Hey folks, Harry here... I'm writing this less from the point of view of Harry - guy that runs AICN, and more from the point of view of Harry - producer boy. Ya know... there's a sweeping amount of these remakes coming at us from all sides. Literally every day there seems to be remakes - remakes from movies a year old from another country, remakes of classic films, remakes of films that were just really fun and then remakes of films that had a good idea - but as a film never lived up to that idea. That last group - that's the best to work from. But I get the appeal... I do. Not only do you have a ready made ad campaign that worked before... but even if the studio makes a shit film, the publicity from that film serves as a marketing tool to sell the original film in some sort of deluxe dvd that has promotional material for your new version. Check - gotcha...
Recently I was offered a chance to work with someone on an entire library of films to potentially remake. Over two hundred titles. Things... gosh, things I could imagine cool as hell reimaginings of. Films with titles... oh such great titles. Films I've got posters, lobby cards, press books... and even Forrest Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland files on. Films I've known my whole life... whose beats I instinctively know and have thought what if they'd done this or that... or if only they could have had today's tools.
My initial reaction was to act like a kid in a toy store wanting to grab this one and this one and oh yeah this one. I drew up a list of 7 properties... exchanged a couple of emails... and then went to sleep. Over the course of that rest, I thought about it. Did I really want to put my energy into a film that ultimately... I couldn't have actors in that I loved as much as the originals. A film, who... in replacing the director - I don't believe that there is a cooler director alive, in comparison to the original? Oh sure - I could make it BIGGER. I could attach an actor with less of a cult persona and more of a mainstream marketability. But... at the end of that process - would it be particularly relevant to today? If I made it absolutely perfect - great writing - great directing - great acting... Did I want my name associated with a whole developed slate of remakes?
Right now - I'm working on two originals and one adaptation of something that's never seen anything like it on the big screen. That's cool. I love that my two originals are things that were thought up in considering the entire history of their respective genres - and came out of... what I always dreamt of one day seeing done in that genre, that I've never seen. That's what kept a lot of those old time cool directors going. Reinvention. Lawrence Kasdan once said in making SILVERADO that any story you could ever want to tell, could be told in the confines of a Western. I'll go that better - any story you could ever imagine could be told in the confines of any genre or mixture of genres ever imagined. Having said that... there are remakes I like - but in seeing the announcement that Michael Bay's PLATINUM DUNES, Peter Guber and Universal Pictures are mounting a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's THE BIRDS... I just thought... why?
Is it because, when Michael was a boy and he saw THE BIRDS - he saw the film over and over and over. That it captured his imagination and made him dream of one day making movies? Did he put a worm in his hair and run through a park trying to get a bird to peck it from his head? What was the passionate cry to remake it? There's so many stories out there... Sit down, watch a ton of movies, dive in and put them together in your head, scramble them... think about what has always been done in those TYPES of movies - and dream your own... reimagine not a classic single film, but your take on the genre and the archetypes within. Ultimately - and I guarantee it on this one. You'll not make a film worth the slightest moment of the original in this case. Sure, you can make the bird attacks more intense with CG - you can make more birds attack... and in perfect chaotic formation - but you gonna make it happy at the end? Will ya bring a guy with a flamethrower to roast the feather fiends in a great bird roast? Will ya have the birds attack a major city... like New York and the pigeons turn on the breadcrumb tossers on the park benches.
I don't know... It just seems that with each growing day - there's more and more and more of these things. So often these remakes come from a marketing stand point - which I guess is good business... but how often do we see it approached with say the passion that Peter Jackson has been exhibiting on KONG? Where it has literally been a life long dream to explore what else was on Skull Island, the dream to make Kong more expressive and an honest desire to giddily film guys in biplanes firing off machine guns straight into camera? These remakes... they seem to be being used as easy no-brainer slate launches... to build a large line of product. But Platinum Dunes has made 2 films so far. They're about to do a prequel to THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and another remake - THE HITCHER. Add THE BIRDS to that - and I'm left wondering... have they any original voice at all? Any new dreams? Hitchcock did one remake in his career - of one of his own films. And frankly, I prefer the original, but of remakes of Hitchcock films - he did make the best one to date.
