Edward Neumeier is best known for his work on two iconic SF movies – Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop and Starship Troopers. He’s returned to the latter universe on a number of occasions, most recently for the second animated continuation of the franchise: Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars, which has just been released in the UK on Bluray and DVD by Sony. Paul Simpson caught up with him shortly after the film’s US release…

 

What attracted you back to this universe?

Sony was nice enough to ask me if I wanted to come back and I like these characters a lot. I’m also pretty good friends with Caspar van Dien [who played Johnny Rico in the first and third films, and returns to the role for Traitor of Mars]. I enjoy working with him, I enjoy writing stuff and selling stuff with him – he’s kind of a gas that way, so it was like, “Let’s go out and hang with your friends and do that again.”

I had an idea for a story, and the Japanese animator, Sinji Arimaki and his team also had some ideas which worked together amazingly well.

Sinji and I have probably exchanged 40 words in our entire relationship: he doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Japanese at all, but we worked together very well and I like sending stuff and I like what I get back. It’s an interesting relationship that way.

I didn’t write the one before this [2012’s Starship Troopers: Invasion], but I had met Sinji and talked to him and it was nice for me to work with them a little bit. There were a lot of ideas that they had on the table that were fun for me to deal with.

So where does this fit in? Is it a sequel to the previous animated movie and the live action films?

In my mind it all works in the same universe if you step back from it. The animated one that was done before this [Invasion] was a little less in sync with the pictures, but in Starship Troopers 2, we do not follow Johnny Rico, we follow some Troopers in an abandoned outpost and it was consistent. Phil Tippett, the director of that one, wanted to make a zombie movie which is what we did.

Starship Troopers 3: the war has gone on for 12 years, and it’s on other planets – and we got to get Johnny Rico back into it.

This one was an opportunity, I thought, to do a story with the Dizzy Flores character again, who died on Planet P. I had an idea of how to do that and that was interesting enough to the filmmakers that we went ahead with it. Yes, it is the same Dizzy who died, but I’m not going to say how we do it – but it’s not a cheat. She died.

With all these stories, do you ever go back to Heinlein’s original and look for inspiration or has the franchise become so much its own entity now that that’s a completely different version?

I think what I did, and what Paul Verhoeven and I embraced together was taking the book and flipping it around a little bit, so it does create its own tone and a little bit of a world that’s not completely like the one Robert Heinlein composed.

If you read Heinlein’s book aged 14 as I did, it seems like the greatest adventure you’ve ever read, with all these kids running around; but when you go back and read it as an adult, as I did when I had to adapt it, it’s not that book at all. It’s kind of a political treatise, with a right wing look at the world – “the veterans know a thing or two and when people get out of line, we hang them”… and that’s his recommendation.

So I think to some extent the book is not something I’ve gone back to, but since we couldn’t do power armour for budgetary reasons in the first one, I’ve always felt like I’ve owed the fans the debt of mechanised armour. We have tried – in 3 we brought in a little bit of that idea – but I have to say that Sinji Arimaki, who has a reputation as being one of the best mecha designers in Japan, really fulfilled that promise finally. Everybody talks about the mecha stuff with Sinji but he does the Bugs pretty well too!

What do you think the attraction of this universe is that it’s kept going so long?

I think that we are very interested in things military; we are interested in warrior culture and in this case it’s military culture. Part of the routine of being a human being descended from hunter/gatherers is we’re interested in our survival a lot and the military – and military movies are something that’s fascinated us. Look at [Christopher Nolan’s] Dunkirk – what is that but one survival story after another in a place? It fascinates us and we watch it over and over again.

I think to a great extent the trick of writing a Starship Troopers movie, to those who may remake it, is you have to like military culture. You have to be interested in military culture, and whether they’re doing things that you agree with or not, you still have to be interested in their world and how they see things. It’s a very positive hopeful world in some ways from inside the military. If they get it right and everybody was behaving correctly, the world would work very well. All the people I’ve ever met in the military are very sincere about that so I think that in some ways that that’s what I’ve tried to put into Heinlein’s world.

Heinlein loved movies, and he loved the military: he was in the military during World War II, in naval intelligence along with his pal L. Ron Hubbard. They used to go to the movies a lot. I’m convinced actually if you look at All Quiet on the Western Front, which Heinlein certainly did, and you repurpose that movie plot, you have Starship Troopers. There’s that teacher who tells the boys to go out and fight – but he’s the good guy for Heinlein.

There was surprise among the press corps at the preview of the first film when the Sony representative said it had got a 15 certificate – he didn’t seem to believe it either; do you consider it’s a violent movie for the sake of violence, or that the violence is there for a very specific purpose?

I think it’s certainly there for a purpose. I grew up in a very liberal part of the world –

Marin County in California, just above San Francisco – and you weren’t meant to go see movies about war or about cops because if you did you were a fascist. Of course like any 14 year old boy, I wanted to go see those movies all the time!

