Tony Scott, Brian Helgeland to Remake Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch
Fans of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, steel yourself: The guy who last put Denzel Washington on top of a runaway train (and made bank at the box office doing so) wants to remake the groundbreaking 1969 Western. Deadline reports that director Tony Scott -- whose most recent film was last year's Unstoppable -- is negotiating to reboot the classic Peckinpah film. He also wants to remake his own Top Gun, so clearly nothing is sacred. Read the news after the jump and weep into your cowboy boots.
According to Deadline, Scott is hoping to reboot The Wild Bunch, the tale of an old-guard gang of outlaws facing the changing world as they embark on one last heist, with his Man on Fire and Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 writer Brian Helgeland on scripting duties. He's also reportedly eyeing the busy Jeff Bridges for another film, Hell's Angels:
Fox 2000's Hell's Angels is set around the Laughlin riots of 2001 when the Angels were caught up in a war with rival gang The Mongols. The drama revolves around a friendship that develops between Barger and a young drifter mechanic with a gift for fixing motorcycles.
Deadline points out that Scott and his brother Ridley have a bit of reboot/remake fever of late, since this blasphemy news comes hot on the heels of Ridley's announcement that he'll remake his own arguable genre classic, Blade Runner. So chime in below with your thoughts on both Scott men and their designs on your beloved classic films: Is there room to improve or different territory to explore with great films like these?
· Tony Scott Boarding 'The Wild Bunch' While Revving 'Hell's Angels' As Next Pic [Deadline]
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Comments
Why?
To: All of Hollywood
Re: Remakes.
Dear Hollywood
Please go f*ck yourself with a stiff wire brush.
Sincerely.
Furious D
That's disappointing because I like Tony Scott. He's made a lot of duds in his career but some great ones as well. But of all the people to remake it Tony is the last one. The Wild Bunch was infamous for it's graphic violence (tame by today's standards) so it's sad to imagine a PG-13 Tony Scott version. I'll bet Tarantino's pissed. It's now only a matter of time before we see "so and so plans to remake The Godfather, director eyeing Robert Patterson for Michael Corleone role."
Anybody remaking The Wild Bunch steps on what I consider sacred ground. Peckinpah's creation will stand as one of the finest motion pictures of all time. The exquisite balance of character, motion, violence, camera work, acting, theme. To allow Scott to have his shot at rebooting perfection is absurd and insulting.
This sounds real bad, Tony Scott, while a decent director is by no means Sam Peckinpah.
Are you kidding? This is awesome news!
The Wild Bunch is good but there's room for improvement.
My motto with remakes is: if you don't get it right first time then you have to do it again!
Now, I'm not arguing that Sam Peckingman wasn't an important director. He pioneered slo-mo, after all. But Tony Scott has added more significantly to what's known as "film language". We're talking blue filters and desaturation software for instant mood and swirling helicopter shots and quick edits to make everything exciting. Just imagine those in a western! Combine such visual pyrotechnics with an updated hard rock soundtrack and, well, wowza! I'm thinking a bit of Nickelback (or U2 or Foo Fighters) would sit well with cowboys walking away (in slo-mo) from an exploding town (in slo-mo). Throw in some Coldplay for the staring into the distance reflective moments, and The Escape Club's "Wild Wild West" for the comic interlude where a drunk three-legged dog trying to lick its balls but falls in a puddle!
Taylor Lautner, Channing Tatum and Jason Statham would fit this material beautifully but there might be roles there, too, for some less "obvious" tough guys -- Efron, Bieber, Manny from Modern Family. Controversially, how about a cowgirl or two? Blake Lively would be amazing in spurs, IMHO.
Tagline: "There's wild, there's wilder and then there's... THE WILDEST BUNCH".
Trailer quote: "If they bust a move, smoke their asses!"
I for one, can't wait.
It'll be a chance to make the Strother Martin and LQ Jones really gay, as in flaming, maybe even cross-dressing.
Well, now here we are a discussin' ourselves another western, I reckon.
Couldn't someone remake The Searchers, instead? De-Wayne it as the Cohen Bros. did True Grit. You know, really make it... searchier?
I kid. I kid.
How have we devolved so deeply into a culture that needs pre-experienced objects to consume for the purposes of expressing our allegiances to a brand, a lifestyle? Can we truly not watch something we don't already know how to respond to or how to recognize what our response should be as a member of whatever abstract cultural sub-sect to which we consider ourselves an initiate.
That's what a re-make is. A lifestyle event. New Coke. And if it increases the sales of the new deluxe 2-disc version of Coke Classic, then so be it...
I watch young people's faces as they try to locate not what they think or experience while watching a film, but instead what they think a cool person is supposed to think or experience so they can try to exhibit that. As if the film is an opportunity for another to o observe their viewership.
This is where canned laughter came from. So you'll be told what's funny and the communal laughter will take away your anxiety of whether or not you are in on the joke.
This is mass insecurity. Young teens tend to be this kind of audience. When people grow more experienced, this alienation lessens. That doesn't seem to be happening anymore.
Are we really this insecure, this addicted to only the familiar?
Don't answer that.
A list of potential reasons why everything lately is a remake:
A) The studio suits just want opening weekend mass name recognition appeal to a pre-built audience.
B) We, as an audience, just want to consume comforting nostalgia.
C) Contemporary Directors are, on the whole, glorified graphic design students, and thus, uninspired, enjoy laboring to literally re-package inspired objects.
