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
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.
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.
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.
As a filmmaker, I make the films that I love, that are in my heart. That's what I care about.
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.
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?
Either you look back and deal with your hypocrisy, or you dismiss it.
As it turns out, what looks like science sometimes is not.
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?
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?
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.
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.