RoboCop

"RoboCop, a futuristic story about a policeman shot to death and then revived after all parts of his body have been replaced by artificial substitutes, introduces a more tragic note: the hero who finds himself literally "between two deaths"—clinically dead and at the same time provided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

"Part Man. Part Machine. All Cop."

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

"Robert DoQui — Sergeant Warren Reed"

"Kurtwood Smith — Clarence Boddicker"

"The future of law enforcement."

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

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

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

"Nancy Allen — Officer Anne Lewis"

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

"Paul McCrane — Emil Antonowsky"