quite younger and better-looking than me,

but she was born on June 24th.

With this, it felt,

yeah, she's a really heroic, strong woman.

I identified with her

'cause I'm very, very independent.

I think actors wanna play against type.

And so, I think

when Ronny Cox gets offered a bad guy

and has to go for an audition,

he might put a little more work into it.

I find that very easy to believe.

I had the reputation of being a good actor,

but that I played soft roles.

And it used to piss me off to no end,

because I've been an athlete my whole life,

and I can do things

that nine-tenths of the guys couldn't do.

And what is wrong with winning?

With showing you're the best at what you do?

RONNY: But I got known as this soft, sensitive actor.

So, my agents, they were looking at me,

and said, "Ronny, here's a chance

for you to play Dick Jones in RoboCop.

He's sort of worse than anybody."

I originally did the budget for RoboCop.

And it came in about 12 million dollars.

And I gave the budget to Orion, and they said,

"Well, we're only gonna make this

if it's 10 million dollars."

So, of course, when the studio does that, you go away,

you come back with a budget for 99.95.

When Paul Verhoeven sat down with the producer, Jon Davison,

and said, "What do you think this movie should look like?"

Paul said, "Well, it should look like Blade Runner, of course."

I was so impressed

by the production design of Blade Runner

that I thought, "Okay.

We'll do it differently, but we have to do it that way."

Jon Davison said,

"Well, you can either have the robot character,

RoboCop, or you can have the look

of Blade Runner. So, which do you want?"

Of course, the costume was in the center of the frame

throughout the whole movie.

So, it was, let's say, not a very difficult choice.

We spent at least a year and a million dollars

working with Rob on this suit.

MILES: It's Rob's design.

You know, Rob is a great, sort of, inspiring art director.

It's really his vision, you know?

He was a perfectionist and a workaholic.

And so, you wanted to please him and do your best work for him.

We took a lot of stylistic cues from cars from the '50s.

We looked a lot at previous robots from films,

realizing that nobody had come even close to doing

what we had to do.

JON: Well, Maria's pretty sexy, you know, in Metropolis.

Gorgeous design, beautiful craftsmanship,

but she can barely move. You've seen that thing.

Of course, Gort is sleek. Tobar's pretty clunky.

We didn't wanna go that route, you know?

And Robby, we love, but you know, he's passé.

That is correct, sir.

MILES: C-3PO was probably the most sophisticated thing

that had been done to date,

but, you know, he can barely, sort of, move.

He can walk, but he's kind of like this.

And RoboCop had to be basically in action here.

He had to punch. He had to do everything.

ED: Rob brought me outside

to look at the body cast of Peter Weller,

and there was a challenge there.

Peter Weller was not that tall. His hips were a little wide,

and his shoulders kind of narrow.

So, with those three things going on,

we had a real challenge

to try to give him a, sort of, heroic shape.

Every couple of weeks,

Paul, Ed, and I would go over to Rob's shop,

and he would present various maquettes.

POWER: They actually made Judge Dredd,

and said, "Well, this is RoboCop."

And I said to Jon Davison, "Are you fucking kidding?

You can't do this."

And I'd never heard of Judge Dredd.

I'd never heard of Judge Dredd

here in America, believe it or not.

Although I learned about it later,

and I definitely see the lineage, you know,

of Robo coming from there.

There was no Judge Dredd reference material.

He was never mentioned in Rob's shop.

Verhoeven and company were coming in,

and they were art directing the hell out of the suit,

and making very arbitrary comments.

We started to basically say,

"Well, it has to be very broad shoulders

like a rugby or whatever, very broad shoulders,"

and this, and that.

Rob had to do everything in clay

over, and over, and over, and over again.

Occasionally, somebody would fashion a penis,

and stick it on the thing and...

[laughs]

Sounds like it may have been Verhoeven.

Rob Bottin got so angry

that he basically gave his little knife,

he throwed his knife to me, and said,

"You cut it! You cut it now!"

And I stupid enough started also to do that.

I mean, how bad I behaved, and we nearly destroyed this

by our, let's say, stupid thinking.

