Jose Padilha Quotes

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.

No wonder we have a lot of violence in Rio: the corrupt and violent policemen meet the violent criminals in the streets. What else is going to happen?

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.

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.

We make violent cops, we make violent criminals, and no wonder we have shootouts in slums all of the time.

Measurements, observations, descriptions can only be considered scientific when they are independently confirmed by other people.

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.

Television is so cool. Television is proving that we can be sophisticated and that people will watch, if it’s good.

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.

A lot of jobs today are being automated; what happens when you extend that concept to very important areas of society like law enforcement? What happens if you start controlling the behavior of criminals or people in general with software-running machines? Those questions, they look like they’re sci-fi but they’re not.

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?

Either you look back and deal with your hypocrisy, or you dismiss it.

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.

You’re looking for the best way of shooting it, but sometimes the best way of shooting it is changing the script.

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.

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?’

Well, I’m not that popular with the politicians, I have to say.

I love the sharpness and political tone of RoboCop and I think that such a film is now urgently needed.

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.

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.