[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] On Story is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

"On Story" is also brought to you in part by the Bogle Family Vineyards, six generation farmers and third generation winemakers based in Clarksburg, California.

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[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story."

A look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

This week's "On Story," writer Edward Neumeier discusses his sci-fi classics, "RoboCop" and "Starship Troopers."

- We want to be protected.

We think, what is the cost of being a soldier?

What is the cost of being a cop, and what are the benefits to society?

And we can't live without them.

And so I think there's a fascination with that whole thing.

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [Narrator] This week on "On Story," writer Edward Neumeier discusses his process behind the sci-fi cult classics, "RoboCop" and "Starship Troopers."

Neumeier explores the particulars of writing for the genre, as well as his talent for disguising deep issues with expansive and captivating stories.

[typewriter ding] - I really wanna focus on just the great storytelling and the classicness of the things you've written, and how they still continue to be relevant.

So I guess first question is, you didn't start out, maybe you wanted to be a writer, but you didn't start your career as a writer, right?

- No, well, I always kind of wanted to be a writer, and the first job I worked for was as a story analyst.

And story analysts, readers, there used to be a union for them, read for producers and studios and stuff like that.

And I think I read 5,000 screenplays.

And most of them were not very good.

And I, to this day, I don't know if I could have short circuited that by only reading good screenplays.

But I have a feeling that the bad screenplays made you think you could do it at a certain point.

And so I was briefly an executive at Universal Pictures for about a year or two years.

That was like a little graduate course in development.

And you got to read lots of things and you started to get into what would get made and what would not get made.

And you understood a little bit what the buying mentality was.

I started working on the idea that became "RoboCop" in like 1981, and '80, '81.

And it was four years before there was a draft.

And the first draft was written while I was still an executive, where I did a terrible thing.

I had to go write the first act, and I told them that my grandfather had died.

He was already dead.

[audience laughing] And then I went away for a week to the funeral, and they sent me flowers.

[laughs] [audience laughing] But that's how, you know, that's what you have to do.

You have to want it so badly that you lie to your boss and stuff like that.

[audience laughing] By then, I had met my partner, Mike Minor, who met me when I was an executive, and we started working together on nights and weekends and finished the script.

And I'd heard stories about John Davis, and he had produced "Airplane!"

and he was a bigger-than-life character.

When I finally got to him, I had in mind that he was a guy that could help us, and I got it to a director named Jonathan Kaplan, who was a friend of a friend, and he read it and said, "Well, this would be perfect for John Davison."

And I was like, "Uh."

And then John Davison read it and he said, I don't know why, to this day, he said, "Yeah, let's do it."

And he was the perfect guy.

I have to tell you, luck plays such a big deal in what has happened to me, because there was nobody better on the horizon that I look back on 35 years later who could have done such a good job as this guy did.

- I think the really amazing thing about it is watching it again the other night, it was like, it just holds up.

You're writing this script in an era, a political era, a social era, in a lot of ways not too different from now, even though it was 40 years ago, whatever.

You were.

[laughs] So you're crafting some of that response to the world at the time into your storytelling.

Did sci-fi make that an easier process to do?

Or was it really just the story you wanted to tell and the social commentary you were building in?

- Science fiction was not supposed to be the first thing you wrote, because it was expensive, and people didn't know what to do with it.

And so it was really against the advice of people that "RoboCop" was a science fiction story.

But it was always meant to be pretty cheap.

I was very interested in action films.

I love "Dirty Harry."

I love those movies.

I love "Wild Bunch."

I was absolutely, the first thing I did when I was 15 was I learned how to make bullet squibs so you could shoot somebody.

That was just a hobby of mine, you know.

I was sort of obsessed with screen violence.

And that worked out for me later.

[audience laughing] But I grew up in a place in Northern California, Marin County, which is very liberal in its political thinking.

And in fact, they didn't like action movies up there.

That was like, you were a fascist if you liked action movies.

So I sort of had this challenge from youth of like, I'm gonna write a action movie that is like, for, you know, everybody.

But I'm gonna put other stuff in it.

I'm gonna put a level of satire in it to sort of, I don't know why I'd want to do that.

But the media breaks in "RoboCop" were were really part of it.

And I also wanted it to be funny.

And the most interesting journey for me with that script was no one, everyone would say, "Well, why is this funny?