JON: We knew that what we wanted was something sleek and sexy.

MILES: I had a book by an illustrator named Soriyama.

He was an illustrator that was kind of popular then.

He had done a lot of, sort of, sexy chrome girls,

and he had a book out called Sexy Robot.

And I had this book.

It was full of his beautiful illustrations.

So, I brought that in,

and Rob picked it up one day, and said, "This is it.

Take this aesthetic,

and we'll graft it onto his body,

and see what that does."

That Japanese airbrush, girly stuff, that,

and having the robot from Fritz Lang's Metropolis,

and you put them together, and you got Robo.

MILES: The simple slit for an eye,

the big shoulders coming up over the torso.

I thought, "Well, shouldn't he just

have an OCP badge sculpted or molded right onto his chest?"

And Rob for some reason felt like it shouldn't be there.

So, he said,

"Why don't you come up with something else?"

So, I thought, "Well, that little grill on his chest

is a speaker for his voice when he needs to project it."

ROBOCOP: Let the woman go. You are under arrest.

MILES: I covered him with these very fine little,

sort of, pen-striped seams.

That big piston coming out of his calves

that sort of acts as an Achilles tendon.

These are all things so that when he rotates around

on the screen,

he always strikes a powerful silhouette.

Rob had a great design sense.

He was always pushing for memorable elements.

He wanted to create a character

that would last in people's psyches.

Peter said he wanted to hire a movement coach.

MONI: I was called by Peter Weller.

And he asked me whether he could meet with me.

I said, "Why don't you come to the theater sometimes

and we'll play together?

We'll see if we can manage to make something interesting."

Moni Akin is a genius mime.

He's a pantomime,

but he's moved mime into the field of dance,

and he's head of the movement department

at Juilliard.

And he said, "Why don't we do something,

like, more dance-like, right?

And it was almost like kung fu.

It was like almost aikido. A facile type of character.

A cop who has got fantastic energy, and facility,

and physique.

MONI: We worked with hockey gear.

And we did things very swift, very fast.

Running, and jumping, and shooting, and falling,

and all kind of acrobatic things.

And he felt pretty secure at the time,

and he went to film it.

JON: The suit arrived, I would say,

at least two weeks late, after it was promised.

So, we couldn't shoot anything that we'd planned with Robo.

We were doing a screen test with him that first day,

and he was trying the suit on.

When I first put it on, uh, it took a long time.

Twelve hours.

Eleven hours.

Ten hours.

PETER: It took ten hours to get into it the first time.

Ten hours.

Peter Weller was brought to the set.

Basically, a makeup room, at three o'clock in the morning.

And at three o'clock in the afternoon,

it still didn't fit.

And he was not happy. You know, he was not happy.

PETER: The fucking suit doesn't work!

CHARLES: Peter tried on the suit and freaked out.

Fuck it, you know? This is what happened.

He was fucked from what he wanted to do.

Peter Weller couldn't walk in it.

I'm bummed,

'cause I can't do what Moni has been six months

teaching me to do.

He had to study for weeks and weeks, Peter Weller,

with all these things around him,

thinking that basically, now, that it's the costume,

he could do the same.

He couldn't do any of it. Nothing.

I remember sitting there

thinking, "Either we're gonna be here

for the next six months, or they're gonna shut us down.

And I just had this kinda like sinking thing.

VERHOEVEN: He felt cheated, you know?

He felt that he was basically betrayed

in his preparation for the part.

Everyone hated everybody.

Everyone was fighting.

And it was really annoying, this thing.

JON: Paul threw a shit fit.

Rob threw another shit fit. Ed tried to get into the mix.

I got into Ed's face about getting into it.

I look back now, and I kind of cringe,

like the things I did and said.

But anyway, uh, that's how that went.

[chuckles]

PETER: And then I said,

"This is not gonna work for me," and everybody just went home.

And I'm bummed that Verhoeven now doesn't like me,

or I don't like him either.

We were basically looking,

do we have to do other things, another actor, what, what, what?

PETER: And then I get this call

on the dead of night from Medavoy.

