1.
In Rio de Janeiro, every cop has to make a choice. He either turns dirty, keeps his mouth shut, or goes to war.
Jose Padilha
2.
I love the sharpness and political tone of RoboCop and I think that such a film is now urgently needed.
Jose Padilha
3.
We make violent cops, we make violent criminals, and no wonder we have shootouts in slums all of the time.
Jose Padilha
4.
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.
Jose Padilha
5.
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.
Jose Padilha
6.
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.
Jose Padilha
7.
How can I make a movie about the violence of the police if the police aren't going to let me film it?
Jose Padilha
8.
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.
Jose Padilha
9.
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.
Jose Padilha
10.
As a filmmaker, I make the films that I love, that are in my heart. That's what I care about.
Jose Padilha
11.
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.
Jose Padilha
12.
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.
Jose Padilha
13.
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.
Jose Padilha
14.
Either you look back and deal with your hypocrisy, or you dismiss it.
Jose Padilha
15.
As it turns out, what looks like science sometimes is not.
Jose Padilha
16.
Television is so cool. Television is proving that we can be sophisticated and that people will watch, if it's good.
Jose Padilha
17.
I think the media needs a little criticizing now, as it did in the '80s, don't you?
Jose Padilha
18.
Well, I'm not that popular with the politicians, I have to say.
Jose Padilha
19.
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.
Jose Padilha
20.
Usually I say I have no imagination.
Jose Padilha
21.
Measurements, observations, descriptions can only be considered scientific when they are independently confirmed by other people.
Jose Padilha
22.
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.
Jose Padilha
23.
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.
Jose Padilha
24.
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.
Jose Padilha
25.
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?
Jose Padilha
26.
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.
Jose Padilha
27.
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.
Jose Padilha
28.
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.
Jose Padilha
29.
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.
Jose Padilha
30.
You're looking for the best way of shooting it, but sometimes the best way of shooting it is changing the script.
Jose Padilha
31.
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?
Jose Padilha
32.
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.
Jose Padilha
33.
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.
Jose Padilha
34.
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?
Jose Padilha