September 22, 2024 • 58 mins
Step into the fascinating world of screenwriting with this captivating episode featuring the legendary Edward Neumeier. Known for his groundbreaking work on iconic films such as "Robocop" and "Starship Troopers," Neumeier takes us on a journey through his illustrious career, sharing insights and anecdotes that reveal the passion and creativity behind his most famous projects.
From his early days in Marin County, California, where a chance encounter with George Lucas' work inspired his cinematic dreams, to the challenges and triumphs of bringing "Robocop" to life, Neumeier's story is both inspiring and enlightening. Discover the behind-the-scenes struggles and creative decisions that shaped these cult classics, and gain a deeper understanding of the film industry from a master storyteller.
Join us for this third installment of the September Screenwriters Series, where we delve into the mind of Edward Neumeier, exploring his unique approach to writing, his thoughts on remakes and sequels, and his latest venture into the world of anime with "Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars." This episode is a must-listen for cinephiles, aspiring screenwriters, and anyone who loves a good story about the magic of movies.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
G'day. That's right. It's that time again.
Time for Cinema Eugenics.
Music.
The September Screenwriters Series continues.
(00:23):
Eugenics with Edward Neumeier. Now,
does his name really need an introduction i'll say a couple of films you'll
know straight away robocop starship troopers he also wrote on anacondas the
hunt from the blood orchid which,
oddly enough i like more than the first anacondas or sorry the first anaconda
(00:45):
but anacondas i actually like anaconda is better than anaconda just like i like
aliens better than alien and And, yeah,
I'm really going to upset my cinephile friends when I say The Godfather 2 is
better than The Godfather.
But, yeah, that's just how I go. Terminator 2 is better than Terminator.
(01:05):
Robocop 2, not. No, definitely, definitely didn't.
Of course, Road Warrior is always said to be better than Mad Max.
But, yes, Edward Neumeier, the third installment of the September screen series.
Here he is. Edward, welcome.
Very good, good, nice intro, man. I really appreciate it. That's my career, it's better than it is.
(01:29):
So anyway, before we get into the meat of it,
And I promise not too many Robocop questions, because you're probably Robocopped out, aren't you?
Well, it's okay. It's like having a good friend that you can see every now and again. Okay.
But before we get to the part where, like, and I'm paraphrasing yourself in
the documentary Flesh and Steel,
(01:51):
where you come on and you say, you know, I was an executive at Universal Pictures
and I hated my job, so I quit and wrote a screenplay.
Before we get to that part, can you tell us a little bit about how you came
to your enjoyment of films and your origins before that?
(02:13):
Sure. I was very lucky to grow up in Marin County, California,
which is north of the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge, as we say.
And lovely town, almost like for the Americans out there, it's almost like Mayberry,
a little picturesque little town.
And I think I was lucky that I had, you know, good teachers and parents who
(02:37):
were interested in things like art and, you know, interested in the world and interested in travel.
And so I got a kind of an unusual upbringing in some ways that way because I
was encouraged to sort of be myself and think what I thought and to come up
with something interesting.
But really, what I didn't realize for a long time, because I just kind of left
(02:58):
it out, was what was, you know, kind of like really unusual about where I grew
up, San Fella, was when I was in high school, there was a guy living there who
made a movie called America in Graffiti.
And George Lucas. And it's shot in San Rafael. And I had, like, friends who were in it.
And now I'm coming along, and I really want to make movies.
(03:18):
But it's really far away from me. Hollywood is in another part of the state,
and it might as well be thousands of miles away.
But this movie thing made right around me.
When Coppola was in the city...
And then I went off to first year of college or so, and I was working on a newspaper there.
And into the newspaper comes the announcement of this movie, Star Wars.
(03:43):
And I didn't put it together with Lucas. But the pictures were amazing to me
because it just immediately looked like the world I would accept and that I
wanted to go see. And then the movie came out.
And I was 19 years old. I had always wanted to be in the movie business.
And it was made in San Anselmo.
I mean, the post-production was done in San Anselmo. Two, like,
(04:07):
two blocks from my house, he lived.
And, you know, I've never met him, but he was kind of suddenly all around me.
And I think that that was important because I think it said to me,
hey, someone has, you know, you know someone who went out and made some movies.
It's doable. And that propelled me to go down to Los Angeles,
go to the UCLA film school.
(04:28):
And when I got out, I sort of became a reader for several different studios
who could decent enough jobs and could live.
And eventually I was an executive for a little while. And I don't know if I hated it.
I never thought I was very good at it. I thought the other people around me
were better at it, the skill set.
I particularly wanted to kind of concentrate on one thing.
(04:52):
When you're an executive, you're always juggling a bunch of things.
So I started writing this idea I had that I've been working on for a long time
really about four years I've been thinking about so that's RoboCop and I.
Right around the time I was executive I ran into a guy who wanted to write and
direct Michael Miner and we
got to talking and we decided to join force with the big story I had going,
(05:16):
and you know we wrote the script and somebody brought it and it rather quickly
came together although there were many ups and downs and suddenly we had a movie
and it was a movie people liked and I was a screenwriter.
It was like an owl boy do, you know?
But that's how that happened. You know, making Robocop was.
(05:38):
As all movies are, incredibly difficult. And you can probably sit around with
a bunch of people and make movies and they'll just talk about,
well, my movie was even harder.
But I think all movies, big and small, are difficult things to undertake.
And maybe good movies are a little harder than others, but I'm not sure. Sure.
Well, Robocop certainly became more than just a great film.
(05:59):
It became a franchise with a couple of sequels, a TV series,
an animated series, which I remember for a little while.
A remake, or a reboot, or a reimagination recently, and a rather compelling
documentary, which I'm looking forward to seeing, RoboDoc.
So it's really become its own little industry. Yeah, those guys are great.
(06:21):
Yeah, I've been following it, so I see that you are participating in it, yes?
I think it happened because they came to town and they interviewed me for some
reason for a little movie that they were doing about a movie called Fright Night.
Okay. Directed by Tom Holland. And when I was working on RoboCop,
(06:41):
my girlfriend worked for Tom Holland.
Okay. So I was on the set, fight night a couple times.
And I think that brought them to me for some reason. And then I took them out
to dinner and said, why don't you guys do a RoboCop documentary?
And my God, they listened to me and they did. So I hope it's good.
Yeah, it looks, I mean, they've got pretty much, it looks like.
(07:04):
They got everybody, which was fascinating to me. and they really,
they've taken it quite seriously.
I got to, on the day they interviewed me, I got to meet S.C. Nimitz.
Again, I hadn't seen him for a long time. Dixon Snyder. And boy,
that was worth the price of admission right there.
Right. Did they end up getting Peter Weller?
(07:24):
You know, I don't know if they did. Peter's a little funny about that.
He doesn't want to talk about Robocop anymore.
Right. He does. And I, you know, Peter, you can do whatever you want. Yeah, I like Peter.
He's a good guy and Done all he got he doesn't have to give anything more to Robocop. I know nice.
He's done his bit but how did you feel about the What should we call is it a
(07:49):
reboot or a reimagination or a?
Remake You know on the one hand I was lucky enough to be a,
Thanks to the Writers Guild, they gave my partner and I credit on it,
which was just very nice because it was, you know, it was some money you didn't
think you were going to get.
And I went around and I used the occasion to meet everybody on it and kind of
(08:15):
like you are meeting with me here.
I sort of interviewed them about how they experienced working on the movie.
And a little secret for you guys is that after a movie is made,
the filmmakers desperately want to talk about it. They just desperately needed
to talk about this horrible thing that they had gone through,
because it was really difficult.
And so I would go sympathetic to them, and I had a very good experience with
(08:38):
them. I was not like, I didn't hate the movie.
It wasn't the movie I, it's not the kind of thing I do, because it wasn't funny,
really, in the way I wanted it to be. and I have very specific feelings about
the character and what you should and shouldn't do with him.
And they didn't have the same feeling.
I wasn't, I was, for instance, in the original, I knew that the wife and kid
(09:00):
were, were not going to be much fun to have around.
So I just had them go away. And they invested half the story in them.
And I think that they paid the price because it's just so unpleasant.
But other than that, I'm sorry it didn't do better for them because I don't
think we'll need the last Robocop movies.
(09:20):
But, you know, apparently made a little money. And so sometimes I hear them
talking about, well, maybe we should make another one. But we'll see how that goes.
I don't know if they'll make that. I think they're not quite sure what to do
with the remake because I don't think they think it was successful.
They don't want to. Last I heard from them, they don't really think that's a
(09:40):
successful take on the character.
And I don't disagree. agree.
Yeah. Do you think, do you think the danger with a lot of these remakes today is that they, they are,
either too precious or not precious enough with what made the first one any good?
Well, I don't know. I think it's very difficult. Equals have always been traditionally
(10:03):
difficult to get something as good as what excited everybody the first time.
And, you know, it's only been recently that some of these franchises have kind
of worked into a different rhythm, wherein they kind of are the same characters
coming back again and again and every two years, and we like it.
And that's worked a little bit here for a while, which is why we keep getting so many of them.
(10:26):
I would say The Fast and the Furious is a really good example of that.
It's almost like movies, franchise movies that work well now are almost like TV shows.
It's like a family that comes together every two years and they solve a problem
and you get to see with them again.
And that's why I think The Avengers kind of, those movies work that way. Right.
(10:48):
In a way. So the whole recurring characters, recurring villains, recurring plot.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's why TV is like that. TV was traditionally like,
hey, every week I want to spend 30 minutes or an hour with these people I kind of know.
And so the movie franchises that work seem to have that kind of reset to them
or whatever, or that's worked for a while.
(11:11):
You know, The Last Guardians of the Galaxy comes out two years later,
and it doesn't really seem as fresh as the first one for some reason.
I think it's because it's very difficult to come up with really good stuff fast.
Yeah. And there's not like a formula for it.
So, you know, probably if they'd worked on that another two years,
they would have been better.
(11:32):
But on the other hand, they probably wanted the money that they could get out of it now.
Sure. And I mean, I think that.
Yeah. And I mean, the trend is, isn't it? Like if a film is ridiculously or
successful or surprisingly successful, that they're more inclined to rush a
sequel into production as fast as they can.
(11:52):
They are. And, you know, you can understand why. They've got to make their next quarter.
And they have their slots and they have their plans and they want to go with things that work.
And, you know, it's probably better to strike while the iron's hot, et cetera.
It's just, you know, sometimes it's not as easy. Marvel has done a pretty good
job of turning out pretty high quality stuff on a regular basis I guess.
(12:16):
Some of them I really like Star Wars is done okay that way Pixar seems to take
longer and they seem to do better doing that Yeah,
Like you said if they sort of took the time sometimes to come back,
and to not sort of set the the release date and put the posters out and then
(12:39):
they've had rush like hell to make the movie we might we might have probably
seen some better sequels.
I think so, probably, if there was more. I think the real trick of the movie
business, and I'm just talking about movies now, is the development of the script.
Right. And it's a very difficult thing, as you know. You've written yourself.
(13:02):
It's hard to write a script. Yeah. And it's hard to get one right.
And so I think that that kind of not knowing when you can have it ready to go
is a big problem for people who want to run a regular business.
