Let’s face it, we’re all excited about the new ROBOCOP remake. Adding to the excitement, director José Padilha, along with Samuel L. Jackson, Joel Kinnaman, Michael Keaton and Abbie Cornish sat down with press at Comic-Con 2013 to talk a bit about the film. Check it out below!
In RoboCop, the year is 2029 and multinational conglomerate OmniCorp is at the center of robot technology. Their drones are winning American wars around the globe and now they want to bring this technology to the home front. Alex Murphy is a loving husband, father and good cop doing his best to stem the tide of crime and corruption in Detroit. After he is critically injured in the line of duty, OmniCorp utilizes their remarkable science of robotics to save Alex’s life. He returns to the streets of his beloved city with amazing new abilities, but with issues a regular man has never had to face before.
Director José Padilha (Elite Squad) reimagines the tale of part man, part machine, all cop starring Joel Kinnaman (The Killing) as the title character, Gary Oldman (The Dark Knight Rises) as the scientist who creates RoboCop, and Samuel L. Jackson (The Avengers) as media mogul Pat Novak. RoboCop is being produced by Strike Entertainment’s Marc Abraham and Eric Newman, with Eric Carraro as Executive Producer. The film is currently in pre-production and slated for a summer 2013 release.
To Samuel L. Jackson, what was your thought when you first heard there was going to be a RoboCop remake.
Samuel L. Jackson: Why me?
Because, because–
Samuel L. Jackson: Because I actually went to the movie theater to see RoboCop.
Joel Kinnaman: Before I got this part I’ve probably seen RoboCop about 25 to 30 times. I started rehearsing the RoboCop walk way before I became an actor. So I was pretty well-versed in the Robo-walk. But then when I got the suit on, and also sort of the 1987 vision of where robotics would be is very different from a 2013 vision of where robotics would be and how a robot would move in 15 years, in the future. So when I got the suit on, I had some ideas. We went for a more superhuman approach to his movement pattern, but then we added in some more robotic movement to it. But that was something I was mostly… I was playing around with it and then José would look at it and then maybe give me a little note and I would either take that note and work on something else but mostly I’d take his notes.
José Padilha: The suit is hot. That’s the only thing. He wants to get in and out quickly.
Joel Kinnaman: It was a bit of a torture device but I was glad —
Michael Keaton: Bulls–t. I’ve seen the suit. You try wearing my Bat suit. Ah man, you’ve got it easy.
Samuel L. Jackson: I did three Star Wars movies and I just did Oldboy. I did Shaft.
This is your first sci-fi film. What did you think when you first read the script?
Samuel L. Jackson: I was excited by the prospect of a modern-day RoboCop. Thinking about it and thinking about the possibilities of what could be done with all the CG things we can do now, and the advancements in robotics and… I read a lot of comic books, so I see a lot of things and the things that happen in my as opposed to what happens on the page as opposed to what he (director) said we were going to do, I was excited by the possibility. And knowing that there are a lot of young people who may be aware of RoboCop but not really the way we’re aware of RoboCop, so I’m excited to come into that world.
Tonally the original RoboCop is almost like a black comedy in some parts
Samuel L. Jackson: You mean like Stanford and Son? Not that black? (Laughs)
Will there be any one-liners that we’ll be quoting years from now?
José Padilha: Yes. The original RoboCop tonally was very ironic and very violent. It was a critique of fascism, at least the way I’ve seen it. But it was also very smart and it dealt with some concepts that maybe not everybody caught on to, but they were there. 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’ll just give you an example. If you think about the war in Vietnam, or even in Iraq – The war in Vietnam ended because American soldiers were dying. Same thing that’s happening in Iraq – we’ve got to get out of there. Now, if you picture the same war with robots, substituting robots in instead of soldiers, then you don’t have the political pressure at home. There is a relationship between being able to use robots for war and fascism. The issue has already been posed by the use of drones by the way, and if you open all of the major American newspapers, you’ll read and hear their opinions – pro and against drones. Now this issue is ready and our movie is pretty much about that. That’s one part of it. And the other part of it is what it feels like to be a robot as opposed to what it feels like to be a human. I kind of explain to you why. Say you have footage of the Hiroshima bomb exploding and then you play the footage backwards. The bomb goes up into the plane. The plane flies backward. At the end of this you’re going to end up at Harry Truman’s table, and he makes the call to drop the bomb. Now, because Harry Truman is a man, he has free will and he can make choices. We can argue about whether he did the right choice or not. The same thing goes for criminals. A criminal shoots someone in the streets. We say this is a man who knows what he’s doing. He’s taken someone’s life and we can’t argue whether it’s right or wrong. Now, once you replace man with autonomous robots, accountability goes out the window. Say you have a robot, let’s say in the middle of the Amazon forest hunting drug dealers, and the robot is there and nobody sees what it’s doing and it shoots drug dealers and it shoots a kid. Now, whose fault is that? So, this is a huge philosophical issue that’s going to be present more and more. It’s been debated a lot already, but it’s going to be debated more and more as robots evolve, and our movie is also about that. And there are some fights in there too.
