CraveOnline: Yeah, right?
José Padilha: Ours is, yeah, I think our comedy – the comedy part of our movie – it’s very hard to compare with the original. It’s just a different movie.
Of course.
I tried to be more explicit about and tackle the philosophical question of what it means to be human, a human being, and what it means to be a machine and how those things interface. Hence I have 40 minutes of Alex Murphy becoming RoboCop, as opposed to he wakes up and he’s like that. That was a choice to be more cerebral and explicit about that kind of thing. So I have Norton talking about free will, and I have, “Consciousness is nothing more than the processing of information. We’re going to fix him and he won’t know the difference.”
That’s a clear statement of artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mine. I even named the characters after philosophers. Dennett is a famous philosopher, Sellars is a famous philosopher, Dreyfuss… I went that way, and I didn’t try to create a movie that was as much in your face as Verhoeven’s. I did that with Elite Squad. I thought that feel [was right] for that movie.
I mean, the anger is already in Verhoeven’s movie. It’s there! It’s perfect. It still applies, so I don’t have to do it again! Because it’s done. It would be stupid to try to do it again, wouldn’t it?
Yeah, it would be stupid to do a shot-for-shot thing. When you got this project was the script already in place or did you have to go back to square one?
No, no, actually I got to this project because there was no script.
So they just said, “What would you do for RoboCop? We have no idea?”
Actually the other way around. I went into a meeting with MGM and they were pitching me other movies, and there was a RoboCop poster, and I said, “Listen, I have no ideas for these other movies. I have an idea for this one, because I love this movie and I think we can – based on the construction and the smarts of the character that explores… to me it’s about the connection between automation and violence and fascism… I think it’s time to talk about this again. We can promote thinking in a very large audience if we do it right, and we start with the RoboCop idea.”
So I pitched that to the studio, actually, and then two days later I got a call from my agent saying, “You know what? Beware of what you want because you may get it!”
Did that blow their minds? Like, “Remake RoboCop? Should we do that?”
They had [Darren] Aronofsky on the project…
Oh that’s right, yeah…
Aronofsky had left the project. They weren’t doing it at the time. But I think about it in a good way. I don’t think like, “Oh, I’m going to do RoboCop… What’s going to happen with me…” What I think is, “This is such a great, cool, genius idea that Verhoeven had, and can I try and explore it?”
So I see it positively. If I saw it negatively, I wouldn’t be a filmmaker and I wouldn’t be doing it.
I imagine not.
And at the same time, I am not the filmmaker that does – and nothing against movies that only have fun – but I can’t do G.I. Joe. It’s not compatible.
Although I’d kind of like to see you try to spice it up with some real politics. That might be kind of fun.
[Laughs.] That’s an idea!
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
