Home Entertainment Joel Kinnaman talks ROBOCOP, Remakes and Gary Oldman

Joel Kinnaman talks ROBOCOP, Remakes and Gary Oldman

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I know, I know. I’m a hypocritical blasphemer. Go ahead and throw over-rip produce at me. The fact of the matter still remains that I am strangely looking forward to director José Padilha’s Robocop remake.

Besides for Padilha’s impressive action film credentials with his Portugese language Elite Squad films, the other reason is Joel Kinnaman (The Killing, Safe House) who has been impressing me in virtually everything I’ve seen him in.

The Swedish born actor recently sat down with Collider where he spoke about his feelings on the remake as well as working with Gary Oldman.

“I used to be like “Why are we doing a remake? What are remakes being done for?”  But then, we do that all the time in the theater.  If we weren’t doing remakes, nobody would know who Shakespeare was.  I’m not saying that Robocop is Shakespeare, but it’s a way to … we’re retelling.  That’s what we do as human beings.  We retell our favorite stories.  That’s what we’ve done since we were sitting around campfires.  It’s a part of the human spirit.  It doesn’t have to be negative to creativity.  It can be completely opposite.  That’s how you can break new ground by rethinking something that’s already been done.  José has a completely different take on this than Verhoeven had, and with all respect, everybody that’s involved in this movie loved the original and we have a lot of respect for it.  We’re going to have a lot of throwbacks and there’s going to be a lot of fun stuff for the fans of the first movie.  It’s a new story within the old one.”

As we reported not too long ago, one of those new “takes” on the story is by dramatically expanding the character of Robocop’s scientist creator. The role will be played the human acting chameleon Gary Oldman, which will also help tremendously to lend the film some cinematic gravitas. Kinnaman spoke about the honour of working with the acclaimed actor:

“That feels about as surreal as me being RoboCop.  I couldn’t be happier.  He’s pretty much the grand master of the game.  I still think it made everybody that voted for the Oscars look bad that they didn’t vote for Gary Oldman, because what he did is so difficult in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  It’s a completely different kind of thing.  I mean, I loved The Artist. I thought it was fantastic.  I saw it early before the whole hype of it and I thought that French actor (Jean Dujardin) did a great job, but he’s more like that guy.  I’ve seen him in interviews and he is a bit animated like that character.  But, Gary Oldman disappears into his character.  It’s so subtle.  It’s so difficult what he does, and it’s something that I don’t think maybe two or three other actors could do on their best day in the world right now.  It was a master’s performance and he’s on top of his game right now.  He’s in his golden age.  So, I’m very, very excited and we have great scenes that have a lot of the substance that I was talking about.  It’s very much a relationship between Gary Oldman’s character and Alex Murphy.”

You can read the full interview over on Collider where Kinnaman lists his favourite Oldman movies, as well as how things are going on the production.


Last Updated: June 4, 2012

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