Cop Land at 25: It had all the ingredients to be a modern-day classic – what went wrong?

James Mangold’s 1997 New Jersey-set police thriller starring Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta and Robert De Niro was supposed to be the new ‘Goodfellas’ but, as its director-writer tells Geoffrey Macnab, it was beset by problems caused by its executive producer, Harvey Weinstein

Miramax had been hoping that ‘Cop Land’ would do for Sylvester Stallone what the company’s earlier film, ‘Pulp Fiction’ (1994), had done for John Travolta (Shutterstock)

Fucking rat,” veteran NYPD cop Ray Donlan (Harvey Keitel) sneers at the retreating back of internal affairs officer Moe Tilden (Robert De Niro) early on in writer-director James Mangold’s Cop Land (1997). Their brief encounter in a coffee shop is an electric moment – the first time Keitel and De Niro had shared the screen with such ferocity in a thriller since they were the young stars of Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976).

They may have been friends, but that didn’t stop them from competing in front of the camera. Both were trying to steal the scene from under their rival’s nose. De Niro’s Moe fiddles with the sugar for his coffee while Keitel’s Ray reminisces about when they were classmates at the police academy. For all their seeming bonhomie, they clearly loathe each other. Moe represents the rule of law. Ray is the quintessential crooked cop, as corrupt as they come; a cynical old-timer pulling the strings in the fictional town of Garrison, a sleepy, suburban community just a few miles across the George Washington Bridge from New York. Half the residents in the town are serving police officers.

In the wake of the George Floyd murder, the movie seems more topical than ever. Its plot hinges on Moe’s investigations into the killing of two Black teenagers by a hothead young white cop. It was inspired by Mangold’s own experiences growing up in Washingtonville, a town just like the fictional Garrison across the river from New York.