He says, you know,

"Paul's thinking about cutting you loose

'cause he's had a bad time on his last film,

and he just doesn't wanna go

through the movie star problem again."

Then Medavoy came there.

He was the head of Orion, seeing basically

what was happening, said, "Okay, you stop.

You're going to figure it out together."

So, they shut down production for a few days.

ED: What they're gonna do is they're gonna do tests.

They're gonna print them in 24 hours.

They're gonna look at the tests, Mike Medavoy and Bob Bernstein

are gonna get on the phone, and say

whether this movie is gonna be made or not.

It was really a crisis of the highest level, in fact.

PAUL: They flew in Moni.

MONI: Everybody was depressed.

Paul Verhoeven, I saw him all brooding,

coming towards me, and he tells me,

"Moni, it's not working."

Moni says, "I need 30 minutes."

And then they put the suit on me.

And he says, "Cut the elbows out of the--

cut the feet off the thing, the knees and so forth,

so that the joints, the shoulders, everything,

so that all the joints can move.

Because of the awesomeness and the size of this costume,

the thought process of this creature

was much slower.

He says, "Think of yourself as a captured animal.

Huge movements! Huge, with staccato."

And then turn the head, and, like, I said,

"This feels so phony. This feels like bad opera."

And he goes, "I know. Keep doing it."

He said, "Then I'm gonna show you a film."

MONI: And then Nikolay Cherkasov came to mind,

because he played Ivan the Terrible,

and he was tremendously stylized.

Everything is this long move

with a staccato at the end of it,

and it's a head turn, like that, right?

And it's phenomenal.

And he turns,

and he will look back at the camera,

and do these things, you know, that are very robotic.

PETER: It's a phenomenal performance.

You never get tired of it, and I watched it twice,

and I watched it the next day.

it just struck me

that instead of having the brain in the head,

we had to transfer the brain to the chest,

which means the chest

will be the first thing to react,

and then the neck, and then the head.

We ended in staccato almost every slow motion

to define the process of thought that goes on in the slow motion,

and then getting it.

PETER: And I said, "I get it, man.

That is RoboCop."

VERHOEVEN: Peter basically adapted.

You know, and I go up to Paul, I said-- apologized to him,

"Whatever it is, you know, I'll do what you want."

And we sat together, and say,

"Okay, let's basically shake hands and all,"

and say, "Okay, we try again."

MONI: So, we shot.

And in the evening, we saw the Russians.

Whoa.

And everybody jumped, and applauded,

and said, "We got it."

And they wouldn't let me come back to New York.

JON: They picked Detroit because Detroit is the emblem

of urban America and controversy.

You know, if they'd have set it in LA,

it wouldn't have gotten a buzz.

ARNE: Paul really didn't wanna shoot it in Los Angeles.

He just didn't think it would be special.

There were too many movies shot here.

He didn't wanted to do something different.

He really didn't wanna be here.

The studio also didn't wanna pay the IAEA union residuals.

And in order to avoid that,

they were happy to get it out of town somewhere.

My job is to go around with the location person,

sift through a lot of stuff,

hopefully, find a bunch of interesting images,

and then let the director sift those,

and we'd start looking at locations.

We looked in Detroit.

JON: You know, we went to Detroit.

But the problem is,

it didn't look like Detroit, you know?

It had the good rundown bits,

but it didn't have the futuristic stuff.

So, Verhoeven and I went to Dallas.

Dallas at that time was interesting

because it was a film market that was trying to develop.

Dallas had just gone through this huge building period.

So, you had all these really fantastic buildings,

a really futuristic-type landscape.

What sold Paul on Dallas is, it was a skyscraper,

completely outlined in green neon.

And he thought, "Boy, that's great.

That's the future."

And when we got there to shoot, it had broken,

and the light was off.

WILLIAM: We looked all over Dallas,

looking at old police stations, and looking at this,

and we finally narrowed it down to what we needed.

I think I had about four, 500,000 dollars for the sets.

We needed that kind of money

because Paul was blowing things up

wherever we went.

[laughs]

It was like we were building sets for Paul to show up

and blow them up.

MAN 3: Take one!