Right. So I think that things get pushed that way.
But yeah, people would emphasize the script a little more if they could.
(13:23):
And sometimes they do. I mean, I know that they struggle to get these scripts right.
In general, they're writing to some kind of deadline, though.
I know when they were working on one of the Spider-Mans, the Sam Rainey Spider-Man,
it was just like, we'll hire another writer, we'll hire another writer.
And they were just trying to move it along as fast as they could.
(13:45):
I still took them to you. Yeah. How do you feel as a writer about these movies
now sort of being written by a team of writers?
They obviously get in a bunch of writers and have them come out with them.
Well, again, it's like the television model being brought into the movie.
Right. They have a room of writers.
Yeah. They break them down and, you know, hey, I was in a room for not a movie
(14:09):
but for a video game briefly and just kind of as an observer.
And it was kind of fun to hang around and talk about things with people.
But, you know, I've done a little of this stuff in consulting.
You know, I mean, not really, but, you know, I've been around a group involved
in the Air Force and some other government stuff.
(14:29):
And they do that, too. They have this way of having a bunch of people come together,
a bunch of experts come together in a room.
And then you talk about it and you say, here are the problems.
And we're going to divide you into a group of four.
And then we're each going to give you a problem. We're going to come back at
3 o'clock. And you're all going to come together. And you're going to come at
5 o'clock. And you give us the answer.
And you know what? I just think it's a bunch of bullshit. You know?
(14:50):
It doesn't really work that way. But they want it to work that way. and
so so i i feel like that's kind
of where this goes and you probably get a little out of
it but then you know then then you still take a while to come to peace you need
somebody to be able to come in the next day and go hey you know that thing you're
talking about here's why it's completely wrong why don't we do this that kind
of process doesn't go for that because it's based on keys or something anyway
(15:14):
that's that's i their work would be okay with me yeah anything that works Yeah,
because I mean that it seems like today like every time I read about new,
because they're now in the business of It seems like they're in the business
of building universes today We've got the Marvel Universe and the unit Universal
wants to rebuild the the Universal monster Yeah,
(15:37):
so it seems like and then you hear like oh they've got a bunch of screenwriters
together It's gonna plot out the whole thing.
And I mean that I haven't seen it but by all
accounts that new mummy picture wasn't that wasn't that
hot or didn't do too well you know I didn't
know it did not it did not it doesn't seem to work you know again I think the
(16:01):
new transformer was done with one of those writer rooms and it's probably going
to make money but it didn't make money in the US the way it was you know thought
that yeah the way people wanted it so but don't you think don't yeah don't you
think the hazard of that is is the old adage too
many cooks spoil the broth yeah i actually
think it's yeah i'm not listen i'm not hopeful of it it
(16:23):
doesn't mean it seems to me that you know it really takes the you know hard
work of one or two people and maybe some other people along the way to sit down
and and you know figure out what's working and what's not and i i don't know
if you if you can make it go faster by throwing more monkeys into the room,
you know, but they're going to try.
(16:45):
Cause obviously it's a reason they have a schedule and they have to hit these release dates.
So it's a problem. I'm not sure. It's almost like they need more good screenwriters. Yeah.
But I mean, back probably back when you started, I mean, it seems like they
used to go for like screenwriters where that was their strength.
I mean, like, you know, if you, You and just coming off of Robocop,
(17:09):
they go, well, he writes...
Good he writes good stuff like that or like shane black
you know when he was when he was when he was
hot you know he writes a good action picture we want
a good action picture writer let's get him
you know instead of this whole you know let's get as many writers in the room
as possible and watch them you know fight it out until one of them emerges with
(17:32):
a bloody pencil and a script um you know or or i don't even know if they fight
it out i think that really what happens is you have somebody in there who's got to write it,
and they probably care more than anybody else.
And then you've got a bunch of other people who don't have to write it,
so they can just have their ideas.
And then that's that. So you don't really have – the people who are having to
(17:54):
come up with the ideas are not much better than development executives.
They don't have to write it. They don't have that much skin in the game.
And I think that that can make a lot of – if you have to write it,
you can say a lot of things in a room.
And I've been in a room where people have said a lot of things.
And I've said a lot of things. Then you go back and you have to sit down in
a lonely little room. Yeah.
(18:16):
And it doesn't work out the same way it did in that room that was filled with people.
Yeah. You know, it's lonelier, too. You're all by yourself.
But I think that's why this idea, it probably helps to have more ideas.
Eventually, you still end up with somebody having to work out a story bone by
bone. Yeah. Probably by themselves.
(18:37):
So anyway, after the whole Robocop experience,
you re-team with Paul Verhoeven for a movie that I found, when it came out,
it seems like it didn't get as much love as it should have,
but now it's being looked back upon more fondly, and that's Starship Troopers.
(18:57):
Oh, you're talking about Starship Troopers? Yeah.
Yeah, it is, I think. I think that's true, and thank God for it.
It was, again, another incredibly long and difficult sort of journey to make that movie.
And when it came out, it was kind of a little bit less than you wanted it to
be, particularly if you had been working on it all that time.
(19:18):
Yeah. It was a studio. Yeah.
But, you know, it was immediately a big hit in home video, which was,
I hate to say it, just kind of coming out, coming into its own then.
And it was, I guess, enormous. It just sold a lot of damn videos.
And so that was, so more and more people saw it that way.
It played on television quite a lot, and a lot of people see it that way.
(19:40):
So yeah, it has, over a long period of time, it has kind of grown into its own
little cult, whatever you want to say.
I think also, I was talking to Paul recently, and he was saying,
you know, with some amusement.
His science fiction movies were staying
relevant longer than his other movies so I
(20:02):
think it's the genre that gives you a little you know you're
talking about the future and if it's something
that people relate to then they kind of keep going back
to it and they find more in it or they enjoy it or they
use it in a conversation or you know there's a lot more news stories now about
Star Trek troopers as say the Air Force is now kind of starting in America The
(20:24):
Air Force is starting a kind of a branch of the Air Force that's going to be
about space work and space stuff.
But the press likes to call it Starship Troopers. Every time there's an advance,
a technology advance up with cops or a thing about armor, cops and armor,
they call them Robocops.
There's a police car that's in Dubai that's autonomous.
(20:47):
They can drive around and scam things, and they're called Robocop cars.
All right. Cool. Somehow, you know, that stuff, the movies about the future
seem to find a useful place in the press. Yeah.
I think I remember you saying in an interview on one of those documentaries
that really you were writing,
(21:10):
I think it was for Robocop, that you were writing a funny movie or a satire
disguised as a genre picture.
Do you think that when you, like you were just saying about how the genre helps
you, you know, you're not really,
you're intent on saying something, but disguised as genre, it helps get it across easier?
(21:32):
I think so. I mean, look at the beginning of the touch of triplets was occurred on a walk in.
Carl Verhoeven and I were taking sometime in the end of 1986 in the hills,
you know, near Pittsburgh, where we were shooting.
And we were talking on a Sunday about things we would want to do.
(21:55):
And, you know, what would we do if we did another movie? Because we got along pretty well then.
And he at one point said, I've always wanted to do a movie about a bunch of
kids in Nazi Germany, you know, in 1935 or so.
Before you knew it was that.
That's when it was happening and it was exciting and and
and i think that he said i really and i i like that
(22:18):
i did too i thought yeah because that's really interesting they didn't know
they were doing something that was wrong they just were doing something they were caught
up in something exciting and you know
at some level and i said yeah at the time i said yeah but they'll
never want to make a movie about 1936 poland or 1936
germany you know about from that point
of view well that's not the way a dramatic movie would you know it would be
(22:40):
hard to make that movie Evoke Self and then it was not long you know a couple
years later and I suddenly around the time Jurassic Park was coming out that
was being done by Phil Tippett who had done the Ed 209 stuff,
stop motion stuff in Robocop that I realized oh we could do all these kind of
bugs and things we could make such a trip as a movie and it would be that movie
(23:03):
it would be about you know I'm going to join up and all that kind of stuff.
So if you look at Starship, you see it's about a bunch of kids in high school
and there's an excitement about joining up and going off into the world and
that plays into this thing where suddenly you're at war.
And it was, I mean, it was very inspiring to me to look at it that way.
And Paul, I kind of knew Paul would like that too. Right.
(23:25):
Just in general that it would appeal to him and it did.
And eventually he came on board and off we went on that one.
But, But I've noticed today, like I noticed recently on social media, they recut...
A trailer for Starship Troopers, and gave it... Yeah, I saw that.
(23:46):
You did, yeah. Gave it some, as one commentator said, gave it some gravitas
that he thought it needed upon its initial release. How do you feel about that?
Do you think the marketing... Well, I mean, at some level, there's a winking
going on with it being a giant B-movie from another time.
(24:10):
Sure. Almost like what it is. Yeah. And that's what we were doing,
and what Paul and I were kind of, like, we were pushing B-movie stuff,
we were pushing the vulgarity a little bit, we were kind of trying to hit this
tone of manufactured entertainment from, I think it collectively came from our,
(24:32):
you know, we're 20 years older than I am, but our different views of B-movie culture.
And we were what you started out saying is you
know you're are you hiding in genre so you
can take it more seriously and i think you know
you are trying to get away with something by doing this so we'd
never tell a studio we're making the movie that people
pretty much accept dark ship as they read the script
(24:55):
and kind of felt like it was a military movie maybe
kind of like star wars or something right and they didn't see it as and they
were amused by it too because it's amusing the kind of you know where you're
sort of saying it's a bit of a fascist state but it's fun you know it's it's
edgy in that way for them but i don't think that they understood it as a.
(25:17):
Completely absolutely made where you know about in the third act you realize
the audience is asked to to undertake the idea that that their heroes might
be the matter and that's pretty subtle but But that's the third act conclusion
at some thematic level is, oh, have they all become fascists?
Which, of course, we decided by the end of that movie that the theme of the
(25:41):
movie was war makes fascists of us all. And it really, really does.
I mean, that's fascinating that we arrived at that. And now that I look at war
and warlike behavior and warrior culture, it's just impossible that it doesn't
make us into that. the only way you win, right?
You're becoming tougher and less human and more certain, I don't know, it's music.
(26:04):
What would we do without human folly, I ask myself. It's just so much fun. Yeah.
I personally love Starship Troopers. I saw it in the cinema when it came out.
I personally wasn't one of those people that have grown into it.
I thought it was great from the beginning.
And I look at, like, Paul's movies, like Robocop and Starship and even Total
(26:30):
Recall, and how they've, I mean, they remade Total Recall as well.
Now, I mean, they've applied a certain slickness to it, because now with the
certain toy, the movie-making toys they have now, they can do pretty much what they want.
(26:51):
But that wasn't that wasn't really the that wasn't really the factor that people,
enjoyed I think when they initially, when these movies initially came out,
like if they remade Star Trek,
that's a very interesting point because we couldn't do power armor which to
some people who like Star Trek the book just think that's,
(27:12):
how can you make a movie called Star Trek without power armor but we just couldn't
do it because we didn't have the money and the way to do it,
the CGI that we had was about all we had.
And yet now we can do everything if we have enough money. And the question is, what do you want to do?
