José Padilha recently spoke to Comingsoon about the upcoming release of “Elite Squad: The Enemy Within,” which arrives this Friday. During the interview he also reveals details about his upcoming “Robocop” reboot for MGM in which he expresses his priority in finding an American lead to play the all-American, all-Detroit steel, Robocop:
“‘RoboCop’ the first movie was fantastic,” he told us. “But even if there was no movie, 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 you 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!”
“I have my take on it,” he continued, “And I can tell you this: In the first ‘RoboCop’ when 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?”
“We need an American RoboCop, man. RoboCop is an American guy, his name is Alex Murphy.”
Padilha’s “Robocop” reboot is still in early development stages, but so far it sounds as if he’s pretty gung-ho for the project and is focused on putting his own spin on the iconic ’80s action movie. Shooting for “Robocop” is set to begin early next year. We’ll have more as it develops.