This shouldn't be funny."

Even for a little while, my writing partner, Mike Minor, was like, "Yeah, but should this be funny?"

And I was like, "No, it should be funny."

Then I met John Davison who had done "Airplane!"

and who was a very sophisticated maker of movies.

And he said, "No, it can be funny, because funny is entertainment."

After many people turned us down, Paul Verhoeven, for reasons that I now know very well, said yes.

And it just changed everything.

He was sort of down on his luck, 'cause his last movie hadn't done that well, and he needed something.

Actually, everybody who made this movie needed something.

And that's another thing to remember.

John Davison had had a movie that hadn't worked, "Top Secret," I think he made, and Phil Tippett had had a movie that hadn't worked very well, "Howard The Duck."

So all of us came together desperate to achieve something.

Again, Verhoeven, who I still work with, he is really a genius, and he really is, and that's why the movie holds up so well.

- And then he enters the picture, and English is actually not his first language, and he's reading this satirical script, and- - And this guy has a PhD in mathematics.

[Barbara laughing] I mean, he has a classical European education.

He spoke five languages.

- But the fact is you've written a satire, and that is very- - You know, when he first read it, he said, "Why is this funny?"

And I was like, "Well, 'cause if it's not funny, they'll be laughing at us, you know?"

And he didn't really get that.

He was like, "If I make it, he's not going to be funny.

It's gonna be serious."

And he left, he went back to Holland, and he asked us to rewrite the script without any jokes in it.

And so we did it, and it was kind of miserable.

We couldn't even finish it.

My partner broke his leg, so he couldn't even show up at the end.

So Paul shows up and I'm there, I've literally slept in the office that night trying to finish it, and I didn't make it.

And he sits down and he reads it in front of me, which is terrible.

[audience laughing] And then he comes to the end and he goes, he did something that no American director that I know of has ever done in his life.

He said, "I was wrong, we're going to go back to your script.

I understand it now."

I had given him some comic books to take back to Holland with him as a last desperate measure.

And he read 'em, and then he said, "Oh, it just reminded me of my childhood.

And I love comic books."

- Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na... [men laughing] - The violence part.

I'd seen that movie so many times, but I kind of forgot about it.

And when I watched it again recently, it was like, "Oh man, I forgot about that scene."

I don't know why, and it was the arm, you know, I mean- - Oh, the arm.

The Arm, yeah.

That's the scene that got us Paul Verhoeven.

- Yeah.

[gun shots and man screaming] [Barbara] But you know, when I went back and looked at it, after the first, like, eh, you know, hiccup, then I went back and looked at it and like, okay, it's so cartoonish.

It is comic booky.

It doesn't really feel like, because of the way it was shot, it looks, it was set up a certain way.

So I guess maybe that's why I didn't really remember it as an ultimately violent movie.

I remember "Scarface" as a much more violent movie than this, and maybe because there is humor in your film, you know?

- Yeah, "Scarface" is actually, strangely, the scene you're thinking of is the chainsaw scene.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, chainsaws.

- There is no cut in that.

You never see contact.

- Yes.

- It's all done.

When I met, when Paul and I sat down, I think one of the reasons we started getting along is we had a very early conversation where we both agreed that we actually like violence on screen.

Not real violence, but screen violence.

And he shoots a very balladic, it's really beautiful what he does.

It's violence, but it's really beautiful, and I like it.

That was one of the things that I really wanted to see was that in an action movie, that it was not sterile.

The other thing that was important to me was I knew that when you did something like that, you caused a great deal of tension in the viewer.

And so my theory was that with all that tension, if you told them a joke, they'd laugh really loud.

If you look at the movie, you'll see it's action set piece followed by humor as much as possible.

- Top story, Pretoria.

The threat of nuclear confrontation in South Africa escalated today when the ruling white military government of that besieged city state unveiled a French-made neutron bomb and affirmed its willingness to use the three-megaton device as the city's last line of defense.

- And the president's first press conference from the Star Wars orbiting peace platform got off to a shaky start when power failed, causing a brief but harmless period of weightlessness for the visiting president and his staff.

We'll be back in a moment.

[typewriter ding] - That brings me to the characters in your story here.

The bad guys are definitely just bad.

You know, they really have no positive aspects to them.

When you're setting up characters like that, did you, you know, was that really more of the time or did you feel like, you know, this is just your statement?