ARNE: And we discovered

that we could create a corporation in Texas,

hire people on the Texas IA contract.

Their contract didn't stipulate residuals.

So, we set it up that way.

The name of the corporation was Tobor,

robot spelled backwards.

They were shooting in Dallas from August to October in 1986,

which are the hottest, most humid parts

of the United States.

CHARLES: It was hot during the day.

And at night, it just got dark.

It was still hot. It didn't get cooler at night.

It was just dark.

I had an enormous impact on RoboCop

because I was the guy that capitalized the C,

because it was too hard to read with a lowercase C.

[laughs]

VERHOEVEN: I was highly amazed by the news

and television in general, you know?

It was very un-European,

with two people talking and laughing,

and basically, I mean, in Holland and in France,

or the BBC, I think, that there was a guy

who sits there and tells the news, you know?

But then in the United States, it was already

very over the top, I would say.

NEWSCASTER: This is Media Break.

You give us three minutes, we'll give you the world.

CASEY: Good morning.

I'm Casey Wong with Jesse Perkins.

No one had ever heard of anything like this,

deliver bad news with a smile.

JESSE: You bet.

Next time you see a cop, smile. Thanks for watching.

It was very much like it is,

where you would go from impending doom

to a beauty pageant, all in... like that,

with the same kind of delivery.

Three dead police officers, one critically injured.

My amazement about American television,

you see very well in the movie, of course,

and I pushed it very hard in a hyperbolic way.

So, it became kind of light, and funny, and strange.

I remember when we scouted the police station location,

we were in this big, sort of, abandoned factory facility,

and there were tiles, and lockers,

and all sorts of things.

Is there any word on Fredrickson?

We're doing this long, very balletic dolly shot,

which starts on me coming down a hall.

It's a continuous shot. It never stops moving.

And you get little tidbits of lines from different people.

Beats me, man.

I think OCP's moving a lot of new guys up here.

It was dressed in a way

that you could go to the other room,

come back, and turn around,

and end up in the locker room again.

There was no cut necessary.

It's all one shot

with what they called the JostiCam.

JostiCam? Yeah. Okay.

[chuckles]

PAUL: And it was Jost Vacano's

version of his own Steadicam

that he had invented for Das Boot.

[men clamoring]

PAUL: Jost, man.

Jost is running those shots up and down here,

his own gyro, Aeroflex thing that he invented.

It was like a Steadicam, but everybody goes,

"What's Jost's invention? A Steadicam?"

No, it's not a Steadicam. It's a gyro camera.

My approach was,

I would like to shoot this film very realistic,

a little bit documentary-like, with a handheld camera

and with very much available light,

no real film lighting, what you would normally expect.

They came up with banks of lights

that were fluorescents.

Not very lovely on the face, but it really did the trick,

and created a good mood in the film.

My feeling is that the handheld camera,

if it's not distracting, if it's reduced,

it's an underlay of human movement.

This is catching the audience much better emotionally.

There was one shot that we did in RoboCop

in the boardroom where he takes us

off the elevator, we go into the boardroom.

Don't mess with Jones, man. He'll make sushi out of you.

FELTON: It's one beautiful shot.

PAUL: And there's dialogue going on, and exposition.

We'll turn things around.

But it's all that kinetic movement.

So, you don't really realize

you're getting pages of exposition there.

I just love the way that Paul directs.

MAN IN MOVIE: Delta City.

Jost, he could go anywhere, do anything,

follow you doing anything, and it was a little bit noisy.

As a sound guy, imagine having what sounds like a 737

taking off right next to you.

It sounded like a sewing machine.

[imitates sewing machine rumbling]

So, they had to get rid of a lot of that in post.

ROBERT: Paul had a hard time visualizing

what a police station would look like in America.

Attempted murder?

Well, it's not like he killed someone!

We wanted a contrast,

so we made an older police station,

you know, and Paul liked it. We sold him on the idea.

And I had a photo shoot done with all these, like, bad guys,

and their henchmen, and everything, you know?

ED: We would work all night trying to make it better,

and also not spend any more money.