Samuel L. Jackson: Wait, wait, wait… And your favorite line from the original RoboCop was what? I’m sure there’s one or two lines in this [new] film, but I haven’t seen it and I thoroughly expect my face to be on all kinds of t-shirts. (Laughs)
Coming off on what you were just talking about, the first film also dealt with a lot of corporate issues. [inaudible] It feels like corporations are now stepping into making it into a government issue.
José Padilha: Right. I would actually kind of corporations are in the movie, but in any case, we had in the first movie, there was all the satire with the ads. The over the top corporation ads selling something that was clearly not for kids, and we do the same satire in the movie, but instead of using ads we go for the media. So, if you remember recently we’ve got the weapons of mass destruction and nobody could find it, and then the weapons were not there, it was almost anti-patriotic to go against the idea and all the media fell for that or kind of played with that. We have that. We kept that and our movie has that from the original.
To me, RoboCop is a very beautiful story about Alex Murphy. This corporation thinks they own him because they created the cards that brought him back to life, but they can’t own Alex Murphy. How do you explore that in this version and I was curious to see if you’ve ever seen the Canadian TV series of RoboCop?
Joel Kinnaman: I have seen that. I love the first movie, I kind of checked out 40 minutes into the second one and I didn’t see the third one, and I missed the TV series. But that part is very much so in our story. We go a little further with Alex Murphy. We get to know him a little better. We spent more time with Alex Murphy when he’s at work as an undercover cop and as a family man. He’s got a beautiful little family. And then that is very much the question. Is he now a property? Is he owned by OmniCorp? He’s very vulnerable because the system needs to be changed and he needs to be plugged in, so he’s dependent on this corporation that has made him to survive – that has made him very powerful but at the same time very vulnerable. There’s a continuous interactions. They let him interact with his family, he gets to reconnect with his family after he had become RoboCop, and that’s of course something that’s not easy to come home and try to embrace your six-year-old son and your wife, and you have just a big robotic body. You can’t really feel them.
Samuel, what’s your favorite movie of all time and why?
Samuel L. Jackson: Who? Me? My favorite movie of all time… you mean if I’m lost on an island somewhere and it’s a movie I would want to watch everyday? Hard Boiled. Just because I love John Woo, I love action, I love Chow-Yun Fat and I think it’s a wonderful, wonderful movie.
I loved the movie when I was a kid. It’s my favorite childhood movie. Will you get to say the famous line “Your move, creep”, and is there any trace of Clarence Boddicker in this movie?
Joel Kinnaman: Sorry to disappoint you man. We kept a couple of lines from the original but we also felt that all these iconic lines from the first one, they were part of that movie – the tone of that movie and Verhoven’s tone. I think that would feel like something unjust and disrespectful to keep all the lines. We’ve kept a couple of lines from the original but “your move, creep,” no. That’s something that I would say to my friends all the time when I was obsessed with that movie. I practiced that a lot. [On Clarence Boddicker in the movie] Not really, no.
First of all this could be a really excellent performance with you. You also finished a movie with Anthony Hopkins and Colin Farrell. Can you talk a little bit about that experience?
Samuel L. Jackson: They’re bringing that movie in tomorrow. Not fair.
Abbie Cornish: According to my representative over here I’ve got to keep a tight lip about it. No, I’ve been really lucky. Sort of in the last year I worked on three great gigs, starting with RoboCop. It’s funny, when people ask me about RoboCop and the experience of shooting it, they say ‘How was it?’ and I say ‘It’s the easiest film I’ve ever made.’ And it was. We have incredibly talented director who just helmed this quite classic and political social story in such a sort of wonderfully deep way. I worked with an incredible cast and worked on a film that is, for me, iconic and very nostalgic. I was five when it came out. My brother had it on VHS and we ran that VHS until it shredded itself up. And so for me it has a lot of importance in my life, and in my childhood. So, great cast, great crew and everyday was just easy. All the actors were A-grade, so prepared and same with the crew and directed by Jose. That was a dream gig.