- I think the statement was really that for a policeman, for a cop, our cop, he faced enemies at the top of society at the bottom.

And my then idea was that there wasn't that much difference between them.

That idea that the criminals were essentially the same as the people, some of the people in the boardrooms.

And the Clarence Boddicker character is one of my favorite.

And I don't know quite where he came from.

He seems to- I think he's sort of patterned after some dark id in me, I think.

I always wanted him to be funny and with glasses.

There was a terrorist called Carlos the Jackal, and he ran around throwing hand grenades and using shotguns back then.

So if you look at Clarence, he's sort of a terrorist in a way.

- The choice to kill Murphy in the beginning was, to me, a really interesting one when I started to look at it as, "Oh, okay, I'm critically looking at the film from the script perspective."

Because, you didn't like Steve Austin him, and we're just gonna fix this guy and make him- - That's right.

- You know, you actually killed him.

So this guy we sort of think is our protagonist straight from the start, now he's dead.

- That was, I think maybe the most important early critical decision that I made.

And this was when I was still wandering around thinking about it, and I thought, originally I thought he was gonna be a ro.

I said, this goes back to Blade-- I was working on the "Blade Runner" set as a volunteer because they had so many people working on it, they didn't know who was working on it.

And at night, you know, on a film set, you know, there's a lot of time to sit around and nothing's happening.

And the environment was very evocative because of the set design.

And I had been thinking about robot stuff a little bit.

At that point I thought, he's a robot, this character.

The name was RoboCop too, by the way.

That was weird that that came to me so early.

And then I thought, he's a cop, and he's trying to figure out how people work.

It was like a machine intelligence idea about humans.

But then one day, not long after it occurred to me that it would be much more dramatic if he was turned into a machine, and that it was a man that had been used.

And it sort of, I just knew immediately that that was gonna give you Frankenstein and everything else and Jesus if you wanted him.

And so that just became the way.

- So that identity part of it, was that all originally part of what your story was about?

Or did that really come about as you went forward?

- No, the identity thing was always there.

But I remember we were in production and Paul turned to me and said, "You know, the writers of this thing did a really smart thing."

I was like, "Really?"

He said, "Yeah, you're gonna keep wondering how much is left."

How much is left?

And he was right about that.

- The suit, you know, is an interesting... - Well, that's because we got Rob Bottin, another genius in need of a hit.

The first thing he showed us was almost what you see.

And one day I said to him, you know, it's really funny, I look at RoboCop, and he's like this chest and he's like this.

And I said, "It really kind of looks like the front of like a Ram truck or something."

And he said, "Well, Ed, it's Detroit.

That's what you wrote.

So yeah, it's a car."

[audience laughing] [laughs] And it is.

- Yeah, well when you talk about the kismet of all the pieces that came together and the people that were needing something and part of it and probably throwing everything they had into that project.

- Everybody in "RoboCop" turned out to be really well.

I mean, I remember when Miguel Ferrer walked in the room and just went, "Whoa, that guy."

You know, you could feel the room snap.

And I had to read pages with Peter Weller and you know, he always seemed like the right guy.

He was very serious about the job, and sometimes that made it difficult, but he was serious and I appreciate that.

- How much did his chin really have to do with... [audience laughing] - Well, you know, one day, Rob Bottin, we were looking at another actor I won't name, and he said, "Well, you know, that guy's a good actor, but he's gonna look like the Michelin man if I put him in a suit.

So we really need somebody really skinny."

And so that wasn't the reason we got Peter, but I always thought that we needed a serious actor in that suit.

And everybody always acted like, well, you can put anybody in the suit.

And it's not true because Peter brought so much to that part, just in the physicality.

The way he ended up walking is his story in itself.

And it really was like a cauldron of fire because the suit was late to the set by a lot and we had to swap the schedule around.

And so poor Peter gets in that suit the day before we shoot, 14 hours to get him in the suit.

And it doesn't feel right.

He's trained in all these different ways, and it's just terrible.

And I think there was a kind of a mini, well, there was a major crisis about this, about how the suit would work and how he would move and stuff like that.

And it was very unpleasant for everybody, for both Paul and for Peter and the production.

But when it was resolved, you had that character.

And I kind of watched the character come to life.

And it didn't come to life until there was a huge amount of pressure.

It's like a diamond in a coal mine or something like that.

