Director Gus Van Sant explains why he used the "Get Out of jail Free" card he won with Good will Hunting to make a new version of Psycho that's so much like the old version he refers to it not as a "remake" but as a "reproduction."
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Driving into Universal Studios early one morning, I'm reminded of a cryptic bit of wisdom Alfred Hitchcock imparted to me nearly 20 years ago on this very same lot. The master director, then eightyish, philosophized, "The older you get, the stranger it all becomes." How right he was. Especially considering that I'm here to talk with director Gus Van Sant, who has just reshot Hitchcock's 1960 black-and-white masterpiece Psycho in color with a contemporary cast, but otherwise almost unchanged, on many of the same soundstages Hitchcock used. Does it get any stranger? Having written a book on the making of the original Psycho, I have a profound appreciation for this strangeness.
For those of you who weren't around to see Psycho the first time, and have never caught up with it, here are some hints about why Van Sant has some explaining to do. Psycho is cited by critics again and again as one of the best movies ever made, but its influence goes far beyond any mere technical or artistic brilliance. Psycho rocked worldwide audiences as the first movie in which the central character, played by a major star, got savagely bumped off in the first third of the story. It gleefully made major plot points of such screen taboos as transvestism, taxidermy, obsessive mother love, premarital lunch hour trysts in seedy hotels, and a flushing toilet. The movie's then-revolutionary violence pointed the way toward the bloodbaths in everything from Bonnie and Clyde to Scream. And because Hitchcock decreed that no ticket buyer could be admitted into the theater once the film began, Psycho influenced even the way we attend movies. It was that big a deal and more.
So why would anyone, especially Gus Van Sant, whose singular vision gave us films like Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, To Die For and Good Will Hunting, remake a movie that is as close to perfect as a movie can get? As one equally offbeat director put it: "It will either turn out to be the smartest gambit Gus has ever pulled off, or it'll be a major blunder." Oddly enough, that's more or less what Psycho novelist Robert Bloch told Hitchcock after seeing a rough cut of the original movie.
STEPHEN REBELLO: I know you don't consider your movie a "remake" of the original. What is it then? GUS VAN SANT: It's a reproduction. That's our twist. That's what's new. We basically reproduced every shot from Hitchcock's movie and used the original Joseph Stefano script, with a few alterations. Our original concept was: "We shouldn't change anything. Everything should be the same." That's never been done before.
Q: And you've had this notion of "reproducing" Psycho for quite a while, I've heard.
A: For a long time it was just a one-liner, high-concept idea, probably the only one I've ever had. It was a reaction to the projects studios would talk with me about. After Drugstore Cowboy came out in 1989, Universal wasn't interested in doing My Own Private Idaho, but, like other studios, they talked with me about remake ideas. The reason to do remakes was all about marketing, like, "Why take a chance on developing a story nobody knows about when we can take something that's been made before--something we can all have opinions about?" But changing things generally screws remakes up, even when it's perfectly done. The essence is missing. You might as well make an original movie. So I said, "If you guys are going to be remaking things, you should redo Psycho without changing anything, because you don't need to. Just shoot it in color and have, for instance, Jack Nicholson play the detective and Timothy Hutton play Norman Bates." I'd had art school training in the '70s, the era of appropriation, ready-mades, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol. The idea is that the new piece is changed, but it's still the original piece as well. There was some of that in my "high concept."
Q: Film executives don't think like people from art school.
A: No, they weren't interested. And I wasn't rallying for it, but I kept thinking what a good idea it was. This past year, when Hollywood got excited about Good Will Hunting--every studio gets super-hyped, grabbing people off the Oscar tree--Universal and Brian Grazer wanted to rope me in, and I said to my agent: "Here's the idea. Psycho, don't change anything, film it in color, new cast." They said, "Yeah, let's do it." Suddenly I was using my "Get Out Of Jail Free" card for this project.
Q: Did anyone ask you why an individualistic director like yourself would want to "reproduce" another director's great movie?
A: It's never been done before. Isn't that a great reason to try it?
Q: How do you regard Psycho among Hitchcock's works?
A: It stands alone. It's almost like a play. For some movies, it's the way the stories are told that makes the movie great. Psycho is like Waiting for Godot. You can put anybody in the places of the characters, stage it indoors, outdoors, it's going to do its thing. The puzzle has been so worked out it almost wants to be redone. It's very much like an opera, something you should restage and celebrate.
Q: So what's next? James Cameron's Citizen Kane?
A: Hmm. Citizen Kane. Why not? I think it might be one of the films you could remake. There's nothing blasphemous or incorrect about doing it, because I'm not so sure that, outside our community of film obsessives, the public really knows what it is. It would be great to have a Citizen Kane by Martin Scorsese. It's a good thing to reestablish the importance of a work like Psycho or Citizen Kane. Why not redo in color a brilliant, successful film nobody's seeing because it's in black and white? In fact, Hitchcock's daughter, Pat, told me, "It sounds like one of Daddy's ideas."
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.
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