And it's interesting because here's what they're going to start with.
I know they're going to try to remake it sometime.
(27:33):
They keep trying to remake it as far as I can hear because I'm not really involved in it.
They keep wanting to make it more real or more benign or something.
And so they're basically, they say they're doing the book. But the book is just
a, it's just an argument. It's not a story.
And so I have a feeling that they're going to pimp off the original story,
(27:57):
but that they're going to try to make it a little more.
I'm not sure what, I mean, I don't know. I guess what I'm saying is I,
I hope somebody can find a way to make that movie interesting for them, but I don't know.
I'm not sure if they're going to be able to, it's like, there's not that much of a story there.
If you don't do what Paul and I kind of did with it, which was to take this
(28:18):
idea and flip it around and tell this kind of military propaganda.
It is, in its own way, a piece of propaganda, so we treat it as propaganda.
But to treat it as something real might be, I don't know, you're going to have
to make up a new story for it.
Yeah, because, I mean, your whole angle and the idea that it was,
(28:38):
you know, the whole idea that people that are under an oppressive regime don't
really know it, you know, They're all, and plus you've got the B-movie angle,
I mean, I saw it, when I first saw it I thought this is great,
this is like an old fashioned, sort of cheesy B-movie made for a big budget, but...
(29:00):
Which was fantastic, but also the idea, as you were saying when you were talking
with Paul about how people living in Germany,
while the whole thing's going on to the outside world, what they're doing is
terrible, but to the naive youth that are there,
like you said, it's all wonderful.
And they buy the propaganda because, like, oh, wow, this is a great idea.
(29:24):
Yeah, become a citizen, serve, you know, all this sort of stuff.
I mean, that's a great angle, and I don't know if making it,
like you say, I don't know if making it sort of, you know, with this whole,
like, gritty realism that they want today is dark and, you know, let's make it real,
let's make it, I mean, people go to the movies for escapism,
not realism, don't they?
(29:45):
Well, I mean, I think in this case, the world, which is a meta world a little
bit, it is purposely trying to kind of look like an old-fashioned or a cheaper,
I would say, you know, high-end 50s sci-fi like them or something like that.
It has those values in it. I mean, we're pretty aware.
(30:10):
It's written in the late 50s. The military look was kind of set as a World War
II look, in a way, because we figured that's what it would be.
So if you look at the ships they're not they're not you know like really cool
looking and they're not really like look at stuff they're made of big funny
shapes and stuff like that yeah very industrial kind of anti-physical.
(30:33):
Industrial look shapes and stuff like that right and so I mean I think we were
trying I think what's really interesting about the movie is we created a world
that you would accept it's nonetheless not a real world so if you make this
more gritty and more real,
you know it's probably just a different kind of a movie yeah I mean,
if you want to do Private Ryan, I'm not sure if you can do Private Ryan with us, you know.
(30:55):
I'm not sure you can make that, you know. I mean, maybe you can.
You can do a little of that if you want it.
I don't know. It's an interesting problem. Yeah.
It would just be a very different film. It wouldn't have the tongue-in-cheek at all.
Well, in a weird way, it would be closer to something like the Clone Wars.
(31:16):
No. The battle sequences in the Clone Wars I thought were actually the only
part of the movie I liked.
Right. And, you know, they remind me a little of Peckinpah, in a way.
Right. The question is, how long can you sustain that? That's true, yeah. So, anyway.
Or a bit like that. Well, I don't know. We'll see what they do with that.
If they remake it. I kind of wish they didn't. I think at one point I decided that it was very good.
(31:43):
Even when we were making it at an R and people wondered if that was smart.
And probably would have made more money if you could have downed it down a little to a PG-13 maybe.
But I kind of felt like no one's ever going to make a movie like this.
Or not for a long, long time. And so it made it worth it to me in a way to make
it tougher and stranger and maybe not as commercial as you know We would have
(32:07):
liked you know Do you think that if they did it today they might try for something
more like that edge of tomorrow? You know that Tom Cruise movie?
Well, I mean I did you like it as well. I did I thought it was good,
And I'm bored with Power Seals now. Right. That's just me.
You know, I thought that they did them about as well as you could do them.
(32:29):
Cameron's done a version of them, a different version for Avatar that's also pretty good.
Yeah. You know, maybe someone will come up with some amazing, you know, Mecha Ballet.
Yeah. In the future that we will like. But, you know, we'll see.
I'm not as, and probably because I've been, you know, bouncing around,
no pun intended, with this idea of how it could grow long time.
(32:53):
I'm just not interested if I want one.
So Troopers went on to 2 and 3, which you directed, but in between there,
I noticed Anacondas, Hunt for the Blood Orchid. How did that come your way?
You know, that was an interesting studio
(33:14):
job but Michael and I
decided to see if we could work together
again and we went up for this job at
Sony where they sort of knew me and him and we you know they had a they had
a competition for like a good idea for this and they thought of franchise at
(33:34):
that point that they wanted to save so we wrote it it was a little bit uninspiring in some ways.
Particularly because I generally try to make things a little bit funny,
you know, in some way. And they didn't want that.
And I think that's until Get Out came along, everybody said,
(33:54):
you can't be funny and do horror at the same time.
And I think they were wrong, but that made the script particularly uninspiring.
And I do think I learned that you know it's just not enough it's not much fun
it's fun to write something that you like and have it turn out and get it good
and have it turn out good if you can but writing something that you don't like
(34:18):
or writing something that someone else likes,
isn't that satisfying? It doesn't, it doesn't feel very well.
So, you know, I must say, I, at a certain point, I, I didn't care whether they made that movie or not.
And then they did, they went and made it. And that was great.
I'm glad they made the movie. And a guy named Dwight Little directed it.
And he did about as good a job as you could.
(34:39):
They made it for a certain price.
Probably, you know, if you had a little more money and a little better actors,
you would have had a better movie. I don't know. I'm not sure.
I ended up saying to my kids that
I thought maybe I wasn't the guy to write a giant rubber
snake in the jungle movie someone else could have probably done it better there's
(35:03):
a good title for a movie there a giant rubber snake in the jungle it shows you
where I come from it's probably too much from a movie perspective but you know Anyway,
I think for me, the struggle as a screenwriter is always to try to find out
what a story is really about.
(35:25):
And you're limited when it's really about a giant rubber snake in the jungle.
Well, that came in between the Starship 2 and Starship 3, which you directed. What was the directing?
Yeah, so I got, I mean, the Star Trek Troopers direct-to-video movies have been
a little cottage industry that a few people have gotten to direct on,
(35:49):
and now I've got my health insurance going, so I'm very grateful to Sony for that.
That but did they yeah they finally someone finally convinced
that they had two things happening they'd made a lot
of money with the otherwise not wonderful in
my opinion from a good standpoint starting with two
and then there was the production problem but we didn't quite get to shoot the
(36:10):
whole movie and you know i think the movie had pretty good bargain in it for
sure and phil tibbett the director you know did well for having a very short
schedule and you know i I guess he had under $6 million to make that movie.
You know, we had. I mean, I was on it. I wrote on it.
But it was actually quite an education for me. I'll tell you,
(36:33):
I learned a lot about movies from experience.
And helped me for... But nonetheless, Starship 2 made a lot of money for Sony.
And it was sort of at the height of the... No one knew it then,
but kind of at the height of the video business.
The home video business. and so they decided that they should make another Starship
Troopers 2 a movie and maybe if it was better they'd make even more money.
(36:57):
And then to make it better they were willing to spend some more money and then
they came to me and I said well I would like to do this and that and they for
some reason they said yes and I wanted to bring Chapter Van Dien back into it
and said I wanted to write a movie about Johnny Rico and they,
They said, okay. And, you know, they basically let me do whatever I wanted. I wasn't crazy.
(37:21):
And the movie was quite, again, very difficult, quite an ordeal.
But it went well. Nobody killed anybody.
And it all got shot, sort of, kind of moving together out of it.
And I didn't get fired, which was probably my big ambition.
And, you know, I shot in South Africa. It was really a great experience to shoot
(37:43):
in South Africa. I had a giant crew and a lot of people who tried very hard
to do things. We probably didn't have enough money.
The script probably wasn't as good as it should be, but we had a good cast,
and we had a very good crew and a good DT.
So for me, it was a really great experience of directing a movie,
and I now know what it is to direct a movie.
It changed how I feel about movies a little bit, or how I feel about directors of movies a little bit.
(38:09):
Because it's a really, really complicated job. And I think that most people
can't do it. Probably me included.
It's almost like, sometimes I was sitting around talking to one of my old friends,
and he said, I can't decide if directors are born.
And I said, I think they are born. I think the really good directors are born.
(38:30):
They can do something other people can't.
And that maybe you can't really learn to do, or not everybody can learn to do.
As I say it's a complicated job so they're probably operating visually and maybe
in other ways just ahead of most people they see things in a different way do
you think it's more do you think with a director it's you know I mean there
(38:53):
are a lot of writer directors as well but,
do you think the sole directors you think their strength lies in.
Not so much just getting the pages on the screen and getting stuff shot but
actually crafting those images.
(39:13):
Like like no i think you know i think
there's no one way to do it but all the
hoping i i would say shot about pages that we prepared moving into production
we shot the script and it was interesting to me because i've been around before
that and you know i didn't realize how lucky i was for a little while because
(39:34):
you know what i wrote and what we all agreed on they're kind of the.
Producer and the director and I, was more or less what happened.
And there was nothing where I thought, well, somebody ruined that or ruined
that. I mostly looked at it and said, I wish that line, mine, were better.
Sometimes I got very lucky and have gotten lucky with an actor,
a good actor will come up with a good line and I'm smart enough to go,
(39:57):
that's a good idea, let's do that.
And so that was, you know, my sense of it is that you use the script,
the director should use the script to put everything down as it's going to happen.
If you get the good idea when you're shooting it, that's fine.
And Paul was there. That's because Paul, that's the way Paul did it.
Now, other people are more intuitive, and they see things in different ways.
(40:18):
And so it's not all rules apply. But I do think that the more you prepare yourself
and set what you're doing in a process, the more the director does that, the better for me.
It just seems like it becomes richer and stronger.
And I guess, again, I'm very influenced by having Wolfgang Serhoff.
But what he was able to do with my material is now more and more I realize how lucky I was.
(40:45):
I always thought I was lucky. But not everybody can do that or see it that way
and pull it all together.
So the performances and the blocking of the camera and the movements of the
people are all working in support of that in such a great way.
Well, it's like I once heard.
I think it was Peter Gruber say that once you hire a director,
(41:09):
you've bought that eye, you've bought a particular vision.
Yeah, what I would say now, as a writer, I understand is I don't want the directors
to do anything that they don't believe in or they don't want to do.
Right. It's just not in my interest.
And they won't do a good job of it if they do.
They have to understand it, and they have to do something they want to do.
(41:31):
It's kind of like raising a child. I mean, seriously, you have to let them do
what they're going to do.
If you try to say, you know, you can say to a director, hey,
how about this? You can pitch them an idea, and if they like it, great.
If they don't like it, you can't get them to do it. Yeah, ultimately,
ultimately, they're going to be what they want to be, right?
(41:52):
Well, you have to find the right person to work with, you know.
