Why Paul Verhoeven Was Going To Pass On Directing RoboCop (And What Changed His Mind)

In America, Paul Verhoeven is best known for the chapter of his career that began with "RoboCop" in 1987 — a run of sci-fi hits and erotic dramas that included "Starship Troopers," "Basic Instinct," "Showgirls," and "Total Recall." It was a decade and a half of classics and cult classics, but the director was well established in his native Netherlands and Europe at large before making the jump to Hollywood.

Verhoeven made his first American film in 1985, "Flesh and Blood," and "RoboCop" followed just two years later. However, the director nearly passed on the film that ultimately solidified his place in pop culture history (not that it's something Verhoeven has ever been terribly concerned with). In 2014, Esquire published an oral history of "RoboCop," in which Verhoeven explained his initial trepidation.

"I was feeling insecure at first about RoboCop as it was unlike anything I'd done before," he explained. While it was his second American film, Verhoeven was still relatively new to working in the English language, and he struggled to find a thematic way into the script at first. It was only after his wife read through it and encouraged him to take the job that he began to see the film in a different light.

"She said to me, 'I think you're looking at this the wrong way. There's enough there, soul-wise, about losing your identity and finding it again,'" the director explained to Esquire. "I didn't recognize that in the beginning. That was the main issue: finding the philosophical background to the film."

The transition from Dutch films to Hollywood was an understandably major one for Verhoeven and his movies, but the language barrier itself was a big part of the transition. His wife's suggestion that he take a closer look at the script led him to take more time in really understanding the layers to it.

"That got me to really start reading it with a dictionary, because there were a lot of words I didn't understand," Verhoeven told Esquire. "I started to read it, and I slowly started to discover that I could do that movie." The scene of lead protagonist Alex Murphy (Peter Weller), who becomes RoboCop, returning to his old home and getting traumatic flashbacks of his "death" was the key for the director in unlocking the rest of the screenplay. "That to me is like finding the lost Garden of Eden, like a lost paradise," Verhoeven explained.

Even still, the director was very careful during production to make sure he was handling the material on the page correctly, consulting carefully with writers Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner. "English is Paul's second language, so he kept asking us, 'What does this joke mean?'" Miner told Esquire. "He was a slave to the script."

That attention to detail and collaboration yielded one of the most iconic sci-fi films ever made, blending Verhoeven's knack for absurdity and satire with a rich cyberpunk text. Neumeier and Verhoeven would collaborate again a decade later on "Starship Troopers."