That was my whole thing.

It's like, "I'm not gonna spend any more money,

but I'll make it better."

We virtually dressed at it, like, 5:00 in the morning,

and they walked in and started shooting the movie.

Listen, pal!

Your client's a scumbag, you're a scumbag,

and scumbags see the judge on Monday morning!

Robert DoQui was just, like, this walking encyclopedia.

He was just so full of knowledge, you know?

I loved Robert DoQui.

And we had a great working relationship together.

YOLONDA: He introduced himself. And I knew who he was.

I mean, I was trying to be cool. But I mean, Robert DoQui,

he did a lot of great body of work.

But in my mind, I'm thinking,

"This is the guy that plays Florence's boyfriend

on The Jeffersons, " you know, and he was in Coffy,

and all these Black exploitation films from the '70s.

What the hell's going on around here?

YOLONDA: So, he had great chops.

I mean, he had done all kinds of episodic television

and all kinds of cool stuff.

Now, look.

Why don't you run in the other room and get yourself

a cup of coffee?

Not now, E.J. Get a cup of coffee.

Oh, Searg.

It could have been a thankless role.

But because of who he was,

it becomes a very memorable part of the film.

Now, get out of my police station

and take Laughing Boy with you!

I remember talking to Ed Neumeier

about the cops' names, which, you know,

they're all names of mass murderers.

Like Carol Chessman, who was the last man

killed in the gas chamber in California.

Charlie Starkweather.

And then there was a character named Manson.

I figured out rather quickly,

you know, that they were all named

after serial killers,

which later on, the writer said to us, you know,

I said, "Yes, I was aware of that, yeah."

When I looked up who I was named after,

I was like, "Whoa!"

[chuckles]

YOLONDA: This was Ed's idea, and it worked, you know?

MICHAEL: I remember talking to him about it,

and saying, you know, "Why are these names?"

And he said, "Oh, it's just, you know,

we wanted to have some fun with this whole thing.

So, we named all the cops after mass murderers."

MANSON: Welcome to hell!

[laughs]

I thought that was kind of cool actually.

[laughs]

"Well, I'll tell you what we should do.

We should strike. Fuck em!"

Jonathan Kaplan, the director, was attached early on.

And Jonathan Kaplan's favorite phrase

when they talk about,

"Well, the studio's gonna say this, so the money..."

is "Fuck 'em!"

So, as an homage to him,

Ed Neumeier created a character, Kaplan,

that would say, "Fuck 'em!"

We should strike. Fuck 'em!

When you look at those scenes,

those people are sweaty, and grimy, and disgusting

because we were sweaty, and grimy, and disgusting

when we were making the movie.

NANCY: You had the men and the women sharing the locker room.

It just seemed to be that you had to be just

a self-survivor and take care of yourself.

You know, it was not an era where you depended on men.

There are actually

a few classic sound effects in RoboCop.

STEVE: There's a face impact that is known in the trade

as the John Wayne chin slap.

[indistinct chatter]

-[grunts] -[groans]

[grunts]

And it's the great, cracky face punch

when Lewis takes out her suspect.

[indistinct chatter]

[groans]

[grunts]

In the script, it said she takes off her helmet

and her hair cascades down.

[chuckles]

You know, I thought, "Well, I can do that," you know?

After meeting with Paul, he wanted her hair to be short.

So, I had my hair cut, and they looked at it,

and they said, "Hmm, a little bit more."

So, we cut it again, and then we cut it again.

I went through the process

of, like, eight different haircuts.

So, I ended up with really nothing.

It was really awful.

[chuckles]

She's introduced as a male character almost.

[indistinct chatter]

REED: Lewis!

Come here when you're finished

fucking around with your suspect!

COP: Get on your feet!

ED: She was made to look more butch or not more butch.

And in the end, it's sort of a compromise.

She looks very feminine. She's attractive.

Murphy, meet Lewis. Show him the neighborhood.

Glad to know you, Murphy.

You know, when she takes out the guys,

and all the karate and so forth, and I said, "Pretty neat."

Pretty neat.

PETER: I just found her entertaining.

