Earlier today, ComingSoon.net had a chance to talk with Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha about his anticipated sequel Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, which will finally open in the States starting on Friday.
Talk eventually got around to his planned relaunch of RoboCop for MGM. Anyone who has seen “The Enemy Within” will realize immediately why Padilha is perfect to direct a science fiction movie based in a world of corrupt police and politicians, since that’s very much the core of the new movie.
He’s hoping to start shooting early next year and he shared with us what we can expect from his take on the popular ’80s action movie:
“‘RoboCop’ the first movie was fantastic,” he told us. “But even if there was no movie, the concept of ‘RoboCop’ is brilliant, first because it lends itself to a lot of social criticism, but also because it poses a question, ‘To when do you lose you humanity?’ The way it does that is by replacing body parts with machine parts, and that’s very smart because guess what? It’s going to happen!”
“I have my take on it,” he continued, “And I can tell you this: In the first ‘RoboCop’ when Alex Murphy is shot, gunned down, then you see some hospitals and stuff and then you cut to him as RoboCop. My movie is between those two cuts. How do you make RoboCop? How do you slowly bring a guy to be a robot? How do you actually take humanity out of someone and how do you program a brain, so to speak, and how does that affect an individual?”
When asked whether we might see some of his documentary skills at work for the movie, maybe with a little bit of handheld camerawork, he responded, “Listen, they gave me the job, I’m going to do it my way, so yeah, you’re going to see myself in there. For bad or for good, I’m going to shoot it the way I shoot it.”
For those Brazilians hoping that Padilha will reunite with his “Elite Squad” star Wagner Maura to play RoboCop, we have some sad news (at least for them) that in fact, the director is looking for an American actor for the role.
“We need an American RoboCop, man. RoboCop is an American guy, his name is Alex Murphy,” he said, laughing at the idea of turning Maura’s character Nascimento into an android.
Look for the rest of our interview with Padilha in which we talk about Brazilian politics and how they’re reflected in his new movie Elite Squad: The Enemy Within sometime later this week.
