The same room as last time? Gus Van Sant's version of Psycho's Bates Motel
What makes a man remake a movie? Does he do it out of love or out of dislike? Does he revere his source material, or nurse a vague contempt for it? I used to think it must be the former: that all those directors who beat a path back to the films of old are on some kind of holy pilgrimage. These days I'm not so sure.
Take the case of Neil LaBute, who is currently putting the finishing touches to his Hollywood rejig of The Wicker Man, Robin Hardy's haunting portrait of a pagan community in Scotland. In an interview with this month's Premiere magazine, LaBute pays a perfunctory tribute to the 1973 original before adding that, when he saw it again recently, "it wasn't as scary as I remembered. I thought it could be taken as raw material to create something new." Or to put it another way: that British movie had a neat idea but bungled it. Here's how it should be done.
The Coen brothers were similarly dismissive when discussing their Southern-fried version of The Ladykillers. Speaking to The Guardian a few years back, director Joel Coen casually trashed a film that is generally cited as one of the key comedies of the 20th century. "It's an Ealing comedy, so there's something very British and genteel about it, which isn't particularly our thing," he sniffed. "So the more genteel aspects of the movie got trashed. Ha! Ha!" Until then I'd always regarded Coen as one of the smarter film-makers of his era. Now it seems that he's just another Hollywood bozo who wouldn't know a good film if it came and pushed him under a train.
What makes the comments of both LaBute and Coen so depressing is that they are such dunderheaded misinterpretations. Yes, The Wicker Man is an odd little film; frequently cheesy and sometimes even unintentionally comic. And yet surely it is this very oddness that makes the picture so uniquely terrifying.
By the same token, dismissing The Ladykillers as "genteel" totally misses the point of what a nasty, vicious and downright subversive animal it really is. Small wonder the Coen brothers remake was so bland and redundant (and yes, genteel). I'm betting the new, improved Wicker Man won't be much cop either.
That said, I'm not sure that dislike might not be just as valid a motivation as love when it comes to remaking movies. Steven Soderbergh showed a healthy disrespect for the Ocean's Eleven and the result was a film far superior to the original. At the other end of the spectrum, Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot paean to Psycho managed to make a Hitchcock nail-biter look almost eerily dull.
Pushing this through to its logical conclusions, I am beginning to wonder if outright loathing might not be the best motivating factor of all. If so, perhaps we should turn over the classics to directors who hate their guts; who have absolutely no affinity for them and come to bury them, not praise them. This would work as a kind of billion-dollar game of consequences; a grand orgy of creative vandalism. Let Brett Ratner tackle the remake of Tokyo Story! Turn the Dardenne brothers loose on Weekend at Bernie's! Now those are reinterpretations I would pay good money to see.