And it was fascinating to see from a creative standpoint how well it worked and how well Peter did.

- So then you and your writing partner Minor and Verhoeven wait a while before you get another one that you're gonna do together, just purely is a whole new idea, right?

The "Starship Troopers?"

- Oh, "Starship."

Well, yeah, Michael wanted to direct.

So he had gone off during "RoboCop" and directed a movie that he made, and then we were suddenly very popular writers after "RoboCop," which is not as much fun as it sounds like.

And let's see, I think I was working, what was I working, I was working on something at Universal, and "Jurassic Park" came out.

And Phil Tippett, who had done ED-209, was one of the guys on it.

And I said to John Davison, said, "Hey, let's do another movie.

And I have this idea, let's do "Starship Troopers."

We'll get Phil Tippett to do the bugs, and we'll get Paul to direct it."

And I didn't even have to say that, 'cause that was like, he understood that.

And that it took seven years, but that was where it started.

And I wrote the script.

We optioned the book and we wrote the script and I wrote a first draft before Paul was in even really involved.

He went off and made another movie during that period.

He made "Showgirls."

And it was probably good that "Showgirls" didn't do that well, because I think if "Showgirls" had done well, he would've had many more choices, but instead he was trapped having to do "Starship Troopers," so... [audience laughing] - So that's, from the start, a bigger production than what you had all worked on before.

- Well, "RoboCop" was 14, and "Starship Troopers" was 125.

And it's really different when you put that much money on something, it makes everybody a little crazy, and it's much more pressure.

- That movie also was an early stage of tremendous amount of CGI.

- And if you look at that movie, that movie holds up pretty well too, the CGI does, and it's because it's Phil Tippett again.

Another, I think they're Bernini-level artists, these guys, and Phil Tippett can just do amazing things.

- So at the time, you're engrossed in making a movie at the early stage of how you shoot CGI, right?

- Well, he had done "Jurassic."

So "Jurassic" was the first where they had set a bunch of the parameters.

And yeah, it was sort of the second big wave of CGI.

And you know, they had all these, in those days, you had to do a lot more registration and a lot more like documenting where the shots were and what the light was and all that kind of stuff, and they had all sorts of things.

Nowadays they don't do that as much.

But they have it down more.

But I remember Paul was very worried about, "Okay, how am I gonna get my eye lines right?"

You know, when somebody's looking at a bug or a whatever, a monster.

And you know, what I found about CGI was everybody, the director, and everybody would get very scared about it.

Like, "How are we gonna do it?

And what am I gonna look at?"

And I knew Robert Zemeckis, and I said, "Well, let me call up Zemeckis and see how they did what they did, if they did anything on 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit.'"

And I called Zemeckis and I said, "I have a question for, Paul Verhoeven wants to know if you had like, any sort of special devices or a laser or something that you use to establish eye lines."

And he said, "No."

He said, "What you need is you need a stick and you put a piece of tape on it, and then you need a good actor, and you say, that's where you're looking."

[audience laughing] - So the propaganda aspects of both of those two in big way, obviously much greater even, or it feels much greater in "Starship Troopers."

It's sort of even built into the visuals in a way, you know, the way they dress.

- Well, one, "Starship" was meant to be, I mean, "RoboCop" was meant to be local news in Detroit.

And it was just a kind of a sort of a Greek chorus, if you want.

It was a chorus, it was a counterpoint.

I've always been interested in how things- what happens and how it's played.

And so there's a lot of that.

In "Starship," it was really, I started with the "Why We Fight" series, the Capra stuff, and I wanted to do war propaganda.

And I ended up- once Paul got involved, we would be doing "Triumph of the Will."

[audience laughing] And seriously, I knew we would do it.

And if you look at the movie, it starts off as "Triumph of the Will."

And so that we kind of got along on that.

I was doing Frank Capra, he was doing, what's her name, the Leni Riefenstahl, yeah.

- So that part of it though, in your satire, you know, I just think that both scripts have a tone that great consistency all the way through, but sometimes it is hard, right?

It's like, how are people gonna respond to that tone?

Are they gonna catch that it's a- - Well, you don't know.

You don't know.

I mean, I would say the interesting thing about Paul and I is we've had two movies together, and there's really not that tone.

You don't see that tone anywhere else.

[typewriter ding] - How much did knowing you now had those resources affect the way you were writing?

