RoboCop

"Peter Weller — Officer Alex J. Murphy/RoboCop"

"Nancy Allen — Officer Anne Lewis"

"Dan O'Herlihy — The Old Man"

"Ronny Cox — Dick Jones"

"Kurtwood Smith — Clarence Boddicker"

"Miguel Ferrer — Bob Morton"

"Robert DoQui — Sergeant Warren Reed"

"Ray Wise — Leon Nash"

"Paul McCrane — Emil Antonowsky"

"Jesse D. Goins — Joe Cox"

"Lee de Broux — Sal"

"Mark Carlton — Ron Miller"

"Gene Wolande — Prisoner"

"S.D. Nemeth — Bixby Snyder"

"Del Zamora — Kaplan"

"Yolanda Williams — Ramirez"

"Edward Edwards - Manson"

"Jon Davison — ED-209 (voice)"

"Part Man. Part Machine. All Cop."

"The future of law enforcement."

"Do you find Jesus in your films? “RoboCop” has a metaphor of Jesus. The reason I did it was because, for me, there were two metaphors. One is really Paradise Lost, which is when he comes to his house. He is already “RoboCop.” He doesn’t know who he is. He goes to his house and gets flashes of something wonderful that was there. His wife and his child, and the love of them. That’s lost paradise. He cannot touch, it but it was there. When I made it, this was important to me. It was the decision moment to me. I see this metaphor of Paradise Lost and standing at the Gates of Eden. The other metaphor, is that there is a resurrection. That is why he gets killed in an even more brutal way, because I felt that was a metaphor of crucifixion. Murphy gets killed and resurrects. He is dead and resurrected with another brain. It is very interesting if you read in the Gospels about Jesus being resurrected. He doesn’t say anything anymore. It is monosyllabic. But he, after resurrection, expresses himself monosyllabic with phrases of five or ten words. If you look at “Robocop,” that’s what he does. If you look at his eyes, you slowly start to see what he sees. Most things he says is, put down your weapon or whatever. At the end of the movie, because I was living in the United States, the metaphor is that he’s walking on water. In the front of the water there are the walls of an abandoned steel factory, where we shot. You can see the walls like the walls of Troy or Jerusalem. I put grit under the water so he could walk on water. To make him into an American Jesus, he turns to the bad guy and says, “I’m not going to arrest you anymore. I’m going to kill you.” That for me was the American Jesus."

"It’s certainly the most challenging role I’ve ever done. To bring that alive, much of it is thanks to Moni Yakim [the head of the Movement Department at Juilliard], Moni Yakim, the writers [Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner], and Paul Verhoeven. That quadrant of people all infused to make that thing, and Rob Bottin, the makeup artist, and Stephan Dupuis, the guy who put on the prosthetics. I dunno, that was just… I knew I was making a good film. When I met Paul Verhoeven in a hotel room in New York, I knew that, because Paul was directing it, it was going to be great. I knew it was going to have something of a moral opera in it and that he was not going to miss the universal morality in this. He was not going to just make an action movie. And it’s a very funny movie and a brilliant sort of social commentary. When I met Verhoeven, I’d seen all his movies, and I just knew he’d be fantastic. And to be feeling the feelings I felt when I met him… I mean, he was intimidating, but I knew that, with his expertise, he’d be executing something non-ephemeral and awakening certain aspects of social morality that’ll last. That movie will be around forever, man."

"I feel good about playing a robot in that I’m playing a human being who has been transformed into a cyborg. Aside from the action-adventure, the corruption, corporate machinery gone berserk and so on, the heart of all this is a morality tale. It’s like Beauty and the Beast, or the Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz. It’s a great little jewel of a human story."

"I worked with a mime for four months. We wanted to take a human being and transform him into a robot, walking in a suit in such a way that was stylized, attractive, yet computerized and the mechanical without being ‘mimelike.’ In essence, we wanted to have some humanity breathe through this robotic thing."

"The guys that shot me are part of the military-industrial complex. These ‘powers that be’ manage the police force and are also behind the cybernetic cop idea. They are also the people who are feeding the drug wars, so they can build more robots and fight the drug wars they themselves created! All these people are guilty-not only the people who shot me, but the people who made me, too. When they realize that Robo has found out the truth about them, they try to kill me."

"RoboCop, a futuristic story about a policeman shot to death and then revived after all parts of his body have been replaced by artificial substitutes, introduces a more tragic note: the hero who finds himself literally "between two deaths"—clinically dead and at the same time provided with a new, mechanical body—starts to remember fragments of his previous, "human" life and thus undergoes a process of resubjectivication, changing gradually back from pure incarnated drive to a being of desire. (...) [I]f there is a phenomenon that fully deserves to be called the "fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture," it is this fantasy of the return of the living dead: the fantasy of a person who does not want to stay dead but returns again and again to pose a threat to the living."