They have to like of script and they have to wanna you have
to think we have a shared vision and they you
would then have to get along and then you would have to have
a shared vision about about how to work and i think i was lucky in kind of meeting
up with a director who saw that i could be helpful to him about this and we
(42:15):
were able to work together pretty much hand in glove on two pictures in a way
that i I think, served the picture quite well.
But, you know, not everybody does it differently. In America,
the writer is not usually on the set.
Might be changing a little bit. In America, it's always the TV,
in TV, the writer runs everything and the actors can't say any words but the
(42:38):
ones that are on the stage.
And in features, director runs everything and the actors can make up their own lines.
So were you, on the films you worked with, Paul, Or were you present throughout
the production or just beginning it out?
Yeah, I was usually there writing or working.
On the first one, I was rewriting the movie as we went just to keep going and make it better.
(43:01):
As we came to things, whether they were locations that were suddenly locked
down and, oh, how can we make it look better here?
And I would get that in the script. But I would also, oh, this actor we cast
is great and this line will be better this way.
And so I kept nudging it along and making it better in the process of that for the good on Starship.
(43:25):
The script took it and what's on for so long that it was pretty lost.
And so I've more functioned as the not the official A.D.
We had great A.D.s on that show, but I was known as the European A.D.
And I would run around and make sure the director got everything he wanted.
And everybody knew what the director wanted and tried to troubleshoot when things
(43:45):
went wrong, which somehow they often did.
But that was part of the creative experiment there.
Tell us about the new Starship Troopers, Traitor of Mars.
Well, Traitor of Mars is a piece of anime,
an anime story which is animated by the Japanese master of mecha, Shinji Aramaki.
(44:14):
And Shinji is well known for Apple Seed and other anime he has participated in.
And he has now done two Starship Troopers animes.
The last one I had nothing to do with, and I think they were unhappy about that,
so they asked me, they came back to me and said, we want to do another one even
cheaper, but Shinji really wants to do another one.
(44:36):
They want it to be a good one, and do you have a story?
And I said, well, I kind of do have a story, but it involves,
you know, I really want to, I said,
and I really want to use Casper for the voice, and I also want to get Ina Meyer
back so that she can reprise her Disney character. And they said, really?
(44:56):
Lizzie's dead. And I said, well, I have a way to go.
And so one thing led to another. And I agreed to write this for them as an anime script.
And it was good that I sort of had a notion of the story because they wanted it immediately.
And they just kind of shot it about as fast as I wrote it. but there was at
(45:21):
times it was interesting because we didn't have the best you know,
It wasn't even just that we couldn't sit around and communicate.
We just didn't communicate that much.
Somehow being in Japan and being here and having that everything translated
meant that the communication between us was a little odd at times.
And so the movie came out in a very interesting way.
But what's funny to me is that, you know, the story tracks and everything.
(45:44):
But I used to watch anime movies and think, gee, if only this,
I could fix this. I could fix that.
Oh, the story would make better sense if you did this and that.
But I had this sort of notion that I could fix an anime story,
make a good anime story that I could track and follow.
And I realized that the people who were making this didn't follow those rules.
(46:05):
And so they don't care about the way the story tracks exactly the same way I
do in that world, in that group of people.
And it sort of came off more like it came off as like oh this is like an anime
film in that way too I don't know if that makes any sense to you but there's
almost a different storytelling,
storytelling value between the Japanese culture of anime and the American culture
(46:29):
of movies or whatever so the story sometimes doesn't work the way I want it
to but I think it works in a way that is proper for anime.
I don't know are you an anime fan? Oh, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I, you know, I like all the classics, of course, you know,
(46:51):
Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Ninja Scroll.
I really love that series, Berserk. I don't know if you ever saw that.
I've heard of it. I haven't seen it. Did you see the, what did you think was
wrong or right about the Ghost in the Shell movie?
I think that most people expected a live-action version of the original film, and they didn't get it.
(47:13):
Yeah, I think that's the big thing.
It'll be the same if they ever finally do this Akira film that's been slugging
its way around Hollywood for a long time.
I think if they go too far away from the source material,
particularly with the devoted fans anyway i mean for people who don't know for
(47:38):
people who aren't familiar then obviously it's it's just another sort of science
fictiony actiony picture but for
the for the devotees i think that they go oh wow that's going to be really cool
to see a live action version of the anime but the problem is when they were doing the,
(47:59):
the promotional stuff that was coming out that was showing shots
that were pretty much you know shot
for shot with the anime so people were hopeful but
of course when the final product came out and found like oh geez they they used
a bit of that story and then a bit of something else and a little bit of the
the sequel uh that they made called ghost in the shell innocence which which
(48:20):
came out so yeah i just think that i just think the downfall was was too far away from,
you know, I mean, it's weird, fans are funny fans and stuff are funny they want.
They want what they like or what they liked,
And they want to see that, but they want to see it somehow, like,
(48:42):
live action's going to make it different.
I don't know. It's a weird thing.
So, in other words, the idea of making it more real, live action,
is what they think that there's going to be.
They're going to get more out of that than they do. Yeah, I think so.
It was like when I was a kid and I heard there was going to be a Masters of the Universe movie.
(49:04):
Now, I love Masters of the Universe as a kid. when i
heard oh wow live action movie that's going to be fantastic and a
lot of people don't like it i personally do even though you
know i know now knowing the mechanics of filmmaking that okay they had a budget
and that's why they kept them on earth rather than do the whole thing on on
(49:25):
the alien planet but i mean it was still sort of marvelous like wow that's you know you know the
live action version it had it had sort of an aura around it and i think it still does,
only problem is when like i say when they stray sort of when it's not the film that they loved.
(49:47):
And it's some sort of hybrid of like oh that it
looks and sounds and you know it
feels like ghost in the shell but it's not it's not
the same it's not the anime now so it's weird it's like a fine line that that
i think screenwriters and filmmakers walk like how much of it how much do you
make it a carbon copy and how much do you do a live action version which is
(50:12):
inspired in a lot of ways and.
And is sort of visually similar but it's it's not exactly the same like how
much Like, it's a real, I don't know, I'd, I'd put.
You'd have to really know, you'd have to really get the essence of something.
(50:34):
Yeah, yeah, and I think that's. You would have to save it.
Yeah. Not, yeah. It's like, it's like we were talking about earlier,
like, the thing that makes something great, like, the original Robocop and the remake,
you know, and, like, I feel that they just completely lost what made the first one a good movie.
(50:56):
But then again, the new movie isn't the old movie It can never be the old movie
As much as people would want the old movie back again.
Just watch the, as I say, just, just watch the original if you're not happy, but,
you know, you can't, that's why I think sometimes it's a mistake to try and
(51:17):
just stick with the same plot from the original film and not try some,
some new plot that, that involves,
you know, a guy becoming, you know, a Robocop and eventually like a Pinocchio
type story, rediscovering his humanity, you know, and try that in a different form.
But don't stick with the same plot because you're never going to do it as well as it's been done.
(51:43):
Like, lightning's already struck. Now we're just playing with the thunder.
Well, I agree with everything you're saying. I really do. And I think we can't redo it the same way.
And I've always tried to change it up a little bit.
Like, on the Star Trek River movies, In a way, I was never trying to hit the
same ideas as we did in the first one.
(52:05):
I was trying to have it be part of something that could work in that world.
And I was trying to, you know, hit some notes about militarism and,
you know, the human condition.
Fewer, I would say, in two than I did in three. But that's about it.
You know, I tried to make it seem like it was in that world.
But I also didn't, I knew I didn't have the money to do big,
(52:26):
giant sequences or anything like that. So, you know, I knew I couldn't compete at that level.
It's sort of boring to try to compete with yourself. Yeah. It's a different thing.
Yeah. I mean, it's a tough gig, like always.
Once you've come out with a hit and people... I think I once heard Kevin Smith
(52:46):
was talking to Richard...
What's his name? Richard Kelly, who directed Donnie Darko. He said, aren't you...
Right, sure. Yeah, aren't you afraid now that people are just going to want
Donnie Darko all the time you know,
no matter how much he wants to do other stuff probably, yeah probably that's
such an amazing piece of work and probably they do want it all the time probably hitting that,
(53:10):
balance if you hit a mat is hard to do too bad I really like that stuff but
that movie is kind of miraculous I mean it goes it goes back to the old the
old adage like when it all comes together right And it's successful,
How it happened is a mystery You know, as much as you can Cast.
(53:34):
The actors that you want and you get the right director and good cinematographer
and you've got the script well
written and you've got a good producer and you've got all these elements.
When that all works.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that I've actually seen that. I think that kind of happened on Robocop.
And I think that what happened there was, you know, everybody wanted something
(53:56):
is the best I've heard now from a few.
Bill Tippett once said, oh, everybody needed something on that movie.
And it was like, it's true. I needed my first movie.
John Davison needed a new movie. He was a producer and he hadn't had a hit for
a while since his first movie.
Paul Verhoeven had this amazing career in Europe.
And then his first American English language picture, as it were, was in Blood Crank.
(54:21):
So he needed to do something. And I think everybody was working very hard together
in a way that they could only do that one time.
And when we worked together again 10 years later, it was a little different
because we didn't all need it the same way or we didn't need the same things.
So, you know, whatever. But I mean, I think the other thing that happens is
(54:42):
if you have a group of people who kind of have good communication with each
other, that can really help.
And I think we have that on both those movies. Do
you think too What makes something
great sometimes Is the hunger Like you just said When
you're a young screenwriter Or a young director And you've finally gotten that
(55:03):
first Oh this is my first Like you said my first movie So you're hungry You're
eager to please Like yeah yeah I can't screw this up I've got to give a hundred
and fifty Two hundred percent.
There's a certain power in ignorance That way you're trying really hard.
I don't know I really think it comes down to needs in other words some people
(55:28):
have bigger appetites than others but if you need to do that you'll keep doing
that if you need to succeed and if you need to make another movie you're going to keep,
You've got to keep the fire burning. At that level. Or something, yeah.
It takes a lot of energy, I think. At least it has for me in these things.
(55:49):
Get something going and somehow make something happen.
And then it really helps if you have smart people you're working with. Sure.
I'm really lucky with Verhoeven and the producer, John Davison, on Robocop.
Those guys were really good. So I was a lucky writer that way.
(56:10):
I had some smart people to work with. Awesome.
So anything really cool for Ed Umar on the horizon you can talk about?
Well, I'm writing a script right now I'm not supposed to talk about,
but it is kind of cool to be revealed later.
Yeah, I'm actually happily working along here in the movie business,
(56:32):
believe it or not, which is a little more limited than it used to be maybe.
And so I have nothing to complain about except that
I'm a screenwriter so what John can you say what John you're working in is it
science fiction again action what you would expect I think it's what you would
expect wow okay very cool the Robin always sings the same song well that's cool that's what,
(56:59):
Ferdelucci said I think that's very cool well we certainly Finally,
we at Podcasting Softly and fans all over the world of Ed Neumeyer,
we look forward to the future exploits of you, sir. Okay, well, we'll see.
You never know how these things work. Anyway, it's really a pleasure talking
to you, man. It is. A goatee trader of Mars.
