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Newsweek (1998) - 'Psycho' Analysis

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"Psycho" Analysis.

Director Gus Van Sant defends his controversial decision to remake Hitchcock's classic shocker. All he's added is color.

Gus Van Sant has been hearing one question put to him a lot these days. The question is, WHY? Why would anyone -- least of all the idiosyncratic director of "Drugstore Cowboy" and "Good Will Hunting" -- want to do a remake of "Psycho"? Not, mind you, a remake that reinterprets and reinvents the classic 1960 Hitchcock shocker but one that apparently duplicates the original virtually line by line and shot by shot, only this time in color?

Van Sant, 45, may be the only person puzzled by the question. "I wasn't really aware that I had crossed some bounds. Why are they asking why? For me there are many, many reasons: the biggest reason of all is that nobody's ever done it. If you put things together that have never been put together nobody knows what will happen -- to me that's a great reason to try it. You might discover something."

No one knows whether Van Sant's "Psycho" is a travesty or a triumph: his controversial experiment has been kept tightly under wraps. No press has been allowed to see the film before its Dec. 4 opening -- a decision, claims Universal Pictures, that duplicates the strategy of the original release, which also banned advanced screenings.

Van Sant's second reason is more paradoxical. The 1998 "Psycho" -- with Vince Vaughn in the Tony Perkins role as the mama's boy proprietor of the Bates Motel and Anne Heche following Janet Leigh's wet footsteps into the motel's fateful shower -- is part of Van Sant's campaign against remakes. He hates them. "It's an anti-remake film. Why do people take films that are really well done and change the dialogue and change the shots and call it the same movie? I don't have much faith in Hollywood's ability to do remakes. There's a remake curse."

Those who are already condemning the project as a cynical, heretical sellout, a fall from grace from a once independent filmmaker, don't understand who they are dealing with. "I come from an art-school background where we had the mentality of appropriation and ready-made art," says the director. "Where you take a bicycle wheel and it's art." Little will people know when they plunk down their money for a good scare that they are paying for an encounter with conceptual art.

Van Sant's notion is so unprecedented that many people refuse to believe the new "Psycho" really will be the same picture. Rumors float on the Internet that all this talk is a smoke screen to conceal the big surprises Van Sant has up his sleeve. Indeed, the first thing you will see in the new "Psycho" -- an aerial shot over Phoenix -- wasn't in the original. But it turns out that Hitchcock did a long helicopter shot for his opening, but cut it because the technology wasn't up to snuff. With access to Hitchcock's production notes and shooting script Van Sant found himself using things Hitchcock discarded. One example: pieces of Bernard Herrmann's score are restored in Danny Elfman's reproduction of the notorious soundtrack with its shrieking violins. The original screenwriter, Joseph Stefano, was called in to make minor adjustments to the dialogue.

The idea first came to Van Sant when he was meeting with Universal executives in 1989. They owned all these old properties, which would cost them nothing to rework. Was there one the director might be interested in redoing? "Psycho," he said, pulling the notion out of the air. "But only if you don't change anything." This was not a concept the suits could wrap their minds around. But a decade later Van Sant had made a movie that grossed more than $100 million -- "Good Will Hunting." Numbers like that, in the eyes of the studios, turn your idle whims into brilliant inspirations. Meeting with Universal again, he resurrected his "Psycho" idea. He loved the "austerity and simplicity" of the movie, and thought it more conducive to a remake than his very favorite Hitchcock, "The Birds." To his amazement, they said OK, and for a shaky moment Van Sant had to gulp and ask himself, do I really want to do this?

To the intellectually playful Van Sant, this new movie is as deliberately anti-auteurist as moviemaking gets -- he has erased his own ego as a director. "My filmmaking is not particularly like Alfred Hitchcock's," he says with some understatement. He found that when he tried to add a new scene, in his own style, the whole design fell apart. Also, as the director cheerfully admits, "This was quite a bit a marketing idea."

What will make Van Sant's "Psycho" an entirely new experience -- even more than Christopher Doyle's color cinematography or the updated set decorations -- is the actors, who were all allowed, within the parameters of Stefano's screenplay, to create their own characters. Julianne Moore, who plays the sister (the Vera Miles role), explains her approach. "The movie was made in 1960 so it was a little anachronistic, and you have to translate it into your own vernacular. Instead of just being kind of upset, I tried to make her kind of angry and aggressive. It wasn't a matter of being feminist or not; it was a matter of making it work in a somewhat modern setting."

Anne Heche watched every one of Janet Leigh's scenes right before she did hers. "I did as much exactly as she had done as I possibly could. Down to what hand she held her purse in and how she walked. I really tried to mimic her behavior, the same way that Gus was mimicking Hitchcock's, and yet putting a '90s spin on it." For William H. Macy, who plays the Martin Balsam role, "It's not unlike going to see 'Hamlet' again. The scripts were the same, the sets were similar. I think it's going to be remarkably different even while being the same."

For troubled Universal, reeling from the disappointment of "Meet Joe Black" (a remake of "Death Takes a Holiday" gone wrong) and a disastrous year at the box office, its relatively modest $25 million investment seems a safe bet. It's counting on a vast new audience of kids who will be setting out for the Bates Motel for the first time. That's who Van Sant had in mind, says Heche. "Gus's whole theory was it's not about making it better, it's about 'Look how brilliant Hitchcock is; I'm gonna do it and give it to a new generation as a gift'."

"It's exactly what I wanted to make," claims Van Sant, who is thinking of returning to low-budget independent filmmaking in the future. But you can't be sure what this guy will do next. You see, he has this crazy idea, which he confides with only the slightest twinkle in his eyes: "I'd be interested in redoing 'Psycho' again." Any takers?

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