I have my own process

in terms of how I prepare a role,

and I like to write a biography of the character,

what you don't know.

I had her fatherless, that her father had died.

So, she became even more independent and strong.

And a younger brother rather than an older brother.

So, she really took that role

of being the strength of the family.

[indistinct chatter]

I better drive until you know your way around.

And Nancy's like a dream, and sweet, and fun.

And don't laugh,

but I actually put on a pair of men's underpants.

[chuckles]

Just to see, like, "Ooh! What does that feel like?"

I know it's bizarre, but, you know,

you've got to try these things to see what works.

And, you know, my father was a New York City cop.

So, I did have an understanding of who these people are

and why they do what they do.

[indistinct chatter]

I usually drive

when I'm breaking in on a new partner.

Lewis was a little skeptical, like the sergeant was,

about, "Oh, who's this guy from this really, you know,

la-la-la area

where he didn't really have to work

for a living, as the sergeant said.

We work for a living down here, Murphy.

NANCY: But quickly, she finds that he's a strong guy.

Pretty fancy moves, Murphy.

PETER: I did have some modicum of police training.

But I grew up with guns. I grew up with hunting.

I grew up with handguns.

And I grew up with fast drawing.

[officer speaking indistinctly over radio]

PETER: And I have Colts and all that.

And I can do that stuff. I did it in RoboCop.

Flipping a gun, doing all that stuff.

Uh, yeah.

Well, my son Jimmy watches this cop show T.J. Lazer.

And this laser guy does this every time

he takes down a bad guy.

Can you do that, Dad?

MICHAEL: T.J. Lazer was the very first thing we shot.

I rented some 16mm equipment from the UCLA Tech Office,

and we went out to a vacant lot, and Ed organized the jumpsuit.

I was a cinematographer.

So, the way it's set up, those shots were easy for me.

That was definitely a fun spoof.

MICHAEL: Obviously, inspired by those terrible TV shows

of the '70s, right?

T.J. Hooker.

[indistinct chatter]

Yeah.

Well, role models can be very important to a boy.

He had a sense of humor,

as did she, and they kind of had a little play

together for that moment.

OFFICER OVER RADIO: All units, all units, sector nine.

Why don't you drive?

NANCY: And they bonded very quickly.

Nancy is my buddy.

Nancy's like, "Hey,

let's go eat Mexican food in Fort Worth."

"Yeah!" So, there's a bond.

And plus, which, when you're acting

with her, she's a dreamboat.

RONNY: In playing characters like Dick Jones,

I look for everything good about him.

As you know,

we've entered into a contract with the city

to run local law enforcement.

Because guys like Dick Jones.

Guys like that. They don't think they're bad.

They just think if everybody knew

what the hell they were doing, they'd see things as they do.

We need something more.

We need a 24-hour-a-day police officer.

A cop who doesn't need to eat or sleep.

A cop with superior firepower and the reflexes to use them.

Fellow executives, it gives me great pleasure

to introduce you to the future of law enforcement...

ED-209.

We weren't involved with the design of ED-209.

I mean, we just told Phil Tippett,

you know, "Here's the script to ED-209."

[♪♪♪♪♪♪]

We go to machine shops,

and, you know, robotic shops, and shot a lot of footage.

Reference footage of how robotic things

and machines attack, and decay, and move,

and come to stops and starts, which is very different

than an organic thing, you know?

'Cause an organic thing will go like...

[imitates whirring]

And a, you know, robotic thing will go like...

[grunts]

Ed Neumeier had pictures

that he'd taken off of some Japanese manga

that had a giant robot that had, like,

his arms terminated into guns.

So, Ed knew he wanted something like that.

ED-209 is Phil.

I mean, it's just, as you get to know

Phil's work, it's just Phil.

No one could do that the way Phil can do it.

It was a very exciting group of people.

And, uh, they just came in,

and they did solid, sincere work, you know?

I happened to meet this kid at a barbecue

that some of the costume guys were doing

on Return of the Jedi, and his work was really great.

I mean, he couldn't have been more than 18 or 19 at the time.

It was Craig Hayes.