(57:20):
Yeah. I hope to do a store near you, I hope. Yeah, I look forward to that, yeah.
The September Screen Runners series continues, ladies and gentlemen.
We hope you enjoyed this episode. there is another one hot on its heels so stay
tuned through the month of September for the September Screenwriters Series,
(57:42):
and as always thank you for listening to us little Yugonites on Spotify or wherever
you choose to listen to your favourite podcasts so until next time this is Kent
saying thank you for listening and stay tuned to the one and only Cinema No more?
You get it.
(58:04):
Music.
G'day. That's right. It's that time again.
Time for Cinema Eugenics.
Music.
The September Screenwriters Series continues.
(00:23):
Eugenics with Edward Neumeier. Now,
does his name really need an introduction i'll say a couple of films you'll
know straight away robocop starship troopers he also wrote on anacondas the
hunt from the blood orchid which,
oddly enough i like more than the first anacondas or sorry the first anaconda
(00:45):
but anacondas i actually like anaconda is better than anaconda just like i like
aliens better than alien and And, yeah,
I'm really going to upset my cinephile friends when I say The Godfather 2 is
better than The Godfather.
But, yeah, that's just how I go. Terminator 2 is better than Terminator.
(01:05):
Robocop 2, not. No, definitely, definitely didn't.
Of course, Road Warrior is always said to be better than Mad Max.
But, yes, Edward Neumeier, the third installment of the September screen series.
Here he is. Edward, welcome.
Very good, good, nice intro, man. I really appreciate it. That's my career, it's better than it is.
(01:29):
So anyway, before we get into the meat of it,
And I promise not too many Robocop questions, because you're probably Robocopped out, aren't you?
Well, it's okay. It's like having a good friend that you can see every now and again. Okay.
But before we get to the part where, like, and I'm paraphrasing yourself in
the documentary Flesh and Steel,
(01:51):
where you come on and you say, you know, I was an executive at Universal Pictures
and I hated my job, so I quit and wrote a screenplay.
Before we get to that part, can you tell us a little bit about how you came
to your enjoyment of films and your origins before that?
(02:13):
Sure. I was very lucky to grow up in Marin County, California,
which is north of the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge, as we say.
And lovely town, almost like for the Americans out there, it's almost like Mayberry,
a little picturesque little town.
And I think I was lucky that I had, you know, good teachers and parents who
(02:37):
were interested in things like art and, you know, interested in the world and interested in travel.
And so I got a kind of an unusual upbringing in some ways that way because I
was encouraged to sort of be myself and think what I thought and to come up
with something interesting.
But really, what I didn't realize for a long time, because I just kind of left
(02:58):
it out, was what was, you know, kind of like really unusual about where I grew
up, San Fella, was when I was in high school, there was a guy living there who
made a movie called America in Graffiti.
And George Lucas. And it's shot in San Rafael. And I had, like, friends who were in it.
And now I'm coming along, and I really want to make movies.
(03:18):
But it's really far away from me. Hollywood is in another part of the state,
and it might as well be thousands of miles away.
But this movie thing made right around me.
When Coppola was in the city...
And then I went off to first year of college or so, and I was working on a newspaper there.
And into the newspaper comes the announcement of this movie, Star Wars.
(03:43):
And I didn't put it together with Lucas. But the pictures were amazing to me
because it just immediately looked like the world I would accept and that I
wanted to go see. And then the movie came out.
And I was 19 years old. I had always wanted to be in the movie business.
And it was made in San Anselmo.
I mean, the post-production was done in San Anselmo. Two, like,
(04:07):
two blocks from my house, he lived.
And, you know, I've never met him, but he was kind of suddenly all around me.
And I think that that was important because I think it said to me,
hey, someone has, you know, you know someone who went out and made some movies.
It's doable. And that propelled me to go down to Los Angeles,
go to the UCLA film school.
(04:28):
And when I got out, I sort of became a reader for several different studios
who could decent enough jobs and could live.
And eventually I was an executive for a little while. And I don't know if I hated it.
I never thought I was very good at it. I thought the other people around me
were better at it, the skill set.
I particularly wanted to kind of concentrate on one thing.
(04:52):
When you're an executive, you're always juggling a bunch of things.
So I started writing this idea I had that I've been working on for a long time
really about four years I've been thinking about so that's RoboCop and I.
Right around the time I was executive I ran into a guy who wanted to write and
direct Michael Miner and we
got to talking and we decided to join force with the big story I had going,
(05:16):
and you know we wrote the script and somebody brought it and it rather quickly
came together although there were many ups and downs and suddenly we had a movie
and it was a movie people liked and I was a screenwriter.
It was like an owl boy do, you know?
But that's how that happened. You know, making Robocop was.
(05:38):
As all movies are, incredibly difficult. And you can probably sit around with
a bunch of people and make movies and they'll just talk about,
well, my movie was even harder.
But I think all movies, big and small, are difficult things to undertake.
And maybe good movies are a little harder than others, but I'm not sure. Sure.
Well, Robocop certainly became more than just a great film.
(05:59):
It became a franchise with a couple of sequels, a TV series,
an animated series, which I remember for a little while.
A remake, or a reboot, or a reimagination recently, and a rather compelling
documentary, which I'm looking forward to seeing, RoboDoc.
So it's really become its own little industry. Yeah, those guys are great.
(06:21):
Yeah, I've been following it, so I see that you are participating in it, yes?
I think it happened because they came to town and they interviewed me for some
reason for a little movie that they were doing about a movie called Fright Night.
Okay. Directed by Tom Holland. And when I was working on RoboCop,
(06:41):
my girlfriend worked for Tom Holland.
Okay. So I was on the set, fight night a couple times.
And I think that brought them to me for some reason. And then I took them out
to dinner and said, why don't you guys do a RoboCop documentary?
And my God, they listened to me and they did. So I hope it's good.
Yeah, it looks, I mean, they've got pretty much, it looks like.
(07:04):
They got everybody, which was fascinating to me. and they really,
they've taken it quite seriously.
I got to, on the day they interviewed me, I got to meet S.C. Nimitz.
Again, I hadn't seen him for a long time. Dixon Snyder. And boy,
that was worth the price of admission right there.
Right. Did they end up getting Peter Weller?
(07:24):
You know, I don't know if they did. Peter's a little funny about that.
He doesn't want to talk about Robocop anymore.
Right. He does. And I, you know, Peter, you can do whatever you want. Yeah, I like Peter.
He's a good guy and Done all he got he doesn't have to give anything more to Robocop. I know nice.
He's done his bit but how did you feel about the What should we call is it a
(07:49):
reboot or a reimagination or a?
Remake You know on the one hand I was lucky enough to be a,
Thanks to the Writers Guild, they gave my partner and I credit on it,
which was just very nice because it was, you know, it was some money you didn't
think you were going to get.
And I went around and I used the occasion to meet everybody on it and kind of
(08:15):
like you are meeting with me here.
I sort of interviewed them about how they experienced working on the movie.
And a little secret for you guys is that after a movie is made,
the filmmakers desperately want to talk about it. They just desperately needed
to talk about this horrible thing that they had gone through,
because it was really difficult.
And so I would go sympathetic to them, and I had a very good experience with
(08:38):
them. I was not like, I didn't hate the movie.
It wasn't the movie I, it's not the kind of thing I do, because it wasn't funny,
really, in the way I wanted it to be. and I have very specific feelings about
the character and what you should and shouldn't do with him.
And they didn't have the same feeling.
I wasn't, I was, for instance, in the original, I knew that the wife and kid
(09:00):
were, were not going to be much fun to have around.
So I just had them go away. And they invested half the story in them.
And I think that they paid the price because it's just so unpleasant.
But other than that, I'm sorry it didn't do better for them because I don't
think we'll need the last Robocop movies.
(09:20):
But, you know, apparently made a little money. And so sometimes I hear them
talking about, well, maybe we should make another one. But we'll see how that goes.
I don't know if they'll make that. I think they're not quite sure what to do
with the remake because I don't think they think it was successful.
They don't want to. Last I heard from them, they don't really think that's a
(09:40):
successful take on the character.
And I don't disagree. agree.
Yeah. Do you think, do you think the danger with a lot of these remakes today is that they, they are,
either too precious or not precious enough with what made the first one any good?
Well, I don't know. I think it's very difficult. Equals have always been traditionally
(10:03):
difficult to get something as good as what excited everybody the first time.
And, you know, it's only been recently that some of these franchises have kind
of worked into a different rhythm, wherein they kind of are the same characters
coming back again and again and every two years, and we like it.
And that's worked a little bit here for a while, which is why we keep getting so many of them.
(10:26):
I would say The Fast and the Furious is a really good example of that.
It's almost like movies, franchise movies that work well now are almost like TV shows.
It's like a family that comes together every two years and they solve a problem
and you get to see with them again.
And that's why I think The Avengers kind of, those movies work that way. Right.
(10:48):
In a way. So the whole recurring characters, recurring villains, recurring plot.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's why TV is like that. TV was traditionally like,
hey, every week I want to spend 30 minutes or an hour with these people I kind of know.
And so the movie franchises that work seem to have that kind of reset to them
or whatever, or that's worked for a while.
(11:11):
You know, The Last Guardians of the Galaxy comes out two years later,
and it doesn't really seem as fresh as the first one for some reason.
I think it's because it's very difficult to come up with really good stuff fast.
Yeah. And there's not like a formula for it.
So, you know, probably if they'd worked on that another two years,
they would have been better.
(11:32):
But on the other hand, they probably wanted the money that they could get out of it now.
Sure. And I mean, I think that.
Yeah. And I mean, the trend is, isn't it? Like if a film is ridiculously or
successful or surprisingly successful, that they're more inclined to rush a
sequel into production as fast as they can.
(11:52):
They are. And, you know, you can understand why. They've got to make their next quarter.
And they have their slots and they have their plans and they want to go with things that work.
And, you know, it's probably better to strike while the iron's hot, et cetera.
It's just, you know, sometimes it's not as easy. Marvel has done a pretty good
job of turning out pretty high quality stuff on a regular basis I guess.
(12:16):
Some of them I really like Star Wars is done okay that way Pixar seems to take
longer and they seem to do better doing that Yeah,
Like you said if they sort of took the time sometimes to come back,
and to not sort of set the the release date and put the posters out and then
(12:39):
they've had rush like hell to make the movie we might we might have probably
seen some better sequels.
I think so, probably, if there was more. I think the real trick of the movie
business, and I'm just talking about movies now, is the development of the script.
Right. And it's a very difficult thing, as you know. You've written yourself.
(13:02):
It's hard to write a script. Yeah. And it's hard to get one right.
And so I think that that kind of not knowing when you can have it ready to go
is a big problem for people who want to run a regular business.
Right. So I think that things get pushed that way.
But yeah, people would emphasize the script a little more if they could.
(13:23):
And sometimes they do. I mean, I know that they struggle to get these scripts right.
In general, they're writing to some kind of deadline, though.
I know when they were working on one of the Spider-Mans, the Sam Rainey Spider-Man,
it was just like, we'll hire another writer, we'll hire another writer.
And they were just trying to move it along as fast as they could.
(13:45):
I still took them to you. Yeah. How do you feel as a writer about these movies
now sort of being written by a team of writers?