Samuel L. Jackson: I want to talk about a movie we’re not here to talk about too.
José Padilha: Right. I think it’s the first presumed movie I’ve made. I’m shooting a movie, I’m shooting a movie. When I get on set, whether it’s a one million dollar or a hundred and forty million dollar film, it’s about the script, it’s about the actors, it’s about having the camera the right way, and it was so with RoboCop. We had fun while we were making the movie. We gave ourselves room to improvise. We made up a lot of lines on the spot that just popped up in our heads. The same way, we shot this movie the same way we shot our movies in Brazil. I don’t know why it would change it. Actually I don’t even know how to do it another way. It wasn’t like, there is no such thing like oh it’s such a gigantic movie, how’s it going to happen? How am I going to do it? You just go there and shoot a movie. And there’s a little less drug dealers and corrupt cops around the set, but I guess that’s because we shot that in Canada.
Abbie Cornish: That’s what I mean by easy.
What is one thing about the character that you knew you had to make really cool, and something from the original that you had to bring back that you had to bring to a modern audience?
Joel Kinnaman: I don’t really think about it like that.
Samuel L. Jackson: He’s connected to the internet. He gets wifi. RoboCop gets wifi.
Was there a particular scene that you worked on that you think you’ll remember, for each of you, when you look back on this movie years from now?
Joel Kinnaman: I think for me the whole awakening sequence when Alex awakes for the first time and experiences the disbelief of his new reality. In those scenes, I was working really close with Gary Oldman – and also that whole sequence on getting to see… well there’s some things that I can’t… spoilers. But I think there’s a string of scenes in 40 minutes into the movie that were very demanding but very rewarding as well.
Mike, this is for you. I interviewed you when you were Batman.
Michael Keaton: I am Batman.
My question is, very few people, except for Samuel, get to do one iconic movie after another iconic movie. Did you hesitate at all coming into this kind of superhero movie? Was it kind of coming home again in a sense?
Michael Keaton: No. You know, this was simple. I haven’t actually seen the original, I’ve just seen bits and pieces, so my decision was based on the script that I read. I thought it was pretty smart and pretty well-written. At this point I didn’t know who the cast was, so once I heard who the cast was, that made me more excited. I’ve become a fan of Jose’s, and one conversation I had on the phone with him, long distance, saying I don’t know if you’re interested on my take on the character but this is what I think, and he felt exactly the same way. So it was really a matter of if the film was good.
Abbie Cornish: Michael’s great in the film. Amazing. He’s so interesting. I was lucky enough to do a couple of scenes with him and it was so interesting. You play a lot in that role, which was nice to watch.
Obviously everybody keeps bringing up the original, but when it comes to this interpretation of RoboCop, this question is for all of you. What do you think is the biggest drawing point for all audiences to go in and say ‘I want to see this version of RoboCop.’?
Samuel L. Jackson: The trailer. Always the trailer.
Michael Keaton: It’s a very current theme. My guess is it will be hugely entertaining and underlining. It’s relevant. It’ll resonate with people, but not to the degree where your brain will hurt when you think about it when you’re going home. When there’s smart added to fun, even if you don’t notice the smart, it ratchets everything up exponentially. It just always makes movies better. Even if you have to go home and think about some things. Earlier on I thought Obama made a huge mistake not getting out of Afghanistan when he had the move early on, but I thought, you know, to surgically remove people and to surgically remove certain parts, that’s the way to go and win this war, not primarily drones. Now I don’t think that. I don’t think that. I think there’s a whole other moral issue to that, and that’s what is really interesting about this, the moral aspect of this movie. I don’t mean to make it sound too serious because it’s very fun, but that’s the underlining intelligence and how it resonates. It’s there without you having to pay too much attention to it.
Samuel L. Jackson: Obviously we’re not going to put that in the trailer. We want the excitement in the trailer. Then people will get in there and then they’ll find out how morally intriguing it is, but first we’re going to show them the trailer. Then when people tweet their friends they’ll say “Damn, that s–t is morally intelligent.”
For a fun look at ROBOCOP check out http://www.omnicorp.com
ROBOCOP is scheduled for theatrical release on February 7, 2014