It was sort of like working in a garage

with your buddies, you know?

Everybody, all ten of us, you know,

were there to just really do this one kind of task,

and everybody was really into it.

The whole idea behind ED-209 was that it was styled.

DICK: The enforcement droid, Sirius 209,

is a self-sufficient law enforcement robot.

209 is currently programmed for urban pacification,

but that is only the beginning.

It was styled like a piece

of, you know, American automotive hardware.

DICK: We can expect 209 to become the hot military product

for the next decade.

Obviously, we've gotta reference military technology,

tanks, helicopters in particular,

because they're some of the more, sort of, advanced,

kind of interesting shapes, and forms, and stuff.

This thing needed to have a character, you know?

So, it couldn't be just simply a machine.

So, mix that with some organic,

the organic nature of a killer whale.

The idea of giving it a face without having a face

was really kind of, you know, an important part to it.

PHIL: Very early on, you know,

Craig was doing the designs, and he looked too happy.

So, he was joking around and making him look mean.

CRAIG: Stop motion is basically,

you're moving everything frame by frame.

There's an articulate skeleton or armature

inside of the puppet, which allows the joints

to be tensioned or adjusted just right.

We worked at 24 frames per second, right?

So, that means for every second of screen time,

there's 24 increments in there.

RANDAL: This puppet is an avatar for you.

So, you're acting through this puppet.

So, you better know every square millimeter

of that puppet.

You're imbuing an inanimate object

with a personality,

and you're giving it that personality.

So, it's a very special relationship

between animator and model.

The movement of ED-209

mostly came from an older printing press,

which is cast iron.

And so, we added that to the leg movement.

[imitates printing press whirring]

There were some budgetary issues for the thing.

We never even got to have him move in the scene.

So, I proposed to Paul that we build a

full-size ED-209 if he bought my pitch,

and that would be he can't move.

Oh, okay.

PHIL: But we keep him alive

by, like, a mechanical pedal note.

So, he has a voice that's running through the scene

that's kind of this ominous drone.

And, Paul in. Yeah, that would totally work.

Yes.

CRAIG: The thing's made of fiberglass, and vacuum-formed plastic,

and is, in fact, very lightweight.

You know, two people could break the thing down

and put it back together pretty easily.

JON: I remember when ED-209 arrived on the set.

It was a giant crate.

And, you know, it took him all morning

to uncrate this thing.

And I go up to Paul, and he's sick as a dog.

I think he's got the flu.

And I said, "Paul, you'll be glad to know

ED-209 looks great."

And he said, "Well, I hope the next director

will appreciate it."

[laughs]

DICK: Dr. McNamara.

DR. MCNAMARA: We'll need an arrest subject.

-Mr. Kinney. -Yes, sir.

Would you come up and give us a hand, please?

Yes, sir.

When Mr. Kinney points the gun at the boss guy,

I didn't really get that in the script.

So, when he says...

Use your gun in a threatening manner.

I... I pointed it at ED-209.

And Paul comes, "No, no, no, no, no!

You must point it at him."

And then sort of told him what the joke was.

MAN 4: Action.

Point it at ED-209.

Yes, sir.

ED-209: Drop the gun! You have ten seconds to comply.

Paul would play ED-209

in all the VistaVision plates, you know?

You go like this, and you shoot.

[imitates gunshots]

[imitates gunshots]

[screams]

Just screams!

[exclaims, chuckles]

And everybody would react to it.

And it was actually very effective.

ED-209: You have five seconds to comply.

We needed language for ED-209

because he had a pre-programmed card.

Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply.

His voice was the producer Jon Davison.

Uh-huh.

That they cheesed up a little.

They used a lot of deepening

and a lot of cheesy synthy processing on that.

JON: You rolling?

-MAN 5: Yes. -JON: Okay.

ED-209: Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply.

You now have 15 seconds to comply.

Your civil rights are currently in effect.

If you cannot afford an attorney,

one will be appointed for you.

Take the gun out of my mouth.

Yeah, you shot it on the board here.

[man laughing]

ED-209: Smoking is prohibited in the hallway.

Next.

