Jose Padilha
Jose Padilha
José Bastos Padilha Netois a Brazilian film director, producer and screenwriter. He is best known for directing the Brazilian critical and financial successes Elite Squad and Elite Squad: The Enemy Within and the 2014 remake of RoboCop. He has won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for Elite Squad in 2008. He is also the producer of the Netflix original series Narcos, starring frequent collaborator Wagner Moura, and directed the first two episodes in the series...
NationalityBrazilian
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth1 August 1967
CountryBrazil
I don't actually like blocking actors. I prefer giving actors freedom. They don't have to step on a precise mark with me. Instead of giving marks to the actors I like to give marks to the camera.
It's easy to make a pirate copy when you have digital tapes of things. And it was so complicated and complex to go through all the post-production of a movie without ever going digital.
I like to give dimension to shots inside action scenes. It's demanding because you have to rehearse a lot of things happening at the same time and frame all those things in a shot. But I feel like when you accomplish that then you've got a cool action scene.
If you are in Brazil and you grew up in a right-wing dictatorship, you think Marxism is liberating. But if you grew up in Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union is controlling everything and killing people, then you think capitalism is liberating. Neither of those two things are true and it doesn't take a lot brains to understand this.
Listen, I like great actors. You can be a movie star without being a great actor - this has been proved several times - and I like my casts to have great actors. Acting is more important to me than being a star.
You never find yourself involved in a single action story. Your family is always being with you. And you cannot separate whatever is going on in your life with your relationship with your son, with your wife...
People can't stand it when you deal with issues of race and class, and also sometimes the church, and you give a perspective that flushes out hypocrisy.
Pretty soon we'll have robots in our society, you're going to have a lot of automated processes that used to be done by people - this is happening. Society and technology is changing so fast, and the impact of the change on society and technology is global, not local.
RoboCop the first movie was fantastic. 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, 'When do you lose your humanity?
I come from a documentary background and my natural tendency, as a filmmaker, is to make a movie, if I have something to talk about. If it's not about anything that matters, I don't feel like doing it. I'm not against people who make movies just for fun, but I'm not one of those guys. I just want to provoke thinking and debating about certain issues.
Science is based on the possibility of objectivity, on the possibility of different people checking out for themselves the observations made by others. Without that possibility, there is no empirical principle capable of deciding between different arguments and theories.
The way that I sort of direct the writers is, let's do the best story we can. Let's not worry about production issues. 'How much will that cost? How are we going to shoot that?' Let's not set up those constraints on the writing. I don't think it helps the project to work like that.
I love the sharpness and political tone of RoboCop and I think that such a film is now urgently needed.
You're looking for the best way of shooting it, but sometimes the best way of shooting it is changing the script.