CraveOnline: But that’s right, you framed the debate very literally in the TV show that Samuel L. Jackson hosts…
José Padilha: “Thank you, Senator!”
That was cute. But it brought to mind the TV networks in the original RoboCop, which were much broader and more satirical, but what struck me is that nowadays that’s just Fox News. It’s not even a joke anymore.
[Laughs.] It’s kind of hard to turn that into a joke because the thing itself is a joke. Some commentators of politics in America, I’m listening to them like I would to a comedian. So how do you turn that joke into a joke. You need Samuel L. Jackson for that. Do you know what I mean? [Laughs.]
I do. I do know what you mean.
It’s a caricature of a caricature. [Laughs.]
Absolutely. That was a lot of fun. Now structurally you made a lot of changes from the original RoboCop, and one of the ones that was the most striking was in the original RoboCop Alex Murphy dies and then there’s a montage and then he’s RoboCop.
Yeah.
You milk that whole process. You show them picking away at every piece of him that isn’t a product until the very last minute.
And then they take his emotions away from him.
Yeah, at the last possible second, they’re gone.
You’re totally right about that. We wanted to make a movie about a guy who loses humanity, and see it happening over the course of 40 minutes. First of all, just for the sake of drama, it’s so dramatic, and also we wanted to…
The guy wakes up and first he denies. “I’m not a robot. This is a fucking dream. I’m actually dancing with my wife. This can’t be real. I’m on drugs. What sort of drugs did you give to me?” And then he runs away and escapes, and finds out he’s in fucking China…
That was a cute bit, that they outsourced RoboCop to China.
And then they – boom – turn him off. So he finds out people can turn him off or not, and falls to the ground in China. Then they show it to him in a mirror – and the mirror is key to that scene because he’s facing himself, his humanity – and he sees he doesn’t have a body. And he decides right there that he’s not a human anymore and he doesn’t want to live. “I want to die.” And Norton brings his family back and says, “What about your wife?”
Alex Murphy thinks, “Wait a second, I don’t have a body but I still feel this way about my family. That’s enough for me to believe I’m a human being. Put me back in. Don’t show me again.”
Then he has thing about zoom in, and zoom out, where he doesn’t want his wife to see him…
He only wants his wife to see the part of him that’s human.
Yeah. So you really see the struggle between man and machine, and you see the man losing it slowly. Then they take away his free will by setting up the mechanical parts of his brain to take control when action happens, but at the same time to fill his brain with neuro-transmitters and information that makes the brain think it’s doing what the machines are really doing. So then it’s “the illusion of free will,” like Norton says. And then they take away his emotions.
So that trajectory allows me to discuss the philosophical issues of what it means to be conscious. That’s how I can make this movie explicitly, sometimes, philosophical. I said “let’s go for that.”
