"I think I heard Värttinä first on an album of so-called world music that EMI put out on a label it owned at the time of this record [1994]. They sent me some tracks and opened me up a little bit to Scandinavian folk music - some great stuff from Sweden and Finland that I was very enthused to hear. Although I speak not a word of Finnish and I have no idea what these Finnish fishwives, as I call them, are singing about, we want to immerse ourselves in some notion of what the words mean. It’s just in the same way I don’t speak Hindu or any other Indian language, but love Indian music. Curiously, the marriage between Indian music and Finnish music occurred officially a few years ago when AR Rahman, the great Indian contemporary composer and arranger, discovered Värttinä too and did an album where he used Värttinä’s voices singing in Finnish in some of his sophisticated Bollywood music. He, like me, had fallen under the spell of these fishwives, although I’m sure he too speaks not a word of Finnish. So it’s something about the sound of the words, how the sounds are enunciated, that lets the imagination roam free, unconstricted by what might turn out to be the awful truth, that it’s yet another boring love song."

"I was thirteen when I saw this on opening weekend, and I remember leaving the theater walking on air. This had everything I’d wanted in a film. I was expecting just another fun action movie, and it was so much more. I was blown away by Verhoeven’s skillful hand with bleak absurdist satire, action, and genuine pathos. Somehow the film’s ludicrous extremes were able to make a perfect in-the-moment statement about the Regan-era eighties without the benefit of hindsight. Amazing script, amazing cast, and Peter Weller should’ve gotten an Oscar. So many memorable lines. Rob Bottin’s iconic designs of Robocop and the nuclear waste victim. Phil Tippet’s brilliant stop-motion wonder ED-209, so hilariously anthropomorphized through its beastly sound design and hurky movement—and I’ve yet to see something like that executed as perfectly with CGI. Some truly great, subversive physical comedy. When this was first released on Criterion I was so excited it was getting the reverence it deserved among the other classics. I believe it’s on the commentary track where Verhoeven talks about the sequel he pitched that was inevitably turned down. Instead of simply repeating himself, he proposed a love story with RoboCop falling for a cyborg that was little more than a floating brain in a jar. I would love to see that."