Back to the Bates Motel - 1998 remake of 'Psycho' - Brief Article

GUS VAN SANT TAKES A STAB AT REMAKING THE CLASSIC HITCHCOCK THRILLER PSYCHO. BUT WHY?

When director Gus Van Sant announced he was remaking Alfred Hitchcock's suspense masterpiece Psycho, the reaction wasn't what you'd expect. Of course film historians and Hitch maniacs took umbrage at the fact that Van Sant was daring to tread on the hallowed ground of the mother of all modern suspense thrillers.

But the master's daughter, Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell, pays no more mind to the critical community than her famous filmmaker dad did. "He made his movies for audiences, not for critics," she says from her home in Santa Barbara, Calif. "Which is why many of his films look like they were made yesterday."

And today, and tomorrow. Psycho is but one of Hitchcock's movies that is currently being revamped and reimagined. Earlier this year we saw A Perfect Murder, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Michael Douglas, which was a reinterpretation of Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder with Grace Kelly and Ray Milland. Christopher Reeve directed and starred in a TV version of Rear Window for ABC, which was scheduled to air November 22.

Other pending Hitchcock revisits include an adaptation of his 1935 film The 39 Steps as well as reworkings of Spellbound, To Catch a Thief, and, possibly, Strangers on a Train, his most homoerotic film (plotline: A tennis pro and a spoiled rich boy meet on a train and strike up a peculiar friendship). In fact, Hitchcock even remade himself at one point, turning out a 1956 wide-screen color version of his 1934 classic The Man Who Knew Too Much, with the newer film starring James Stewart and Doris Day.

But all these remake ideas pale in comparison to Psycho, Hitchcock's most successful and influential film. When it was released in 1960, the movie broke new ground by presenting Anthony Perkins as the twisted motel owner Norman Bates, the first in a series of wacko screen cross-dressers (Dressed to Kill, Silence of the Lambs). Psycho also upped the ante on graphic on-screen violence, doing for showers what Steven Spielberg's Jaws would later do for wading in the surf.

When Katie O'Connell, Hitchcock's granddaughter and executor of his estate, heard about Van Sant's Psycho redux, she was also encouraging. "I think it's kind of flattering," she says. "I was told that Van Sant is a big fan of my grandpa's and that he was interested in doing Psycho to expose a classic film to a younger generation that won't go see black-and-white films."

Though her dad's film still plays with the kind of immediacy Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell speaks about, Van Sant says black-and-white movies are to this generation of filmgoers what silent films were to his--ancient history. "For 50% of the current moviegoing audience, there's something antiquated about a movie that was made almost 40 years ago in black and white."

Not that this gives him license to trash a film classic, Van Sant admits. But then this is no ordinary remake. Other than shooting the film in color with several of Hollywood's hottest young actors (including Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Julianne Moore, and Viggo Mortensen), Van Sant has decided to leave well enough alone. He is using Joseph Stefano's original adaptation of Robert Bloch's novel and Hitchcock's shooting script. After all, he reasons, why remake a film if you're going to change it completely? "I've never seen a remake accomplished the way I'd expect it to be, which is to redo the film and keep the story and shooting style."

Besides, he knows he's playing with perfection here. "I would never really want to do Psycho with the idea of it being more effective," he continues. "That would be like improving Einstein's theory of relativity. Hitchcock spent his life doing suspense movies. This is my first. I need to stick close to the original, or I might blow it."

Ironically, the original film starred a closeted gay actor in Perkins, and the new version stars an openly gay actor in Heche. Still, don't expect to see Heche's bare breasts in the film's opening scene, in which she engages in a nooner with lover Mortensen. She'll be wearing a bra just like Janet Leigh did in the original. Nor will Van Sant go any further with nudity and violence in the famous shower sequence, undeniably one of the most iconographic moments in film history. Even people who've never seen Psycho are familiar with the terrifying pizzicato strains of Bernard Herrmann's music and the knife attack on a naked figure behind a shower curtain. Van Sant exercised restraint and did not revert to the novel's bloody account of the murder, which includes decapitation.

"It's already pretty graphic," he says. "And I don't want to compete, with the grotesqueness of splatter movies today." The color of blood flowing down the drain is as far as he will go, though it still may cause, a new generation of viewers to opt for baths. "The scene is still pretty out there," he adds.

Even if Psycho succeeds in its reincarnated form, don't expect Van Sant to travel down the remake trail again. "I don't know if I'd ever do this again," he confesses. "Unless it's maybe another remake of Psycho," he dead-pans. And, as with the master of the macabre himself, you're not quite sure whether Van Sant is kidding or not.

Natale is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.

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