- Well, I think I thought that if I could write a movie that got made, and if it was good, and my God, if it was a hit, then I would know what I was doing.

In some ways "RoboCop" was, for me, I think it was the way I taught myself to write to be a screenwriter.

And if you look at the act structure, it really has first act, second act, third act with little bumpers in between them.

And that was me trying to understand story structure.

And so, you know, those were the things I was worried about.

Like, how do I write this?

And yes, what does character mean?

I don't know, you know.

What is structure?

I have no idea.

One day somebody said, I said, "I don't know what structure is," to somebody, and they said, "Oh, Billy Wilder says it's simple.

It's one, two, three.

Problem, complication, resolution."

That was a really important thing for me to think about, because I started thinking about one-two-three a lot.

And then if you look at "RoboCop," it's all one-two-threes.

It's all setups, complications and payoffs or setups and payoffs, all through.

And it's like a little numerical thing.

And I'm not a math guy, but when Paul Verhoeven showed up, who has a PhD in math, he was like, "Oh wow, this is like a Mondrian painting.

It's like, mathematical."

So anyway, that's how that came to be.

- But then there were a lot of really nice moments in there that don't feel like they're just mathematical.

Like when he goes back to his house, you know.

[Ed] That's the Paradise Lost sequence.

And that was also what Paul was, again, classical education.

He was, "Oh, it's Paradise Lost."

So those things we knew were in there and they're kind of built in.

Once you have that idea that he dies, all of those things kind of are available to you.

- That's like as you're moving forward with your own property and developing it for a life, how were you looking at it between one and two?

Like what is it that you wanted to do after you finished one?

What were you thinking you still needed to say?

- I've always been interested in, I think it's really about how society orders itself.

But I've always been interested in cops and the military.

I spent time as a kid.

I lived in a township where it was all school teachers and cops.

So my neighbors were cops.

I went on ride-alongs with them when I was a kid.

And then later when I was doing "Starship," and because of "RoboCop" now I've met a lot of cops.

And I was always very worried that cops would not like "RoboCop," but in fact they love it.

Their favorite one, their favorite scene was the reading the Miranda Rights as they threw the suspect through the windows.

[audience laughing] Then I read a book by Colonel David Hackworth, who was Army.

And that was very influential for "Starship."

And you know, you just, I guess I kind of, I didn't know anything much about the military as I started to write the script, but you sort of accrue a little bit.

And I was very pleased that the military accepted the movie.

And I think honestly, we want to be protected.

We think, what is the cost of being a soldier?

What is the cost of being a cop?

And what are the benefits to society?

And we can't live without 'em.

And so I think there's a fascination with that whole thing.

- When you decided you wanted to do that, to actually adapt it, had you gone back to look at it?

Was it more out of what was- - It was more out of in my mind sort of memory, more the attitude than anything.

And I was a little bit interested in the kind of the melodrama of a triangle, you know, and relationship triangle.

I read it when I was 13.

It was the greatest book I ever read.

Absolutely.

And everybody knew it.

When I started thinking about doing it as a movie, I thought, "Oh, we'll never get that book.

It's been optioned."

And so I was kind of operating, I was writing the story without it a little bit, a military story set in the future, their bugs, but it wasn't really the book.

Then we were able to get the book and it was a little bit shocking.

Like, "Oh my God, I'm writing, I'm gonna adapt 'Starship Troopers.'"

And I would go around while I was writing it and I would be in a bar somewhere and I would say, "Well, I'm writing 'Starship Troopers.'"

And inevitably, the bartender would say, "That's the reason I went into the military, that book."

Or, you know, it was very important book to people.

When I was 35, it was not much of a story anymore.

It was kind of an attitude with some ideas in it.

And it wasn't a movie.

It was a fine book, but it wasn't a movie, and I knew I was gonna change some stuff.

And so in that case, it was good for me in writing the movie to literally put the book aside.

And I would refer to it if I, you know, Rasczak has some lines that are in the book, you know, "Come on, you apes, you wanna live forever?"

Things like that.

So I wanted to preserve those things, but everything else was not, it wasn't helpful to have the book there.

[typewriter ding] - You've been watching a conversation with Edward Neumeier on "On Story."

On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story project that also includes the "On Story" radio program, podcast, book series, and the "On Story" archive accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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