Gus Van Sant: Return to Bates Motel

Q: Didn't you ever have a moment where you said to yourself, "Oh man, what am I doing remaking this masterpiece?"

A: I never did. Until now, after I've done it. But I feel this way after I've done any movie. Because you're locked in. I mean, I saw Harmony Korine's Gummo after finishing Good Will Hunting, and I was, like, "Oh, look at our movie, then look at Harmony's." I couldn't change Good Will Hunting and I can't change Psycho. It's going to be what it's going to be.

Q: Didn't you ever have a moment when someone you wanted to hire said, "Oh man, what are you doing?"

A: When I asked Danny Elfman if he wanted to rework the original score [by Bernard Herrmann], his reaction was, "You can't do Psycho. They will roast you alive." I kept saying, "It's good if the critics are at odds with an idea. They were at odds with Hitchcock when it came out." I stopped asking him, but when the time came, we called his agent. And he was interested in doing it. I don't think he'd go against his own grain just to do another film with me.

Q: What did you think when you saw your Psycho for the first time?

A: I'm really happy with it. It's what I wanted. By the time we got to the motel, I was no longer evaluating our cut, I was watching the movie. The handful of people who've seen it seem to be entertained by the tale. It's a very weird thing to be watching a movie and connecting to the original as well. It could have been a parody. It's not. Everybody's playing for real, for keeps.

Q: So you've basically left intact the script adaptation Joseph Stefano did for Hitchcock?

A: It's all the original story. There were a lot of little things in the script that weren't in the film that we liked. We tried to do a few of them. Before we started shooting, we didn't know what to expect. Joe became involved in the project and wrote alternate dialogue sequences, changing it to make it more today, adding a few things that he never got to do in the original script. We were prepared to change a few things if we couldn't make it work. It was dialogue, mostly.

Q: Hitchcock's work is full of dreamscapes. The weird, flat, deserty landscape where Marion pulls off and falls asleep by the side of the road is, like, soundstage meets Dali meets real-life Needles, California.

A: Exactly! Hitchcock wasn't "from here," and he used places, or pieces of places, as settings for a story he had to tell. They are dreamscapes, you're right. I read a little blurb for the Hitchcock centenary stamp, which I thought really encapsulated him for today's audience, something about how no other filmmaker was better at blending private concerns and a peculiar view of the world and making them so universal that everyone wanted to see his movies. They said it much better, but, I mean, that is a huge achievement for any artist--to make your private vision applicable to the large general audience.

Q: The shower-murder sequence in the original Psycho sparked a revolution. Given how editing styles have been so altered over the years, how did you approach the shower sequence this time?

A: I just followed the old storyboards. In fact, in every scene throughout the movie, we followed the old storyboards, with minor exceptions. Some scenes are looser than others, but we always got the same shots. We started out that way and we liked it. Our cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, who had done Chen Kaige movies, was used to running around Hong Kong with a handheld camera, and when we told him we wanted to reproduce every shot, it was like, "Oh, God." He got into it, though. I assumed that we would veer off the original at some point, but we didn't actually do that.

Q: Even in the shower sequence?

A: The shower sequence is actually quite different from the original because even though it was storyboarded [the same way], it's more grotesque. It's more disgusting. In Hitchcock's version, that's probably as far as cinema had gone in boldly murdering someone with a knife on-screen. Hitchcock was holding back, I'll bet. They could have made their scene way more grotesque with the footage that they had. We learned, shooting our footage, that just leaving in 10 more frames, you'd get the grotesque part.

Q: Grotesque as in bloodier? But wasn't that exactly what Hitchcock was avoiding, with the idea that restraint made it all the more horrific?

A: He didn't want audiences to throw up. We can go a little more in that direction. Audiences are used to seeing really wild things on the screen. We're more like the full-on shower sequence that Hitchcock could have made but restrained himself because the audience wouldn't have been able to take it. Ours is still stylized, but it's definitely happening before your eyes.

Q: The original Psycho's production design by Robert Clatworthy and Joseph Hurley has such a distinct look. Did you emulate it at all?

A: Let me show you the production sketches for our movie. [He does] We used the same floor plans as the original sets, but the designer, Tom Boone, who is from England, did his own thing. We talked about things, but a lot of the decisions were made by him for his own reasons. I didn't have the time, especially on this project, to get involved in really detailed stuff. The drawings you see were about his apprising me of what he was up to.

Q: The Psycho house is a pop icon. What have you done in your movie?

A: I always thought we'd use the house on the Universal lot. Then I began to reconsider that with Tom. So we started to collect images and to compare them. We realized that, philosophically, we needed to change it because the house on the lot isn't really the original, as you know. And, as you said, it's an icon. We wondered whether we could get another house that does what we think it's supposed to be doing in its own distinctive way. It took a long time to decide what kind of house. At one point, we were going to have a very modern house, since we were updating it. But finally we went back in time to a scary English-countryside, brick, almost plantation kind of house. The original house is more like an old wooden house that reminds me of a skull. Ours reminds me of the figure of death in a hooded cape, like something you might see on the cover of an issue of Hitchcock's old Mystery Magazine. We built our house as a facade right in front of the old Psycho house, not disturbing it. That was cool because the energy of the original house comes right through the facade.

Q: What have you done with the infamous motel?

A: Tom wanted to make it more like a modern, cheesy, cinder block motel. He put a big sign on top of it.

Q: Did you ever feel anything like Hitchcock's "presence" hovering around you?

A: There was an impromptu and not sought-out occurrence of channeling Hitchcock. This channeler "contacted" somebody who said they were Alfred Hitchcock and would talk for a certain amount of time. I've never experienced that before, so I don't really know what I think about it.

Q: Did he sound pissed?

A: [Laughs] We mostly talked about technology, but we did ask something like that. "They" were very, very happy about our doing this. Not having had any previous experience with channeling and having someone channel somebody whose film you're actually doing was really amazing.

Q: Hitchcock referred to Psycho among his associates as his "30-day picture" and he shot it for under $1 million. How did you do shooting the movie quickly and on a very tight budget?

A: In those days, it was relatively inexpensive to build sets and shoot a low-budget movie on them. Today, nobody builds sets and it costs a lot. We had to make a decision to do it low-budget as Hitchcock did or to do it on sets that were going to be similar to ones in the movie. We made the decision to build the sets, which made our movie three times as expensive as his would have been, calculating for changes in the dollar. Our budget doubled to $23 million.

Q: If this experiment of yours works, what will happen?

A: That's a little scary, in a way, because, if it does work, other projects will happen. Buck Henry said, "It's terribly interesting. And, if it works, God help all of us." But, look, I'd rather have another Psycho or The Graduate than have another movie version of some TV show.

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Stephen Rebello is the author of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, published by St. Martin's Press

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