They obviously get in a bunch of writers and have them come out with them.
Well, again, it's like the television model being brought into the movie.
Right. They have a room of writers.
Yeah. They break them down and, you know, hey, I was in a room for not a movie
(14:09):
but for a video game briefly and just kind of as an observer.
And it was kind of fun to hang around and talk about things with people.
But, you know, I've done a little of this stuff in consulting.
You know, I mean, not really, but, you know, I've been around a group involved
in the Air Force and some other government stuff.
(14:29):
And they do that, too. They have this way of having a bunch of people come together,
a bunch of experts come together in a room.
And then you talk about it and you say, here are the problems.
And we're going to divide you into a group of four.
And then we're each going to give you a problem. We're going to come back at
3 o'clock. And you're all going to come together. And you're going to come at
5 o'clock. And you give us the answer.
And you know what? I just think it's a bunch of bullshit. You know?
(14:50):
It doesn't really work that way. But they want it to work that way. and
so so i i feel like that's kind
of where this goes and you probably get a little out of
it but then you know then then you still take a while to come to peace you need
somebody to be able to come in the next day and go hey you know that thing you're
talking about here's why it's completely wrong why don't we do this that kind
of process doesn't go for that because it's based on keys or something anyway
(15:14):
that's that's i their work would be okay with me yeah anything that works Yeah,
because I mean that it seems like today like every time I read about new,
because they're now in the business of It seems like they're in the business
of building universes today We've got the Marvel Universe and the unit Universal
wants to rebuild the the Universal monster Yeah,
(15:37):
so it seems like and then you hear like oh they've got a bunch of screenwriters
together It's gonna plot out the whole thing.
And I mean that I haven't seen it but by all
accounts that new mummy picture wasn't that wasn't that
hot or didn't do too well you know I didn't
know it did not it did not it doesn't seem to work you know again I think the
(16:01):
new transformer was done with one of those writer rooms and it's probably going
to make money but it didn't make money in the US the way it was you know thought
that yeah the way people wanted it so but don't you think don't yeah don't you
think the hazard of that is is the old adage too
many cooks spoil the broth yeah i actually
think it's yeah i'm not listen i'm not hopeful of it it
(16:23):
doesn't mean it seems to me that you know it really takes the you know hard
work of one or two people and maybe some other people along the way to sit down
and and you know figure out what's working and what's not and i i don't know
if you if you can make it go faster by throwing more monkeys into the room,
you know, but they're going to try.
(16:45):
Cause obviously it's a reason they have a schedule and they have to hit these release dates.
So it's a problem. I'm not sure. It's almost like they need more good screenwriters. Yeah.
But I mean, back probably back when you started, I mean, it seems like they
used to go for like screenwriters where that was their strength.
I mean, like, you know, if you, You and just coming off of Robocop,
(17:09):
they go, well, he writes...
Good he writes good stuff like that or like shane black
you know when he was when he was when he was
hot you know he writes a good action picture we want
a good action picture writer let's get him
you know instead of this whole you know let's get as many writers in the room
as possible and watch them you know fight it out until one of them emerges with
(17:32):
a bloody pencil and a script um you know or or i don't even know if they fight
it out i think that really what happens is you have somebody in there who's got to write it,
and they probably care more than anybody else.
And then you've got a bunch of other people who don't have to write it,
so they can just have their ideas.
And then that's that. So you don't really have – the people who are having to
(17:54):
come up with the ideas are not much better than development executives.
They don't have to write it. They don't have that much skin in the game.
And I think that that can make a lot of – if you have to write it,
you can say a lot of things in a room.
And I've been in a room where people have said a lot of things.
And I've said a lot of things. Then you go back and you have to sit down in
a lonely little room. Yeah.
(18:16):
And it doesn't work out the same way it did in that room that was filled with people.
Yeah. You know, it's lonelier, too. You're all by yourself.
But I think that's why this idea, it probably helps to have more ideas.
Eventually, you still end up with somebody having to work out a story bone by
bone. Yeah. Probably by themselves.
(18:37):
So anyway, after the whole Robocop experience,
you re-team with Paul Verhoeven for a movie that I found, when it came out,
it seems like it didn't get as much love as it should have,
but now it's being looked back upon more fondly, and that's Starship Troopers.
(18:57):
Oh, you're talking about Starship Troopers? Yeah.
Yeah, it is, I think. I think that's true, and thank God for it.
It was, again, another incredibly long and difficult sort of journey to make that movie.
And when it came out, it was kind of a little bit less than you wanted it to
be, particularly if you had been working on it all that time.
(19:18):
Yeah. It was a studio. Yeah.
But, you know, it was immediately a big hit in home video, which was,
I hate to say it, just kind of coming out, coming into its own then.
And it was, I guess, enormous. It just sold a lot of damn videos.
And so that was, so more and more people saw it that way.
It played on television quite a lot, and a lot of people see it that way.
(19:40):
So yeah, it has, over a long period of time, it has kind of grown into its own
little cult, whatever you want to say.
I think also, I was talking to Paul recently, and he was saying,
you know, with some amusement.
His science fiction movies were staying
relevant longer than his other movies so I
(20:02):
think it's the genre that gives you a little you know you're
talking about the future and if it's something
that people relate to then they kind of keep going back
to it and they find more in it or they enjoy it or they
use it in a conversation or you know there's a lot more news stories now about
Star Trek troopers as say the Air Force is now kind of starting in America The
(20:24):
Air Force is starting a kind of a branch of the Air Force that's going to be
about space work and space stuff.
But the press likes to call it Starship Troopers. Every time there's an advance,
a technology advance up with cops or a thing about armor, cops and armor,
they call them Robocops.
There's a police car that's in Dubai that's autonomous.
(20:47):
They can drive around and scam things, and they're called Robocop cars.
All right. Cool. Somehow, you know, that stuff, the movies about the future
seem to find a useful place in the press. Yeah.
I think I remember you saying in an interview on one of those documentaries
that really you were writing,
(21:10):
I think it was for Robocop, that you were writing a funny movie or a satire
disguised as a genre picture.
Do you think that when you, like you were just saying about how the genre helps
you, you know, you're not really,
you're intent on saying something, but disguised as genre, it helps get it across easier?
(21:32):
I think so. I mean, look at the beginning of the touch of triplets was occurred on a walk in.
Carl Verhoeven and I were taking sometime in the end of 1986 in the hills,
you know, near Pittsburgh, where we were shooting.
And we were talking on a Sunday about things we would want to do.
(21:55):
And, you know, what would we do if we did another movie? Because we got along pretty well then.
And he at one point said, I've always wanted to do a movie about a bunch of
kids in Nazi Germany, you know, in 1935 or so.
Before you knew it was that.
That's when it was happening and it was exciting and and
and i think that he said i really and i i like that
(22:18):
i did too i thought yeah because that's really interesting they didn't know
they were doing something that was wrong they just were doing something they were caught
up in something exciting and you know
at some level and i said yeah at the time i said yeah but they'll
never want to make a movie about 1936 poland or 1936
germany you know about from that point
of view well that's not the way a dramatic movie would you know it would be
(22:40):
hard to make that movie Evoke Self and then it was not long you know a couple
years later and I suddenly around the time Jurassic Park was coming out that
was being done by Phil Tippett who had done the Ed 209 stuff,
stop motion stuff in Robocop that I realized oh we could do all these kind of
bugs and things we could make such a trip as a movie and it would be that movie
(23:03):
it would be about you know I'm going to join up and all that kind of stuff.
So if you look at Starship, you see it's about a bunch of kids in high school
and there's an excitement about joining up and going off into the world and
that plays into this thing where suddenly you're at war.
And it was, I mean, it was very inspiring to me to look at it that way.
And Paul, I kind of knew Paul would like that too. Right.
(23:25):
Just in general that it would appeal to him and it did.
And eventually he came on board and off we went on that one.
But, But I've noticed today, like I noticed recently on social media, they recut...
A trailer for Starship Troopers, and gave it... Yeah, I saw that.
(23:46):
You did, yeah. Gave it some, as one commentator said, gave it some gravitas
that he thought it needed upon its initial release. How do you feel about that?
Do you think the marketing... Well, I mean, at some level, there's a winking
going on with it being a giant B-movie from another time.
(24:10):
Sure. Almost like what it is. Yeah. And that's what we were doing,
and what Paul and I were kind of, like, we were pushing B-movie stuff,
we were pushing the vulgarity a little bit, we were kind of trying to hit this
tone of manufactured entertainment from, I think it collectively came from our,
(24:32):
you know, we're 20 years older than I am, but our different views of B-movie culture.
And we were what you started out saying is you
know you're are you hiding in genre so you
can take it more seriously and i think you know
you are trying to get away with something by doing this so we'd
never tell a studio we're making the movie that people
pretty much accept dark ship as they read the script
(24:55):
and kind of felt like it was a military movie maybe
kind of like star wars or something right and they didn't see it as and they
were amused by it too because it's amusing the kind of you know where you're
sort of saying it's a bit of a fascist state but it's fun you know it's it's
edgy in that way for them but i don't think that they understood it as a.
(25:17):
Completely absolutely made where you know about in the third act you realize
the audience is asked to to undertake the idea that that their heroes might
be the matter and that's pretty subtle but But that's the third act conclusion
at some thematic level is, oh, have they all become fascists?
Which, of course, we decided by the end of that movie that the theme of the
(25:41):
movie was war makes fascists of us all. And it really, really does.
I mean, that's fascinating that we arrived at that. And now that I look at war
and warlike behavior and warrior culture, it's just impossible that it doesn't
make us into that. the only way you win, right?
You're becoming tougher and less human and more certain, I don't know, it's music.
(26:04):
What would we do without human folly, I ask myself. It's just so much fun. Yeah.
I personally love Starship Troopers. I saw it in the cinema when it came out.
I personally wasn't one of those people that have grown into it.
I thought it was great from the beginning.
And I look at, like, Paul's movies, like Robocop and Starship and even Total
(26:30):
Recall, and how they've, I mean, they remade Total Recall as well.
Now, I mean, they've applied a certain slickness to it, because now with the
certain toy, the movie-making toys they have now, they can do pretty much what they want.
(26:51):
But that wasn't that wasn't really the that wasn't really the factor that people,
enjoyed I think when they initially, when these movies initially came out,
like if they remade Star Trek,
that's a very interesting point because we couldn't do power armor which to
some people who like Star Trek the book just think that's,
(27:12):
how can you make a movie called Star Trek without power armor but we just couldn't
do it because we didn't have the money and the way to do it,
the CGI that we had was about all we had.
And yet now we can do everything if we have enough money. And the question is, what do you want to do?
And it's interesting because here's what they're going to start with.
I know they're going to try to remake it sometime.
(27:33):
They keep trying to remake it as far as I can hear because I'm not really involved in it.
They keep wanting to make it more real or more benign or something.
And so they're basically, they say they're doing the book. But the book is just
a, it's just an argument. It's not a story.
And so I have a feeling that they're going to pimp off the original story,
(27:57):
but that they're going to try to make it a little more.
I'm not sure what, I mean, I don't know. I guess what I'm saying is I,
I hope somebody can find a way to make that movie interesting for them, but I don't know.
