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

Fucking rat,” veteran NYPD cop Ray Donlan sneers at the retreating back of internal affairs officer Moe Tilden early on in writer-director James Mangold’s Cop Land. open image in gallery ‘Cop Land’ writer-director James Mangold has painful memories of making the 1997 film – especially the post-production process, when Harvey Weinstein tried to rewrite the ending Mangold is probing away at racism and graft within the New York police department. open image in gallery The film’s co-star Annabella Sciorra, who plays a battered wife married to one of the film’s many rogue cops, was one of the main witnesses alleging sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein during the 2020 trial that led to his conviction and imprisonment “They played to certain constituencies that would give them a core audience but it was always as cynical as a Hollywood studio would be, just playing to a different audience. It was horribly written and I didn’t know what to do.” open image in gallery ‘Cop Land’ was the first time Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro had shared the screen with such ferocity in a thriller since they were the young stars of Martin Scorsese’s ‘Mean Streets’ and 1976’s ‘Taxi Driver’ Eventually, Mangold contacted De Niro and explained the situation.