STEVE: All the growls were cats.

Like tigers, and leopards, and things like that.

My favorite is when Ed turns on Kinney that first time.

So, I like to call that one the whiplash puma.

'Cause it's this great cat attack.

[growls]

[crowd clamoring]

KEVIN: We did our original shoot on location

at the Renaissance Tower.

And about a month and a half later,

I got a call from my agent that said, "They want you back."

They're gonna do some reshoots.

Paul Verhoeven was not happy

with the amount of blood apparently.

That is absolutely true.

KEVIN: And they rebuilt the entire boardroom

on stage one out of the studios at Las Colinas.

So, I had to get splattered and reloaded with squibs

over and over again

for about three 12-hour days in a row.

VERHOEVEN: Okay, just try it again.

KEVIN: The effects guys thought this was very funny.

[laughs]

He was not happy with the effects department.

KEVIN: They told me that they were putting more squibs on my body

than anyone in film history at the time.

And Paul Verhoeven still was not happy.

And he kept shouting, "I need more blood!

There's not enough blood!"

The way I expressed the violence in some ways

was over the top. Blood. Action.

And so, finally, apparently, the effects guys,

this is what they told me,

they were at lunch over in the commissary

in between takes,

and they were serving spaghetti squash.

They slid that baggie of spaghetti squash

underneath the suit, and loaded it up

with more squibs.

VERHOEVEN: And fire!

[groans]

[exclaims]

Completely over the top.

Blood all over the screen.

Fountains of blood

that were sprouting out of his body.

You know, emptying magazines on him, you know, bazookas.

It just really did my man in.

WOMAN 1: And fire the weapons at him now!

I guarantee you, it was very painful.

The squibs are like firecrackers,

and they have a metal backing.

And if they get away from your body,

they kick when they go off.

And the last squib that went off of the last day of shooting

hit me right in the left nut.

[laughs]

So, I'll take that.

So, I had to lay there.

And Mr. Verhoeven just let that camera roll, and roll,

and roll for, like, ten seconds.

VERHOEVEN: Okay.

[groans]

We ran up, and, "Kevin, are you okay?"

No, you hit me in the balls.

He just looked up, and went, "Fuck off.

Get away from me."

I don't believe at this point that anyone has taken

more hits at one time than Kevin took in that shot.

There was actually a wind-down

that was recorded by Ben Burtt for the Star Wars films.

It's actually a 1929 Traveler biplane.

It can be heard when ED-209 dies

after blowing away Kinney.

[imitates whirring, exhales sharply]

Smoke, fall down,

three stooges-like people looking.

That was, of course, horrifying.

But then the first line after that basically is...

But the guy was gone, you know?

There was nothing left of the guy.

And people scampering, running, cringing.

And Dan Herlihy, he never moved.

Dan O'Herlihy, he looked great, never moving.

O'Herlihy just says...

Dick, I'm very disappointed.

That's my favorite line in the movie.

"Dick, I'm very disappointed."

Puts me down, man.

[indistinct chatter]

I'm sure it's only a glitch.

A temporary setback.

You call this a glitch?

The corporate's rule, period.

Your temporary setback could cost us

50 million dollars in interest payments alone.

And it shows to what length

they will go to keep that position.

Perhaps you're aware of the RoboCop program

developed by myself at Security Concepts

as a contingency against just this sort of thing?

Thank you for your concern, Mr. Morton.

I just look for all of the ways that assured me

that his way was the correct way.

-It's something we can-- -Now, wait a minute. Dick!

I looked at this as a cautionary tale.

Tell me about your plan, Mr. Morton.

SAGE: To see that these people who'd gone for the greed

and how things turned out so badly for them.

I'm confident we can go to prototype within 90 days.

You know, karma, for lack of a better word.

[groans]

ED-209 is my baby. Bullshit him.

ED-209 is here.

-That wasn't on. -[laughs]

[laughs]

MAN 6: All righty. There we go.

We're good. All right. So, take it from the top.

-Start again. -Oh, my Lord.

-We had fun. -How time flies.

-[laughs] -Holy shit.

[laughs]

I like it.