Murphy's Law: Paul Verhoeven and RoboCop

By Rob Van Scheers

Paul Verhoeven: The Authorised Biography by Rob Van Scheers (Faber and Faber) is the definitive study of the Dutch director, and in this abridged extract from the chapter 'The Americanization of the Bible: RoboCop' Van Scheers talks to Verhoeven and other key personnel (including Rob Bottin and Peter Weller) so as to reconstruct the genesis and sometime-stormy creative journey of RoboCop to the screen.

The room in the Beverly Hills Hotel had everything a visitor would expect for $190 per night, concluded Paul Verhoeven as he unpacked his bag on Saturday 28 September 1985. He had just arrived from Amsterdam. He put aside the address book that he had found in his luggage; it was not going to be of much use in the United States. Verhoeven realized that he had taken an irreversible step. He was 47 years old, weary of both film and the social climate in the Netherlands, and he now would have to start all over again as a director. Although Hollywood's inner circle knew his work and had been very enthusiastic about Turks Fruit, Soldaat van Oranje and De Vierde Man, he was practically unknown to the wider American film-going public. Verhoeven had come over to shoot RoboCop, a science-fiction story about a cop who is turned into a destructive machine. This invitation from Orion Pictures had made him decide it was time to make a definite move to the United States. As soon as the children had finished their school year in the Netherlands, his family would also emigrate. Until then, he would have to cope on his own.

Verhoeven realized that, for the American public, film was first and foremost a circus. A story had to be divided into three parts: a beginning, a middle, and a grand finale — preferably with orgiastic explosions. He could not point to a three-act structure in the work of Federico Fellini and Alain Resnais that he had so admired in the past, or even in his own films, but he had decided in advance to submit himself to the iron law of Hollywood. His survival tactic was 'Go with the flow'.

The creators of RoboCop were Michael Miner and Ed Neumeier. It was the twenty-something Neumeier who had approached the thirty-something Miner with the suggestion of writing a script together. 'When I worked for Warner Brothers as a reader, they were shooting Blade Runner. At night I used to leave my office and go over to this amazing set they had. It was very inspiring and I kept thinking, "This is a movie about robots who look like people. Wouldn't it be cool if there was this thing that looked like a robot and that was a cop?" After that, the problem was how to glue the audience to their seats. 'I figured out that what would shock them most was if the hero of the story got killed right away — like 10 minutes into the movie, so you think, "O-ho, the movie is over!" I suddenly realized that it has to be a story about a guy who becomes a machine.'

This is why policeman Alex J. Murphy, on the first day of his transfer to the unpleasant district of Old Detroit — barely 4 pages into the script — is shot to pieces by a group of gangsters led by the villain Clarence Boddicker. After a thorough electro-surgical overhaul, Murphy returns to the streets of Detroit as a machine man — RoboCop.

Although this was to be a genre film, in the best tradition of the comic strip it was also intended to spice it with satirical comment on contemporary America. References to the Reagan era — the era of Michael Milken and the junk bonds swindle — are evident throughout. The origin of this satire dated back to when Neumeier, as a development executive for Universal Studios, became acquainted with the mores of yuppie life. At that time he was surrounded by — as he now calls them — 'stupid people in suits who were always working out of greed and getting away with it'.

For the design of the RoboCop suit, the job went to Rob Bottin, who had made his name with his work on The Howling (Joe Dante, 1981), The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982) and Legend (Ridley Scott, 1985). His brief was clear; the audience must not immediately burst out laughing when Peter Weller makes his entrance as the robot. Verhoeven had decided that it had to be in the spirit of the female robot from Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927). 'Rob and I argued a lot about the costume,' Verhoeven confirms. 'At one point it was so bad that he did not want to talk to me any more. In the first instance his design was 90 per cent perfect, but I wanted it 100 per cent — and then it went off in completely the wrong direction.' Finally, Verhoeven and Bottin decided to go back to the original design with a high-tech element added here and there.