RoboCop Director José Padilha Talks About His Vision For The Film

At a recent press conference attended by Comicbook.com, Director José Padilha (Elite Squad, Bus 174) spoke about his thoughts and vision for his RoboCop film, beginning by talking about what makes the new film different from the original. "The first RoboCop, [Paul] Verhoeven's film, it already had a great theme in it," said Padilha, "which is the connection between the automation of violence and fascism. And you can think about this connection in several ways. One way to think about it is to consider Vietnam; America pulled out of Vietnam because there were movements at home due to the fact that soldiers were dying. If you take away the soldiers and put robots there, what happens? The same goes for Iraq. In law enforcement, if you replace the soldier with a machine you take away the possibility of the soldier or the policeman not doing something that the state asks of him if they think it's inadequate to do it. A machine doesn't have that critical perspective. So, if you think about the first movie, you have Alex Murphy fighting against the directives inside his head. So that character embodies this idea that you have to dehumanize the perpetrators of violence in order to have fascism. "Now, we are getting very close to having robots replacing soldiers. We have already seen drones flying about, and so we wanted to make this idea current. In order to bring this movie to the present and to talk about what's going to happen…every country will soon have to decide if they want to have robots for law enforcement or not. The UN is going to have to pass legislation about what's going to be allowed, as far as machines go. By coincidence, on the Telegraph today, there is an article about American armies trying to replace soldiers with robots. It's almost like out of a movie. It's going to happen. "We set up this movie in a place in time where America already decided not to allow robots for law enforcement, and this corporation wants to sell robots there. So he has to create a way to circumvent the law and the only way to do it is to put a drone out there and to say that this drone is a man; put a man inside the machine. Once you do that, you create a character that's a little bit different than Verhoeven's character because you need to have a man. "They're selling that this machine is a man, so Alex Murphy wakes up, totally conscious. He has a memory, he is a man, and he finds out he is a robot. Once you do that you can start to talk about philosophical issues, stuff like what is it that defines you as a man? Is it your brain? Is it your body? Is it because your brain runs a certain software that makes you a man? It all boils down to the premise of the movie. If you develop this movie in a coherent way, you, necessarily, have to tackle those issues. Padilha spoke specifically about replacing commercials with a news pundit "As to the Samuel L. Jackson character, Pat Novak," said Padilha, "and why we replaced the commercials with the media, it's because the media became like the commercials in the real world. We thought it was a good thing to have a little bit of fun with the crazy right wing model, Rush Limbaugh guys that everybody has. We have those in Brazil. I have to say, personally, I've had it a little bit with them, so we make a little bit of fun." The director also talked a bit about the film's visual inspiration and what sets this character apart from some other action movie heroes. "There's a classic moment," said Padilha, "where Joel wakes up and looks at his hands and says 'What kind of suit is that?' And Dr. Norton says 'It's not a suit, it's you.' This is where we go away from Iron Man, because it's not a suit, it's him. He's become a robot, and he's become a robot because a corporation wanted to make a product. So, his body has been transformed and his psychological reality has been molded for a purpose that's not his own. That reminded of Francis Bacon paintings. Bacon puts figures in his paintings and isolates them from the rest of the painting, and they're always twisted, and you can look at it different ways, as society deforming them or their own psychological reality deforming them…I gave those painting to Martin Whist, the production designer, and told him to design the lab after those paintings, and the docking station, and the scene where he is set apart…if you look at the design they're quite similar." RoboCop will premiere in theaters February 12, 2014.