Interview [Written]: Ed Neumeier (“RoboCop” — 1987)

Upon the release of the remake of RoboCop, TheDissolve sat down with the screenwriter of the original 1987 version Ed Neumeier for an interview:

The Dissolve: How did you get the idea for RoboCop?

Ed Neumeier: I was a young man in the development side of Hollywood. I had come out of UCLA Film School, and I wanted to write — for some reason. [Laughs.] And I was very scared about what the business was like. So I studied the development side of the business. I liked the world of the executive and the power of just being at a studio, and I was studying it. During that time, I had been thinking about an idea, sort of making fun of what was going on in the world of business in the 1980s. At that time, the hot books about Wall Street were stuff like The Book Of Five Rings, which was a book by a samurai warrior in 17th-century Japan about how to kill more effectively.

There was this whole notion on Wall Street of Japan rising and America becoming more aggressive in business. I liked the idea of this sort of James Bond world of business. At that time, in the wake of Star Wars, science fiction was not high again; it was considered hard to do and expensive. So one of the things young screenwriters who wanted to prove themselves when they wrote a spec screenplay were not supposed to do was to write a science-fiction movie. But I had always been interested in science fiction — and in particular, robots and action. So I began to play with this idea of building a science-fiction world. At the same moment, I was 25 years old, and my office was a trailer on the Warner Bros. lot where I read scripts. And next door was this giant street they built, suddenly, which is a lovely thing to behold in and of itself. It was for a big science-fiction movie called Blade Runner, and I never had seen anything like it.

They started shooting at night, and I would go over at the end of my day, and I literally just started working on the movie just because you could do something — there were so many people, they didn’t know whether you were working or not. In doing so — because I just wanted to make movies and be on sets and stuff like that — I watched Ridley Scott direct four nights of Blade Runner, and it was astounding to be able to do. I made garbage for the street with the art department. One night they brought out that car, which they called a “Spinner” — it just had me at first sight, because I really like cars. At that moment, I was in a very refined location. I was in the atmosphere created by Ridley Scott, looking at a prop he had designed. After four nights — and maybe not enough sleep, because I was doing double shifts — I had this astounding idea: RoboCop came into my head as a title, and I saw the character in this kind of bluish armored thing. He was a policeman who was also a robot, and he was looking at this strange human race. It was an A.I. idea, like, “Why are people the way they are?” And that was the most science-fiction notion of it.

So I walked away from that experience with a title and suddenly a conviction [that] it was going to be a science-fiction movie, but still with that business idea in the backdrop, because I strangely went into a year of wearing a suit at MCA. One day I get into the elevator on the 11th floor of the Black Tower at Universal, and my God, it’s [MCA head] Lew Wasserman — the person that scared the shit out of ya! [Laughs.] And he’s there with John Landis. John Landis is a really cool guy, but he doesn’t know me from God. He’s talking to Lew Wasserman, and he’s nervous. He’s like, “Oh! Mr. Wasserman, you know this Thriller video — I’ve made more money from that than anything I’ve ever done!” And Lew Wasserman doesn’t say two words, because you know, he’s The God. He’s like, “Hmm, isn’t that funny?” So “the old man,” as he’s called in the script for RoboCop, is Lew Wasserman. And these were life experiences that informed this story as it was being formed.

I had written an outline of RoboCop, and it really had all the major moves in it. All the main characters were named, but I was still working as an executive, and trying to figure out how to write a script at night. I started seeing people from film schools because I was doing my job at a film studio — people who had made little films in that world — and one of the guys who had gone to school at my film school, UCLA, who I had not known then who was kind of a star because he was a cinematographer, came in. He was trying to make it as a director, and he was directing rock videos. He said, “Oh, I’m directing a movie about a robot. [It’s] a rock video with a robot in it.” I said, “Oh, you know, I got an idea about a robot.” So that’s how [my collaboration with co-screenwriter Michael Miner] started.

We started talking about it, and Mike had a lot of energy. and we started working on it nights and weekends. I had gone away and written about 40 pages of a first act based on the outline I mentioned, and then we sat down and kind of finished it. It took a long time, but it was fun. It was pretty rough, but it was more or less a rough version of the movie. We decided to give it to a couple of people that we knew in the business to get some reactions. I gave it to somebody I had known who knew of a producer named Jon Davison, who I thought was a pretty interesting guy. We had two offers on the line for it. I thought we were going to do some more work on it. One of the first great pieces of luck that happened on this movie was that Jon Davison knew the people he knew, who got the script, who encouraged me to do whatever I wanted — to make it funny when I wanted to.

For the rest of the interview, go here.

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