Out promoting “Elite Squad : The Enemy Within”, which finally gets a stateside release this week, director Jose Padilha was questioned about his plans for a certain future project.

The Brazilian filmmaker is directing a reboot of Paul Verhoeven’s “RoboCop” for MGM and tells Coming Soon that he hopes to explore deeper issues within his version than the 1987 flick.

“‘RoboCop’ the first movie was fantastic,” he told us. “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, ‘To when do you lose you humanity?’ The way it does that is by replacing body parts with machine parts, and that’s very smart because guess what? It’s going to happen!”

“I have my take on it,” he continued, “And I can tell you this: In the first ‘RoboCop’ when Alex Murphy is shot, gunned down, then you see some hospitals and stuff and then you cut to him as RoboCop. My movie is between those two cuts. 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?”

Padilha, who said he needs an American actor to play Alex Murphy, suggested he might shoot some of the film in his trademark handheld-style.