I'm not sure if they're going to be able to, it's like, there's not that much of a story there.
If you don't do what Paul and I kind of did with it, which was to take this
(28:18):
idea and flip it around and tell this kind of military propaganda.
It is, in its own way, a piece of propaganda, so we treat it as propaganda.
But to treat it as something real might be, I don't know, you're going to have
to make up a new story for it.
Yeah, because, I mean, your whole angle and the idea that it was,
(28:38):
you know, the whole idea that people that are under an oppressive regime don't
really know it, you know, They're all, and plus you've got the B-movie angle,
I mean, I saw it, when I first saw it I thought this is great,
this is like an old fashioned, sort of cheesy B-movie made for a big budget, but...
(29:00):
Which was fantastic, but also the idea, as you were saying when you were talking
with Paul about how people living in Germany,
while the whole thing's going on to the outside world, what they're doing is
terrible, but to the naive youth that are there,
like you said, it's all wonderful.
And they buy the propaganda because, like, oh, wow, this is a great idea.
(29:24):
Yeah, become a citizen, serve, you know, all this sort of stuff.
I mean, that's a great angle, and I don't know if making it,
like you say, I don't know if making it sort of, you know, with this whole,
like, gritty realism that they want today is dark and, you know, let's make it real,
let's make it, I mean, people go to the movies for escapism,
not realism, don't they?
(29:45):
Well, I mean, I think in this case, the world, which is a meta world a little
bit, it is purposely trying to kind of look like an old-fashioned or a cheaper,
I would say, you know, high-end 50s sci-fi like them or something like that.
It has those values in it. I mean, we're pretty aware.
(30:10):
It's written in the late 50s. The military look was kind of set as a World War
II look, in a way, because we figured that's what it would be.
So if you look at the ships they're not they're not you know like really cool
looking and they're not really like look at stuff they're made of big funny
shapes and stuff like that yeah very industrial kind of anti-physical.
(30:33):
Industrial look shapes and stuff like that right and so I mean I think we were
trying I think what's really interesting about the movie is we created a world
that you would accept it's nonetheless not a real world so if you make this
more gritty and more real,
you know it's probably just a different kind of a movie yeah I mean,
if you want to do Private Ryan, I'm not sure if you can do Private Ryan with us, you know.
(30:55):
I'm not sure you can make that, you know. I mean, maybe you can.
You can do a little of that if you want it.
I don't know. It's an interesting problem. Yeah.
It would just be a very different film. It wouldn't have the tongue-in-cheek at all.
Well, in a weird way, it would be closer to something like the Clone Wars.
(31:16):
No. The battle sequences in the Clone Wars I thought were actually the only
part of the movie I liked.
Right. And, you know, they remind me a little of Peckinpah, in a way.
Right. The question is, how long can you sustain that? That's true, yeah. So, anyway.
Or a bit like that. Well, I don't know. We'll see what they do with that.
If they remake it. I kind of wish they didn't. I think at one point I decided that it was very good.
(31:43):
Even when we were making it at an R and people wondered if that was smart.
And probably would have made more money if you could have downed it down a little to a PG-13 maybe.
But I kind of felt like no one's ever going to make a movie like this.
Or not for a long, long time. And so it made it worth it to me in a way to make
it tougher and stranger and maybe not as commercial as you know We would have
(32:07):
liked you know Do you think that if they did it today they might try for something
more like that edge of tomorrow? You know that Tom Cruise movie?
Well, I mean I did you like it as well. I did I thought it was good,
And I'm bored with Power Seals now. Right. That's just me.
You know, I thought that they did them about as well as you could do them.
(32:29):
Cameron's done a version of them, a different version for Avatar that's also pretty good.
Yeah. You know, maybe someone will come up with some amazing, you know, Mecha Ballet.
Yeah. In the future that we will like. But, you know, we'll see.
I'm not as, and probably because I've been, you know, bouncing around,
no pun intended, with this idea of how it could grow long time.
(32:53):
I'm just not interested if I want one.
So Troopers went on to 2 and 3, which you directed, but in between there,
I noticed Anacondas, Hunt for the Blood Orchid. How did that come your way?
You know, that was an interesting studio
(33:14):
job but Michael and I
decided to see if we could work together
again and we went up for this job at
Sony where they sort of knew me and him and we you know they had a they had
a competition for like a good idea for this and they thought of franchise at
(33:34):
that point that they wanted to save so we wrote it it was a little bit uninspiring in some ways.
Particularly because I generally try to make things a little bit funny,
you know, in some way. And they didn't want that.
And I think that's until Get Out came along, everybody said,
(33:54):
you can't be funny and do horror at the same time.
And I think they were wrong, but that made the script particularly uninspiring.
And I do think I learned that you know it's just not enough it's not much fun
it's fun to write something that you like and have it turn out and get it good
and have it turn out good if you can but writing something that you don't like
(34:18):
or writing something that someone else likes,
isn't that satisfying? It doesn't, it doesn't feel very well.
So, you know, I must say, I, at a certain point, I, I didn't care whether they made that movie or not.
And then they did, they went and made it. And that was great.
I'm glad they made the movie. And a guy named Dwight Little directed it.
And he did about as good a job as you could.
(34:39):
They made it for a certain price.
Probably, you know, if you had a little more money and a little better actors,
you would have had a better movie. I don't know. I'm not sure.
I ended up saying to my kids that
I thought maybe I wasn't the guy to write a giant rubber
snake in the jungle movie someone else could have probably done it better there's
(35:03):
a good title for a movie there a giant rubber snake in the jungle it shows you
where I come from it's probably too much from a movie perspective but you know Anyway,
I think for me, the struggle as a screenwriter is always to try to find out
what a story is really about.
(35:25):
And you're limited when it's really about a giant rubber snake in the jungle.
Well, that came in between the Starship 2 and Starship 3, which you directed. What was the directing?
Yeah, so I got, I mean, the Star Trek Troopers direct-to-video movies have been
a little cottage industry that a few people have gotten to direct on,
(35:49):
and now I've got my health insurance going, so I'm very grateful to Sony for that.
That but did they yeah they finally someone finally convinced
that they had two things happening they'd made a lot
of money with the otherwise not wonderful in
my opinion from a good standpoint starting with two
and then there was the production problem but we didn't quite get to shoot the
(36:10):
whole movie and you know i think the movie had pretty good bargain in it for
sure and phil tibbett the director you know did well for having a very short
schedule and you know i I guess he had under $6 million to make that movie.
You know, we had. I mean, I was on it. I wrote on it.
But it was actually quite an education for me. I'll tell you,
(36:33):
I learned a lot about movies from experience.
And helped me for... But nonetheless, Starship 2 made a lot of money for Sony.
And it was sort of at the height of the... No one knew it then,
but kind of at the height of the video business.
The home video business. and so they decided that they should make another Starship
Troopers 2 a movie and maybe if it was better they'd make even more money.
(36:57):
And then to make it better they were willing to spend some more money and then
they came to me and I said well I would like to do this and that and they for
some reason they said yes and I wanted to bring Chapter Van Dien back into it
and said I wanted to write a movie about Johnny Rico and they,
They said, okay. And, you know, they basically let me do whatever I wanted. I wasn't crazy.
(37:21):
And the movie was quite, again, very difficult, quite an ordeal.
But it went well. Nobody killed anybody.
And it all got shot, sort of, kind of moving together out of it.
And I didn't get fired, which was probably my big ambition.
And, you know, I shot in South Africa. It was really a great experience to shoot
(37:43):
in South Africa. I had a giant crew and a lot of people who tried very hard
to do things. We probably didn't have enough money.
The script probably wasn't as good as it should be, but we had a good cast,
and we had a very good crew and a good DT.
So for me, it was a really great experience of directing a movie,
and I now know what it is to direct a movie.
It changed how I feel about movies a little bit, or how I feel about directors of movies a little bit.
(38:09):
Because it's a really, really complicated job. And I think that most people
can't do it. Probably me included.
It's almost like, sometimes I was sitting around talking to one of my old friends,
and he said, I can't decide if directors are born.
And I said, I think they are born. I think the really good directors are born.
(38:30):
They can do something other people can't.
And that maybe you can't really learn to do, or not everybody can learn to do.
As I say it's a complicated job so they're probably operating visually and maybe
in other ways just ahead of most people they see things in a different way do
you think it's more do you think with a director it's you know I mean there
(38:53):
are a lot of writer directors as well but,
do you think the sole directors you think their strength lies in.
Not so much just getting the pages on the screen and getting stuff shot but
actually crafting those images.
(39:13):
Like like no i think you know i think
there's no one way to do it but all the
hoping i i would say shot about pages that we prepared moving into production
we shot the script and it was interesting to me because i've been around before
that and you know i didn't realize how lucky i was for a little while because
(39:34):
you know what i wrote and what we all agreed on they're kind of the.
Producer and the director and I, was more or less what happened.
And there was nothing where I thought, well, somebody ruined that or ruined
that. I mostly looked at it and said, I wish that line, mine, were better.
Sometimes I got very lucky and have gotten lucky with an actor,
a good actor will come up with a good line and I'm smart enough to go,
(39:57):
that's a good idea, let's do that.
And so that was, you know, my sense of it is that you use the script,
the director should use the script to put everything down as it's going to happen.
If you get the good idea when you're shooting it, that's fine.
And Paul was there. That's because Paul, that's the way Paul did it.
Now, other people are more intuitive, and they see things in different ways.
(40:18):
And so it's not all rules apply. But I do think that the more you prepare yourself
and set what you're doing in a process, the more the director does that, the better for me.
It just seems like it becomes richer and stronger.
And I guess, again, I'm very influenced by having Wolfgang Serhoff.
But what he was able to do with my material is now more and more I realize how lucky I was.
(40:45):
I always thought I was lucky. But not everybody can do that or see it that way
and pull it all together.
So the performances and the blocking of the camera and the movements of the
people are all working in support of that in such a great way.
Well, it's like I once heard.
I think it was Peter Gruber say that once you hire a director,
(41:09):
you've bought that eye, you've bought a particular vision.
Yeah, what I would say now, as a writer, I understand is I don't want the directors
to do anything that they don't believe in or they don't want to do.
Right. It's just not in my interest.
And they won't do a good job of it if they do.
They have to understand it, and they have to do something they want to do.
(41:31):
It's kind of like raising a child. I mean, seriously, you have to let them do
what they're going to do.
If you try to say, you know, you can say to a director, hey,
how about this? You can pitch them an idea, and if they like it, great.
If they don't like it, you can't get them to do it. Yeah, ultimately,
ultimately, they're going to be what they want to be, right?
(41:52):
Well, you have to find the right person to work with, you know.
They have to like of script and they have to wanna you have
to think we have a shared vision and they you
would then have to get along and then you would have to have
a shared vision about about how to work and i think i was lucky in kind of meeting
up with a director who saw that i could be helpful to him about this and we
(42:15):
were able to work together pretty much hand in glove on two pictures in a way
that i I think, served the picture quite well.
But, you know, not everybody does it differently. In America,
the writer is not usually on the set.
Might be changing a little bit. In America, it's always the TV,
in TV, the writer runs everything and the actors can't say any words but the
(42:38):
ones that are on the stage.
