The announcement that Gus Van Sant planned to remake Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” was a shocker. Why would anyone want to approach that 1960 horror classic, the godfather of slasher films? How would anyone approach it – especially when one got to the shower scene?
Van Sant, an expert craftsman whose previous films include “Good Will Hunting” and “Drugstore Cowboy,” has opted to recreate much of the original film shot by shot, except in color with different actors: Vince Vaughn replacing Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates and Anne Heche in Janet Leigh’s role. The director has said he is working in the tradition of appropriated art, as Andy Warhol did with his Campbell’s Soup cans. Whatever.
Still, the “Psycho” shower murder may be cinema’s most famous 45 seconds, at least in terms of how it was filmed. Hitchcock used a dizzying array of quick cuts to evoke the grisly killing without ever showing the knife entering the skin. Van Sant has indicated his shower scene will be more graphic than Hitchcock could get away with in 1960. We’ll see when the new version opens Dec. 4.
Meanwhile, we wondered how other directors would approach this seemingly untouchable scene. To many of them, the idea of remaking “Psycho” is almost blasphemous, and more than a few refused to give any answer. (One A-list director’s assistant said the director was just “too focused” on preproduction of his new movie to offer any response.) Still, a daring few were willing to tackle our question: “If you were filming a remake of `Psycho,’ how would you shoot the shower scene?”
THE RESHOOTERS
Bryan Singer (“Apt Pupil,” “The Usual Suspects”): “One shot, no cuts. One shot outside the bathroom through a crack in the door.”
John Waters (“Pecker,” “Pink Flamingos”): “More gore and she lives. That would be the only way to surprise anyone.”
Roberto Benigni (“Life Is Beautiful,” “Johnny Stecchino”): “This is a scene that we quote a lot of times. It’s like a verse of Shakespeare. Now you can only do like Mel Brooks did (in the parody `High Anxiety,’ in which the shower-taker is attacked with a rolled-up newspaper); you can make fun about this. If you (try to) redo it in a very serious and thrilling way, I would be scared. I’d just cut the scene. No shower.”
Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca,” writer of “The Truman Show”): “Of course the genius of it is that you see very little harm come to her, and most of it is cutaways to shadows or other images. You never see the blade hitting skin. I would probably go even further and not even go into the bathroom. You would hear everything from behind the door. It would be a very cheap scene.”
Todd Haynes (“Velvet Goldmine,” “Safe”): “I would probably want to do it from outside the curtain or something. You’d have to go in such a different direction to be interesting that I wouldn’t want to see it in thousands of cuts. Maybe it would be a sustained shot from outside the room that would be slowly tracking into the door, and you would hear the sounds and you’d see a little bit of it.”
Eileen Boevers (executive/artistic director of Apple Tree Theatre in Highland Park): “Probably shooting from above. The limitations on nudity are much less now, so I probably would look for some different angles and take it from above so we would be looking down on her and seeing the shadow on the other side of the curtain, seeing her being the recipient of what is happening. But I don’t think I could ever get away from the image of the blood going down the drain because it has lived with me ever since. It’s hard to improve on brilliance.”
George Tillman Jr. (“Soul Food”): “I would film it the exact same way Hitchcock did because it’s a masterpiece, you couldn’t do it any other way. Some things are better left just the way they were done.”
Janet Leigh (the original “Psycho” shower victim): “I have no idea. I have no idea. I don’t know. I really don’t know. (In a derisive tone) I guess because you can today, I guess you’d have her being nude and show the knife going in and the blood coming out.”
THE REFUSERS
Edward Zwick (“The Siege,” “Courage Under Fire”): (Making pained noises) “I’m the wrong person to ask that question. I see no reason to reshoot the shower scene. I see no reason to remake `Psycho.’ Why not repaint `A Starry Night’? I don’t see the point. I never would.”
C’mon, let’s say someone put a gun to your head and said you had to remake “Psycho.”
“People don’t put guns to people’s heads to make movies.”
John McNaughton (“Wild Things,” “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”): “I wouldn’t take the assignment. To me it’s like taking `War and Peace’ and copying it out longhand. I wouldn’t remake a picture unless I thought I could improve upon it, and I don’t really think I could.
It’s a very useful exercise for an artist to copy a master painting. To have somebody fund you to do that, I’m sure that will help (Van Sant’s) technique. But then to sell tickets to it, it’s like selling the painting. What is it? It’s a copy.”
Bobby Farrelly (“There’s Something About Mary”): “Only in my worst nightmare would I even think I would be attempting to remake `Psycho.’ It was the understatement of so much that he did, it was what he left so much to your imagination, is what made it work so much. I think if you went back and looked at it frame for frame, it’s not explicitly graphic violence. It’s more about fear, and fear is something that the audience feels instead of sees. Today’s filmmakers want to show you everything, want to show you the special effects they can do with blood and gore, and I’m afraid that’s what might happen with someone remaking it. I would just like to see someone do it closer to the original, which was all about implication.”
Todd Solondz (“Happiness,” “Welcome to the Dollhouse”): “I wouldn’t even approach it. I think that Gus Van Sant is a very, very talented filmmaker. I have a great respect for much of his work, so I’m very curious to see his movie, but I’m not sure that I would have the gumption to tackle it. I wouldn’t do it because I know whatever I do is not going to be as good or as interesting or as compelling as what is now so iconic and vetted in that collective imagination, so to speak.”
Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”): “I couldn’t even improve upon the original.”
THE UNIMPROVABLES
Many other movie scenes also would be unthinkable for directors to revisit because of how cleverly they were filmed (as opposed to the performances or dramatic payoffs). Here are 10 scenes we’d deem untouchable:
– Car-and-train chase in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection.”
– Gene Kelly’s rain dance in “Singin’ in the Rain.”
– Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco snake their way into a nightclub in Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas.”
– Odessa Steps massacre of Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” (though Brian DePalma partially recreated it for the climactic shoot-out of “The Untouchables”).
– Cary Grant fleeing from a crop-duster in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.”
– Little alien and kids bike-riding across the sky, past the moon in Steven -Spielberg’s “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.”
– Final slow-motion bullet ballet of Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde.”
– Ticking-time-bomb/traffic-across-the-border tracking shot that opens Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil.”
– The star-gate light show in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
– Post office shoot-out at the beginning of Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.”
— Mark Caro, Michael Wilmington
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What are your unimprovables? Write to A&E, 435 N. Michigan, Chicago 60611. Or e-mail to ctc-arts@tribune.com. Include your name, address and phone number.