I wrote Starship Troopers knowing we were going right into that. When Verhoeven and I met on Robocop we realised that we both really liked stylised violence: he liked to shoot it and I liked to write it, and we were interested in savagery. We liked the idea that we were shocking people with violence – and this is an old argument – rather than shoot somebody and they just fall down. Paul knew what he was doing: he wanted to shock and we went for it.

With both Robocop and Starship Troopers there’s something about the use of commercials that really counterpoints what’s going on…

It is a counterpoint, it counters the narrative a little bit, and it operates in that way, particularly in Starship Troopers where you are being told, “This is the truth”, but you are also being told in a coded, movie way that this isn’t the truth. Those things exist together and I think people really appreciate that tone in a weird way, and I think that’s how many people view the world and the media in any event.

I mentioned to friends online that we were going to be chatting and everyone came back with the Would You Like to Know More? line…

That’s the line right there that kind of does it. It’s saying we’ll tell you more and yet it’s an empty promise. We can tell you more all day long but you still won’t know what’s going on – necessarily.

Thank God for the UK because you guys got it. When it came out in the United States, people were like, “Hey what is this thing?” but you guys got it immediately, and I appreciate that. I spent time as a teenager in England and watched a lot of weird things on the BBC. You guys get satire and black humour – it was great to see the reviews and reactions.

The music is one of the things that I love about the film…

That was Basil Poledouris, working with Paul; he’s very involved with the score. He’s not a musician but the composers really enjoy working with him and that score was considered a really good score that year.

The character of Johnny Rico survived a lot in the first film, let alone what he’s been through since. How much can you develop him as a character and how much does he have to be a central person around whom things happen?

He’s a protagonist, he guides us through, and the way I view him is he’s a very straight arrow. He really believes in a world where people are fair and right. He probably knows that some of the people he’s working for are not always right and somehow he tries to do the right thing in a  world that’s more corrupt than he is.

I think that’s why we like him because we can depend on him to do the right things for his friends, the right thing morally, the right thing. Even when [Michael Ironside’s character] Rasczak in the first movie has lost his patience with the general who’s shellshocked and is about to kill him, Johnny says, “No that’s out of line. Don’t kill him.”

He’s our voice of reason strangely. A little dim but that’s okay because he’s sincere.

Does he maintain that through this as well?

He is put into a small moral quandary and does something about it but it’s not played wrenchingly, it’s more that the world is an immoral place and he does his best in it. In this case he gives some information to a younger trooper that the younger trooper uses to get the news out.

He really is the guy in the films who’s going to go along with what’s happening but tries to do his best. He’s not going to turn his back – he’s not going to be a revolutionary, he’s going to be a good soldier and keep going.

There’s obviously a good bond between you and Caspar in real life…

It’s like I wrote a character and he became my little brother!

How much seeds in from you knowing him into Johnny now? How much is it that if you hadn’t got to know the guy, he might be a different Johnny Rico?

You always have to do that with an actor a little bit. Even if you don’t become friends with them, although I have been lucky that way, you do look at them and go, “He’d say this”, “She would say that”, “This is a good line for that actor”. You build the part that way.

With Caspar we just got along – when we worked together on 3, we decided to make the whole character a study of John Wayne in John Ford movies and that was fun for us. We tried not to make it overt, but we thought “What would John Wayne have done, how would John Ford have handled this?” He is sort of a John Wayne character.

Is there a similar sort of thing in this one?

I guess so. In this case I wrote the script, sent it off to Japan and then I saw the movie six months later. There wasn’t as much conversation with anybody but it still worked out about the same. Caspar went down to do the lines – he called me up and said he was going down to the lines, and I said, “Do whatever you want.”

Is there a future for this branch of the franchise? Do you have ideas for this older Johnny?

I don’t have an idea right this minute but I will wait two years and watch what happens in this country and Europe… The weird thing is, you would look at this movie and think they wrote it because Donald Trump became president but I wrote it before the election. It’s all about media and popularity and a leader who thinks they know everything. It’s amusing it worked out that way. We’re living in interesting times, as our Chinese friends would say.

In terms of Robocop, anything on the horizon with that?

I know that MGM has some ideas about how they would like to exploit the brand going forward, they’re interested in doing it the right way. I don’t know what they’re going to do. We’ve talked a  little bit about what they thought worked and didn’t work in the remake. I hope something good will come of that – we’ll see; I’ve got my fingers crossed. It would be nice to have a good Robocop out there.

Would you like to have another crack at it?

If that happened… I would probably go back to work. We’ll see.

Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars is out now on Blu-ray and DVD

Thanks to Michael Hammond at DNA-PR for help in arranging this interview.