Gus Van Sant: Return to Bates Motel

Q: You're saying nobody's seeing Psycho because it's in black and white?

A: Today, people in their 30s just aren't interested in seeing things that aren't in color. I don't think that way, but it's my experience that the general audience has no attachment to the historic side of things. They're not archivists, they're looking for entertainment.

Q: If the majority of people under 30 avoid Psycho because it's in black and white, couldn't they just as well be turned off by its more classical style of pacing, storytelling, dialogue, editing?

A: We'll see.

Q: How can your Psycho be as surprising, let alone scary and suspenseful, for today's audience as the original was for moviegoers then?

A: That's the question, isn't it? Executives at Universal asked that. My answer was, "Nobody's seen the original Psycho. They only know about the shower scene, little glimpses of this or that." If you did a poll, you'd find people actually haven't seen it and, if they have, like me, they saw it years ago. I think it'll be suspenseful because people don't know what's going on. Even if they know the surprise ending, my guess is that that's not what keeps you in suspense. Hiding of information is not the thing--Hitchcock let people know about the danger and the danger kept them in suspense.

Q: But one of the most successful publicity campaigns in movie history was built around Hitchcock's idea of insisting, "No one, but no one, will be admitted to the theater after the start of each performance."

A: My guess is that even someone who knows the movie as you do won't remember every shot from the original. The story is too powerful not to get wrapped up in.

Q: How much did Scream factor in to Universal's decision to go ahead with your project?

A: A lot. It's sort of a danger because, marketing-wise, Universal started doing, like, "the godmother of all horror movies," "the horror movie to blow away Scream." Scream relates as a granddaughter of Psycho, but the reason an audience goes to it is not quite the reason I want people to see Psycho. Scream has people looking in closets and somebody stalking somebody--to me it's annoying having to endure too many of those pop-ups. It's no more than being scared in the dark. Hopefully, people will see Psycho because it's a really good movie, not just because they want to be scared 16 times.

Q: You must have had your hands full casting Norman Bates for your movie.

A: A big question was, "How much did we want the guy to remind people of Anthony Perkins?" One guy in particular has an extreme Tony Perkins quality--Robert Sean Leonard. So do a number of other people, like Henry Thomas and Jeremy Davies.

Q: Do you think some actors might have been reluctant to play this part because they've got to put on a dress and a fright wig?

A: That's a daunting quality, though I don't really think of that as being a big deal in the movie. There's a lot of strange undertones about the character being completely attached to his mom. He's not gay, but he is weird. The fact that Tony Perkins was a gay man in real life does a weird thing to the whole character and the issue of who Norman Bates is. Tony became such an emblem of the movie. All those things become very confusing when you're casting.

Q: I heard you considered Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon before settling on Vince Vaughn.

A: I think of Matt for everything I do and we have an interest in working together again. But he's one of those under-30 guys who just didn't get it. He has some sort of difficulty with "period" films. I mean, how brilliant is Matt to write Good Will Hunting, but he can't watch a movie with James Cagney because, to him, he's not speaking English. It's a puzzling quality he has. Leonardo would have been fantastic. He heard about the idea right off the bat and I knew he knew that he could step into it. But I also knew he didn't really want to do it. I never asked Ben Affleck directly, but I assumed he wasn't interested because he didn't say, "Hey, I'm interested." I seriously considered Joaquin Phoenix. He was interested in doing it, but he was busy, so it was either wait or forge ahead and we forged ahead.

Q: How did you wind up with Vince Vaughn?

A: Vince was not even in my imagination as being close to right for Norman Bates. But he's a good friend of Joaquin's, and when I met him, he had a really interesting quality I wasn't expecting. He has a certain presence that's friendly, but there's an undercurrent. It had nothing to do with Tony Perkins, and that opened up a way to avoid a stereotype. A day after I took this picture of him [he shows a Polaroid of a close-cropped Vaughn in a T-shirt], it was, like, "Wow, that's a great Anthony--I mean Norman Bates."

Q: Didn't you meet with Drew Barrymore for the Janet Leigh character, Marion Crane?

A: Drew was somebody I met, yes. But with Drew in the role, Marion, instead of being a 27-year-old working in a real estate office, would have had to have been a 17-year-old intern at that office who steals the money. I didn't want to step it down 10 years just because it was the perception of what I would do. I wanted to preserve the integrity of the characters. I considered Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, too. We liked Nicole Kidman for it, but she had conflicts in her schedule.

Q: What made you decide on Anne Heche?

A: Anne had so many nuances. Janet Leigh seemed to have this complete, rock-hard solidity that '50s women had. Anne wasn't as direct. She played the character's strength, but with a kind of ditsiness, like she didn't know she was getting in so far over her head.

Q: And the rest of the cast?

A: Everyone else--Julianne Moore as the sister of the heroine, Viggo Mortensen as the heroine's lover, William H. Macy as the detective--came later. Julianne came in to talk about either of the main female roles.

Q: Hitchcock once lamented that if it hadn't been for the censors, in the opening scene of the movie, when Janet Leigh and John Gavin are lolling on a hotel bed after a lunch hour quickie, her naked breasts would have been brushing his bare chest. Did you take advantage of relaxed censorship?

A: Not as much as Hitchcock would probably do today. I let the actors play what they wanted and they ended up doing a version of what you can do today. Hitchcock was a showman. He also was a pioneer. He was doing something in that scene that hadn't been done. In our case, we couldn't do something new by doing more of what he did back then.

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