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
If you replace a soldier with a machine, you take away the possibility of the soldier or the policeman to not do something the state asks of him. He may think it's unethical to do it. A machine doesn't have that critical perspective.
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.
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.
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.
I think the media needs a little criticizing now, as it did in the '80s, don't you?
If you publish a scientific paper it is very hard to start a nationwide debate about something. If you do this in a movie, you can start a debate. We like to create a bridge between those two worlds - film and science.
As a filmmaker, I make the films that I love, that are in my heart. That's what I care about.
It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make a movie about the issues that this story is about. Filmmaking is storytelling, for me.
I like some superhero movies, but I have to say that they all feel the same to me. I've seen them a million times. They're all the same movie.
Television is so cool. Television is proving that we can be sophisticated and that people will watch, if it's good.
The relationship between fascism and robotics, for instance, it's very clear that it's going to become way more important as time goes by.
I have to be clear with myself and very conscious of what I am trying to say. Misunderstandings will always take place; it's unavoidable.
How can I make a movie about the violence of the police if the police aren't going to let me film it?