Ed Neumeier, the writer behind Paul Verhoeven's classic 1987 family comedy Robocop, is working on a direct sequel to it that ignores the poorly-received sequels and the forgettable 2014 reboot.
Z: What was this history behind RoboCop? What conceptualised it in the first place?
EN: I think it was my sense of humour. It was sort of how I look at things and way, way back in the 1980’s when I was writing this, you were supposed to write action movies that were exciting, but you weren’t really supposed to write action movies that were funny or satirical and I always thought you could do that. In the 80’s that was kind of a satire about corporate America and a little bit about what was going in law enforcement and policing and stuff like that. Those were topics that I thought I could write about in a fun way and luckily I hooked up with a bunch of talented people and the movie turned out really well.
I was very lucky to have a producer named John Davidson who produced the movie Airplane, which you might have heard of also, so he was a guy who encouraged you to do things that were funny. Then we got Paul Verhoeven – who is just a world class filmmaker – and he really bought into the whole idea lock, stock and barrel. So it worked out really well that way.
Neumeier is essential, but so, I suspect, is Verhoeven. Irvine Kershner (Robocop II) tried to emulate Verhoeven's satirical mix of levity and brutality, but only fleetingly came close. You have to really hate capitalism in ways not so obvious–especially its incredibly bad taste–to make Robocop.
OK, OK, here are the clips you clicked on this post for.