And in features, director runs everything and the actors can make up their own lines.
So were you, on the films you worked with, Paul, Or were you present throughout
the production or just beginning it out?
Yeah, I was usually there writing or working.
On the first one, I was rewriting the movie as we went just to keep going and make it better.
(43:01):
As we came to things, whether they were locations that were suddenly locked
down and, oh, how can we make it look better here?
And I would get that in the script. But I would also, oh, this actor we cast
is great and this line will be better this way.
And so I kept nudging it along and making it better in the process of that for the good on Starship.
(43:25):
The script took it and what's on for so long that it was pretty lost.
And so I've more functioned as the not the official A.D.
We had great A.D.s on that show, but I was known as the European A.D.
And I would run around and make sure the director got everything he wanted.
And everybody knew what the director wanted and tried to troubleshoot when things
(43:45):
went wrong, which somehow they often did.
But that was part of the creative experiment there.
Tell us about the new Starship Troopers, Traitor of Mars.
Well, Traitor of Mars is a piece of anime,
an anime story which is animated by the Japanese master of mecha, Shinji Aramaki.
(44:14):
And Shinji is well known for Apple Seed and other anime he has participated in.
And he has now done two Starship Troopers animes.
The last one I had nothing to do with, and I think they were unhappy about that,
so they asked me, they came back to me and said, we want to do another one even
cheaper, but Shinji really wants to do another one.
(44:36):
They want it to be a good one, and do you have a story?
And I said, well, I kind of do have a story, but it involves,
you know, I really want to, I said,
and I really want to use Casper for the voice, and I also want to get Ina Meyer
back so that she can reprise her Disney character. And they said, really?
(44:56):
Lizzie's dead. And I said, well, I have a way to go.
And so one thing led to another. And I agreed to write this for them as an anime script.
And it was good that I sort of had a notion of the story because they wanted it immediately.
And they just kind of shot it about as fast as I wrote it. but there was at
(45:21):
times it was interesting because we didn't have the best you know,
It wasn't even just that we couldn't sit around and communicate.
We just didn't communicate that much.
Somehow being in Japan and being here and having that everything translated
meant that the communication between us was a little odd at times.
And so the movie came out in a very interesting way.
But what's funny to me is that, you know, the story tracks and everything.
(45:44):
But I used to watch anime movies and think, gee, if only this,
I could fix this. I could fix that.
Oh, the story would make better sense if you did this and that.
But I had this sort of notion that I could fix an anime story,
make a good anime story that I could track and follow.
And I realized that the people who were making this didn't follow those rules.
(46:05):
And so they don't care about the way the story tracks exactly the same way I
do in that world, in that group of people.
And it sort of came off more like it came off as like oh this is like an anime
film in that way too I don't know if that makes any sense to you but there's
almost a different storytelling,
storytelling value between the Japanese culture of anime and the American culture
(46:29):
of movies or whatever so the story sometimes doesn't work the way I want it
to but I think it works in a way that is proper for anime.
I don't know are you an anime fan? Oh, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I, you know, I like all the classics, of course, you know,
(46:51):
Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Ninja Scroll.
I really love that series, Berserk. I don't know if you ever saw that.
I've heard of it. I haven't seen it. Did you see the, what did you think was
wrong or right about the Ghost in the Shell movie?
I think that most people expected a live-action version of the original film, and they didn't get it.
(47:13):
Yeah, I think that's the big thing.
It'll be the same if they ever finally do this Akira film that's been slugging
its way around Hollywood for a long time.
I think if they go too far away from the source material,
particularly with the devoted fans anyway i mean for people who don't know for
(47:38):
people who aren't familiar then obviously it's it's just another sort of science
fictiony actiony picture but for
the for the devotees i think that they go oh wow that's going to be really cool
to see a live action version of the anime but the problem is when they were doing the,
(47:59):
the promotional stuff that was coming out that was showing shots
that were pretty much you know shot
for shot with the anime so people were hopeful but
of course when the final product came out and found like oh geez they they used
a bit of that story and then a bit of something else and a little bit of the
the sequel uh that they made called ghost in the shell innocence which which
(48:20):
came out so yeah i just think that i just think the downfall was was too far away from,
you know, I mean, it's weird, fans are funny fans and stuff are funny they want.
They want what they like or what they liked,
And they want to see that, but they want to see it somehow, like,
(48:42):
live action's going to make it different.
I don't know. It's a weird thing.
So, in other words, the idea of making it more real, live action,
is what they think that there's going to be.
They're going to get more out of that than they do. Yeah, I think so.
It was like when I was a kid and I heard there was going to be a Masters of the Universe movie.
(49:04):
Now, I love Masters of the Universe as a kid. when i
heard oh wow live action movie that's going to be fantastic and a
lot of people don't like it i personally do even though you
know i know now knowing the mechanics of filmmaking that okay they had a budget
and that's why they kept them on earth rather than do the whole thing on on
(49:25):
the alien planet but i mean it was still sort of marvelous like wow that's you know you know the
live action version it had it had sort of an aura around it and i think it still does,
only problem is when like i say when they stray sort of when it's not the film that they loved.
(49:47):
And it's some sort of hybrid of like oh that it
looks and sounds and you know it
feels like ghost in the shell but it's not it's not
the same it's not the anime now so it's weird it's like a fine line that that
i think screenwriters and filmmakers walk like how much of it how much do you
make it a carbon copy and how much do you do a live action version which is
(50:12):
inspired in a lot of ways and.
And is sort of visually similar but it's it's not exactly the same like how
much Like, it's a real, I don't know, I'd, I'd put.
You'd have to really know, you'd have to really get the essence of something.
(50:34):
Yeah, yeah, and I think that's. You would have to save it.
Yeah. Not, yeah. It's like, it's like we were talking about earlier,
like, the thing that makes something great, like, the original Robocop and the remake,
you know, and, like, I feel that they just completely lost what made the first one a good movie.
(50:56):
But then again, the new movie isn't the old movie It can never be the old movie
As much as people would want the old movie back again.
Just watch the, as I say, just, just watch the original if you're not happy, but,
you know, you can't, that's why I think sometimes it's a mistake to try and
(51:17):
just stick with the same plot from the original film and not try some,
some new plot that, that involves,
you know, a guy becoming, you know, a Robocop and eventually like a Pinocchio
type story, rediscovering his humanity, you know, and try that in a different form.
But don't stick with the same plot because you're never going to do it as well as it's been done.
(51:43):
Like, lightning's already struck. Now we're just playing with the thunder.
Well, I agree with everything you're saying. I really do. And I think we can't redo it the same way.
And I've always tried to change it up a little bit.
Like, on the Star Trek River movies, In a way, I was never trying to hit the
same ideas as we did in the first one.
(52:05):
I was trying to have it be part of something that could work in that world.
And I was trying to, you know, hit some notes about militarism and,
you know, the human condition.
Fewer, I would say, in two than I did in three. But that's about it.
You know, I tried to make it seem like it was in that world.
But I also didn't, I knew I didn't have the money to do big,
(52:26):
giant sequences or anything like that. So, you know, I knew I couldn't compete at that level.
It's sort of boring to try to compete with yourself. Yeah. It's a different thing.
Yeah. I mean, it's a tough gig, like always.
Once you've come out with a hit and people... I think I once heard Kevin Smith
(52:46):
was talking to Richard...
What's his name? Richard Kelly, who directed Donnie Darko. He said, aren't you...
Right, sure. Yeah, aren't you afraid now that people are just going to want
Donnie Darko all the time you know,
no matter how much he wants to do other stuff probably, yeah probably that's
such an amazing piece of work and probably they do want it all the time probably hitting that,
(53:10):
balance if you hit a mat is hard to do too bad I really like that stuff but
that movie is kind of miraculous I mean it goes it goes back to the old the
old adage like when it all comes together right And it's successful,
How it happened is a mystery You know, as much as you can Cast.
(53:34):
The actors that you want and you get the right director and good cinematographer
and you've got the script well
written and you've got a good producer and you've got all these elements.
When that all works.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that I've actually seen that. I think that kind of happened on Robocop.
And I think that what happened there was, you know, everybody wanted something
(53:56):
is the best I've heard now from a few.
Bill Tippett once said, oh, everybody needed something on that movie.
And it was like, it's true. I needed my first movie.
John Davison needed a new movie. He was a producer and he hadn't had a hit for
a while since his first movie.
Paul Verhoeven had this amazing career in Europe.
And then his first American English language picture, as it were, was in Blood Crank.
(54:21):
So he needed to do something. And I think everybody was working very hard together
in a way that they could only do that one time.
And when we worked together again 10 years later, it was a little different
because we didn't all need it the same way or we didn't need the same things.
So, you know, whatever. But I mean, I think the other thing that happens is
(54:42):
if you have a group of people who kind of have good communication with each
other, that can really help.
And I think we have that on both those movies. Do
you think too What makes something
great sometimes Is the hunger Like you just said When
you're a young screenwriter Or a young director And you've finally gotten that
(55:03):
first Oh this is my first Like you said my first movie So you're hungry You're
eager to please Like yeah yeah I can't screw this up I've got to give a hundred
and fifty Two hundred percent.
There's a certain power in ignorance That way you're trying really hard.
I don't know I really think it comes down to needs in other words some people
(55:28):
have bigger appetites than others but if you need to do that you'll keep doing
that if you need to succeed and if you need to make another movie you're going to keep,
You've got to keep the fire burning. At that level. Or something, yeah.
It takes a lot of energy, I think. At least it has for me in these things.
(55:49):
Get something going and somehow make something happen.
And then it really helps if you have smart people you're working with. Sure.
I'm really lucky with Verhoeven and the producer, John Davison, on Robocop.
Those guys were really good. So I was a lucky writer that way.
(56:10):
I had some smart people to work with. Awesome.
So anything really cool for Ed Umar on the horizon you can talk about?
Well, I'm writing a script right now I'm not supposed to talk about,
but it is kind of cool to be revealed later.
Yeah, I'm actually happily working along here in the movie business,
(56:32):
believe it or not, which is a little more limited than it used to be maybe.
And so I have nothing to complain about except that
I'm a screenwriter so what John can you say what John you're working in is it
science fiction again action what you would expect I think it's what you would
expect wow okay very cool the Robin always sings the same song well that's cool that's what,
(56:59):
Ferdelucci said I think that's very cool well we certainly Finally,
we at Podcasting Softly and fans all over the world of Ed Neumeyer,
we look forward to the future exploits of you, sir. Okay, well, we'll see.
You never know how these things work. Anyway, it's really a pleasure talking
to you, man. It is. A goatee trader of Mars.
(57:20):
Yeah. I hope to do a store near you, I hope. Yeah, I look forward to that, yeah.
The September Screen Runners series continues, ladies and gentlemen.
We hope you enjoyed this episode. there is another one hot on its heels so stay
tuned through the month of September for the September Screenwriters Series,
(57:42):
and as always thank you for listening to us little Yugonites on Spotify or wherever
you choose to listen to your favourite podcasts so until next time this is Kent
saying thank you for listening and stay tuned to the one and only Cinema No more?
You get it.
(58:04):
Music.
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