Joel Kinnaman Talks Story, Production And More Of Robocop

By Jasper C-H on Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

Speaking to Collider, the actor behind the mechanical policeman in the upcoming reboot Robocop Joel Kinnaman talked about the story of the movie, how production is going, when it starts filming and what it was like to work with Gary Oldman, the actor behind newly-created character for the movie Norton, the scientist who creates Robocop. I have to say, this movie sounds damn good. I haven’t seen the original movies (don’t hurt me!) but I may have to watch them soon. Check out some exercepts below:

When do you start filming RoboCop?

In September. It’s very exciting.

Are you surprised by the level of interest?

A little bit, yeah. It’s like when you say one thing, it’s everywhere, and that’s pretty awesome and a little bit intimidating. It makes you realize you have to think before speaking. That’s a quality I’m continuously evolving. For some reason, it seems like I’m bumping my head into the wall a little bit too many times, but now I think I’m doing alright. It’s fantastic. 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.

How excited are you to work with Gary Oldman?

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.