About a month ago, it was announced that Jose Padilha was signed to direct the reboot of the classic cyberpunk movie, ‘Robocop’. At the time, much wasn’t known about what approach Padilha would take, but in an exclusive interview with Coming Soon, he revealed his plans.
“In the first ‘RoboCop’,” Padilha explains, “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?”
Padilha seems to have great respect for the Paul Verhoeven’s original. “’RoboCop’ the first movie was fantastic,” he says, “…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 your 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!”
This set-up seems to follow the style of Padilha who is more known for his documentary skills. When asked if he would use the same style of filming seen in his other films, the director replied, “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.”
Another thing he confirmed was that he will cast an American in the lead role. “We need an American RoboCop, man. RoboCop is an American guy, his name is Alex Murphy.”
So what do you think of Padilha’s version of the movie?