D) The human era ended when we changed over to an experience-less information culture. Tribal wars over existing art objects from the human era are the only topics left to try to squeeze an identity or mythology from to feed our rapidly expanding symbolic poverty.
I mean, how many stories about someone sitting around staring at his phone anxiously waiting for a text message can someone make?
Id rather see Johnny Depp wait (in a funny hat) for a txt back from a treacherous girlfriend than a Tony Scott super kinetic, super shaky, ultra-colorfully filtered headache-inducingly lurid and loud remake of The Wild Bunch.
I reckon.
What, no Young Guns remake?
I hear Charlie Sheen is available. (Coughs. Rolls eyes. Has massive Stroke.)
Seriously, that must be in development, though. Lautner and Pattinson. Get yr spurs on.
Complaining about Hollywood only making remakes, reboots, sequels and prequels is like declaring war on the sun: admirable, but utterly futile.
Sunrise: a Song Of Two Humans did give us A Place In The Sun. And Hamlet gave us Bambi.
It can be an inspired and vital choice. And as Aristotle pointed out, we're all just "ripping off" nature.
There's just something different about a remake or reboot, or a "riff on the theme of" in this era where a film is only made as the last step in supporting the promotional campaign for that film.
To be less abstract: I just did not need Rob Zombie's Halloween. It actually harmed my soul in measurable quantities.
So, to you weeping for the inevitable rape of your preferred property-- I offer you my shoulder. just let it out, we'll find a new normal some day.
This is the breathtaking bittersweetness and poignancy I needed to start my weekend. Thank you!
At first I misread it as "The Wild One", and imagined Tony Scott's trademark harsh (or maybe ugly is a better word) lens getting a close up of Shia LaBeouf's pores haplessly straining to ooze Brando. The HORROR!
Hello. I'm thinking: you need a vacation?
I vote C and maybe D.
As a teacher, I have noticed in the latest generation of students a shocking lack of basic curiosity. It strikes me as tragic and weird. Without curiosity, there is no motor for exploration. People want things handed to them. Hence, the appeal of the remake?
Sigh.
That was meant to be in response to JK 2:06 am.
Yes, a lack of curiosity, a lack of the willingness to yield control of a situation long enough to engage with anything. A lack of the basic belief that anything other than the preservation and stasis of personal fantasy and the absolute protection of ego is worth pursuing.
That's why they text each other from across the room. They insist on never having to inhabit a deliberate self fully enough to have to draw boundaries, to say no, to deal with the consequences of interactions. To deal with the irreducible reality of another being, and in so doing become irreducibly real themselves.
Each of us just floats in space now, looking for mirrors. And then we blame the mirror for what we see.
They don't have selves, instead they have an internal apparatus that selects selves to temporarily inhabit. They are the blank children in the gallery, examining masks. So, everything they look at is a potential identity. To flirt with, enter, and discard with absolute unaccountability.
And underneath that mask they are both virginal and exhaustively cosmopolitan and jaded- having experienced nothing but the successful avoidance of being.
The consequence of avoiding all consequences is to exist as an infantile whore- young and old simultaneously, possessed of the blind hunger of the mindless newborn married to the inarticulate dread and exhaustion of the old crone. Both hovering in helplessness as the center where life would have been aches and implodes.
How does this over-reaching diatribe relate to film?
Well, a STORY takes places when the audience understands an irreducible universal human nature. A character wants something, has to find a way, has to make a choice, has to deal with a consequence, has to deal with the repressed reality of his own worthlessness, has to exist with courage against the void.
When films and other media objects become a selection of mirrors that the identity-inverted look to simply as facilitating lifestyle accessories, something to enhance their personal promotion-- the promotion of an ironic "I am everything and nothing, depending!" kind of contingent, undifferentiated internal void that is the abstract opposite of the bound, chosen consistency that is an identity-- they become the poison to which they were originally the inspired antidote.
A celebration of the right to an infinite selection of possible personae is not a celebration of "the self." It is, instead, the celebration of stalling. Waiting out your life trying to pick out your "self." The celebration of non-being.
The void space inside of being is not definitive, it's simply the primal condition of being. The response to that void space is what a person consists of. That's who you are.
You are what you do, not what you say you are. You are what you deliberately choose, not your right to promote the idea that you have no choices.
That is, of course, the real nature of THE Choice: a choice between admitting you have a choice and continuing to promote the idea that you do not.
So, you get a sulking form, arms crossed, eyes rolling, saying something like "nobody thinks I am interesting and fascinating" as if being perceived as such is an entitlement.
"Well, try BEING INTERESTING AND FASCINATING, and perhaps you will be seen AS YOU ARE."
Shakes head, "No, I will feel interesting and cool if you'll start telling me you see me that way. It's your lack of collaboration in promoting my chosen self-myth that is why I am failing to become it…"
"And you know what makes a person seem interesting and fascinating? When they ARE INTERESTED AND FASCINATED BY something beyond themselves and their own inconsolability."
Rolls eyes, "What… Ever…" Deletes me from phone.
That's why we connect to a character in a film and it is the source of the transformative power of the art.
And there are, frighteningly, few characters left.
Lack of curiosity? Yes.
I think it may be more. I think it's...
bad faith.
DAmn! I feel like a charcter in The Wild Bunch getting hit by bullitz of da truth. PREACH it, dude! your shit always makes sense, even when i ain't sure how i can read well enough to comprehend it. Seroiusly, though, did yu guys see Domino 🙂
Hahah @MA, Great Job
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The team resurrected an extinct frog, Rheobatrachus silus