Jose Padhila is the Brazilian director who has had great success at festivals with his action movie Elite Squad: The Enemy Within which opens on 11th November 2011.
He is now busy getting the Robocop remake ready to go and has been speaking about the film. The main character will still be called Alex Murphy and Michael Fassbender has not been approached for the role.
Do you want to redesign Robocop and ED-209?
That I can’t tell otherwise I’m going to give the movie away. We are already doing that, working on the designs so I do already know stuff. Listen, the design has to match the script. You don’t design something out of the blue. You design something that makes sense inside the dramatic universe that you are exploring. So that’s what we’re doing.
Is there any truth to the Chris Pine or Michael Fassbender casting rumors?
That’s a new one. I heard the Fassbender casting rumors. I haven’t discussed really casting. What happened was Elite Squad 2 opened in Holland so a journalist from Holland I spoke with wanted to know who’s going to be Robocop because Verhoeven is Dutch. So I said there are many great American actors, for instance Fassbender, Chris Pine and I named a few. Then the web does the rest.
Does anything remain from Darren Aronofsky’s work?
I haven’t read Aronofsky’s script. Aronofsky is a great director. I love his films. I am very proud because I saw Pi in the opening Sundance screening and I loved it. So Aronofsky’s great. I have my own take on Robocop. I know what his take was and it’s totally different. It’s a different thing, different kind of film, even different period in time so I haven’t read his previous work.
It’s interesting you say different period of time. I got the impression from Aronofsky’s take that he was leaning towards modern day and the devices that make us cyborgs now.
Well, some things are constant. A lot of what was great about Robocop, the original one, had to do with the ‘80s. That kind of style of shooting, for one thing, when Robocop was released there was no movie like Robocop. If we do Robocop again, there is at least one.
The original ‘Robocop’ was very much about the corporations of the ‘80s. Would your take be able to address today’s problems like the banks and mortgage lenders?
[Laughs] Listen, there are the constants and the variables in this world, right? Some things change and some things never change. Corporations controlling people are a constant. It’s the banks now, it’s going to be something else 30 years from now. It was something else before. This is the way economics works. So we’re not making a film about mortgage, that I can tell you.
My favorite part is that the corporation creates him and owns him, but he remembers who he was and they can’t own that.
That’s the greatness of the concept. That’s the concept of Robocop in a nutshell. That’s the heart and soul of the film. It’s that conflict between stuff trying to own you and you trying to persevere. That’s the heart of the story and it has to be. Any Robocop that’s worth that name has to talk about that.
Will you still call him Alex Murphy?
Alex Murphy is Alex Murphy, man. You can’t call Batman some other name. Bruce Wayne is Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent is Clark Kent, Alex Murphy is Alex Murphy.
Are you looking forward to the Robocop reboot? Who would you like to play Murphy?
Source: CraveOnline
