ROBOCOP Featurette - "Creating A Legend" Part 1 (1987)

elements of robocop with the screenplay the director and the robo-suit how was i to convey the robotics of a machine and the humanity of a man at the same time we spent a big chunk of change i don't remember might have been a million dollars on uh that suit the danger of this character was that someone said well you're not gonna see his face so he could put anybody in there and i think that that's not true you needed a real actor and who really took it seriously and and peter really did peter you know took it seriously from a physical standpoint he studied mime and he did this and he developed this whole thing and in retrospect you can't imagine the movie without peter it was anyhow difficult to to to find the actor because we needed somebody as has been pointed out several times i mean somebody was a really good jawline isn't it because this is what you see only this did that weller was probably the best person we could get he was a marathon runner he was very skinny and so when you put him in the suit he looks like a normally proportioned person but if you put a normally an actor with a normal physique inside that suit he looks too big he really captures the feeling of the robot physically you know vocally everything and you really feel like he's solid as a rock and yet you know he had to really work it work very hard at that to make you have that feeling orion and mike medevoy my friend and a great supporter through the years said why don't you just find a mime teacher i was living in new york at the time still do and so i interviewed five or six teachers of mime and i talked to this really gifted gentleman named moani jaquin who's head of the movement department at juilliard and he read the script and he wanted to incorporate dance and fluidity in it and not just this staccato pantomime and so i went with him and we prepped for about seven months i put on football gear and would walk around central park and work with moani rob boutin of course the genius really who's responsible for the beautiful look of that suit and the functionality of it always works in clay full size we used to go to robs probably once a week maybe twice a week in the early days of the design phase somehow suddenly we started to look at japanese comic books and stuff like that and then we started to change the design so every time they would change their mind about the overall concept of this character that meant that roboteen would have to go out and get a whole new six foot piece of clay and then sculpt a very detailed statue of what the final thing was going to look like which in itself was very time consuming the drawings that rob submitted initially were almost exactly you know what we ended up doing i mean we did there's small refinements along the way but you i would say that that rob just took it and just said here this is it and everybody kind of looked at it went wow that's cool it's a bunch of different pieces about approximately two dozen but they're very simple you just put them on one at a time essentially what you're seeing is pieces hung from the actor uh what there is under this chest plate is a harness and there's a harness that hangs from the shoulders and goes across the back and across the chest and these pieces here were literally hung on this harness and snapped on in the back the legs were leggings that you could actually pull on like long socks and then you had the shoes which had little sneakers inside of them so that you could slip your feet in those and then they would be secure the uh hands which were supposed to be metal were actually a kind of a foam rubber glove that just slipped on and then again these pieces were just kind of snapped on and like uh half sections to get something that's as nice and as pretty and and as effective as this was a lot of blood sweat and tears from the moment that they started designing the suit and to the day that they actually delivered the final one was an eight month process after i had done the casting with roboteen for the suit and for the face we did not get a chance to try out this suit before we had to shoot with it they had done a full body cast of peter weller then molds were pulled from the body cast and so all the pieces basically were made for peter's body so i had been shooting in dallas for two weeks the non-robotic part of the film and then the suit arrived and rob and his entire coterie showed up and at that point it took eight hours to put peter weller into the suit it took us about 10 hours to put on the suit the first time and it took well 11 hours to to get him into the suit the first time moni aquino and i had developed this very fluid like this legato if you will style of movement almost like a snake when the suit came and it was as heavy as it was and we were already shooting i could hardly move in it so you had two problems the very first day the suit is very late and the suit doesn't work at least not for peter putting on the suit for the first time depressed me possibly more than anything except the end of a love affair 20 years ago that i can remember they had to shave something off here just a little bit maybe they would have to break a piece off and then re-glue it over here it was all just to make it work on peter weller once he removed the armpits and the knees and part of the heels of the feet and the neck then i could start to work the outer shell of the suit more freely but that still didn't give me the fluid-like movement that moni and i had worked on for seven months and peter quite rightly became very vocal in his insistence that he'd be given some time to try to figure out how now to work with this suit arguments ensued what are we going to do i had my percentage of stuff to say believe me in it as did rob and paul so they actually shut down the production for two days so after the first day we were suddenly two days behind and uh those two days peter weller and moni and paul verhoeven all worked very closely together to come up with a new way of peter to move we started to move the suit and paul started to shoot tests on it and moani took me inside and said look slow everything down it's no longer a snake it's a beast it's got to be big and the accents have to be huge the dissection and the definition of the ends of these movements have to be absolutely staccato and not legato the head has to move like bang we'd see peter out there in the parking lot you know marching around with this you know with his uh movement coach um to make it look right you know uh and it made a big difference he needed that time and and rightly so and i think we were pissed off and at him that he was let's say you know openly obstructive but i i don't see it that way any anymore at all that warehouse remember how difficult it was to breathe in there by the end of the day and and then as soon as i felt really really sorry for myself as i said this was also in august and it was really hot then i just look over peter weller and he'd be in that robocop suit which was like built on a wetsuit you know and and he'd just be sitting there with hoses air hoses stuck down in he was constantly having to rehydrate himself and so there was always the danger that you know these uh horrific conditions might take out our star he'd lose eight to ten pounds a day you know just in dehydration then he'd have to put it on at night whenever i felt bad i just look at peter and i didn't feel nearly as fat peter's going to hate that i say this but i don't care all the cast and crew got memoranda saying on the set don't refer to peter as peter or mr weller don't call him by anything other than murphy or robo depending on who he's playing that day and i'd known peter for 10 years prior so i was like kidding me joking so uh so we used to tease him you know he'd be sitting there in the suit in between takes and said pete what's happening man what's going on and he'd ignore me say pete i'm talking to you peter i'm talking to you i know no one in peter he would actually try to say that i said come on and by the way is that the voice you're using really is that how you're gonna do it okay in the beginning he was so methodical that he didn't want me to call him peter but i had to talk to er dresserman like robocop but i couldn't i thought it was so silly i just couldn't do it you know i said i'm not attacked or not i can't do it i can't do it he dropped that after after a couple of weeks but it was pretty you

Channel: JoBlo Behind-the-Scenes + Bloopers

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Keywords: Robocop Featurette Creating A Legend 1987, Robocop Featurette Creating A Legend, Robocop Featurette, Robocop 1987, Robocop, dystopic Detroit, terminally wounded cop, powerful cyborg, submerged memories, Paul Verhoeven, Peter Weller, Murphy, Nancy Allen, Lewis, The Old Man, Dan O'Herlihy, Joblo Behind The Scenes

Id: JQVmcCRhmSg

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 25 2022