With the release this week of Funny Games US (to give it its BBFC-certified title), Michael Haneke joins the small group of directors who have delivered remakes of their own films. It's a peculiar thing to do, if not artistically - a fair few novelists and composers return to works published, performed or put aside some years earlier - then practically. The effort and resources required to make a movie dwarf the gesture of putting an afternoon aside to look at that manuscript again.
So you'd imagine such directors would have a pretty good reason to do it. Haneke is not the first foreign-language director tempted by the opportunity to reach a wider English-speaking audience. His shot-for-shot approach, however, resists the trend of watering down or familiarising troubling subject matter. Takashi Shimuzi's US version of The Grudge lost some - though not all - of its weirdness in translation; George Sluizer, meanwhile, signed up for full-on castration by remaking The Vanishing with a bastardised ending that would make The Player's Griffin Mill proud.
In other cases, changing technology might prompt an established director to return to familiar territory. DeMille turned out his first version of The Ten Commandments in 1923, a silent epic of grandiose pomposity; 33 years later he returned to the material to deliver a VistaVision epic of grandiose pomposity, now without the contemporary morality tale but with added Charlton Heston. 1956 also saw Hitchcock release his second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much; like DeMille, he couldn't resist beefing up the action, to questionable dramatic benefit. On the other hand, when Ozu returned in 1959 to 1934's A Story of Floating Weeds - hardly a model of hysterical bombast - he pared down its characteristically heartbreaking simplicity even further.
There are more cases of such returns, from Tod Browning to Frank Capra to Roger Vadim. But are there other filmmakers you'd like to see joining them? Sidney Lumet is back on top form with Before the Devil Knows You're Dead - maybe he could revisit the template of 12 Angry Men for the very different America that exists half a century on? Might Steven Soderbergh be tempted to re-imagine Sex, Lies and Videotape for the YouTube era? And if Ridley Scott really can't stop fiddling with Blade Runner, perhaps he should start again from scratch...
