Jose Padilha finding RoboCop "hell" to make

Jose Padilha's RoboCop remake had seemingly been progressing ultra-smoothly, with one big-name star after another queuing up to join the production. However, according to the director's friend, Fernando Meirelles, things have not been so peachy behind the scenes.

"I talked to José Padilha last week by phone," said Meirelles in an interview with Cinemacom Rapadura . "He will begin filming RoboCop [ but ] he is saying that it is the worst experience. For every ten ideas he has, nine are cut. Whatever he wants, he has to fight [ for ]."

"‘This is hell here,’ he told me," says Meirelles. "‘The film will be good, but I never suffered so much and do not want to do it again.’ He is bitter, but he’s a fighter."

None of which sounds terribly promising for a film we had been harbouring fairly high hopes for, not least because of its impressive ensemble cast which includes Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Samuel L. Jackson, Abbie Cornish, Jay Baruchel and Michael K. Williams.

Obviously we've got to take into account the 'Chinese whispers' element of the report (Meirelles' comments have been translated into English), and will hold back on too much speculation until we get a statement direct from the horse's mouth.

Given that it will have been Padilha's vision for the project that likely snared those big names in the first place, we can only hope that MGM don't mess with his ideas too much. We'll find out for sure when the film opens in the UK on 9 August 2013.