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.

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.

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

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.

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?'

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

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.

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

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

I think the media needs a little criticizing now, as it did in the '80s, don't you?

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.

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 ...

As a filmmaker, I make the films that I love, that are in my heart. That's what I care about.

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.

A film is a living thing. The screenplay is a guideline. You really need to have a good, sound script to know that you have a dramatic structure that's going to work thematically, and to know how one scene will got through another, and to get a sense of character.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

As it turns out, what looks like science sometimes is not.

In Rio de Janeiro, every cop has to make a choice. He either turns dirty, keeps his mouth shut, or goes to war.