If ever one wished to make a film and have it instantly loathed, the best course would probably be to remake a beloved classic. What then, could possibly be had from a remake of one of the finest films, of one of the finest directors, in all of the history of cinema. Gus Van Sant seems to have given this question far more thought that he was widely given credit for when creating his criminally overlooked, and underrated remake of a Hitchcock classic. Here then, let us go back to 1998 and have another look at Psycho.
Well, where to start. Firstly, the film is in colour. Hitchcock had famously decided to shoot in black and white, when colour no longer presented a technical and financial hurdle. In fact, the year 1960, and specifically the film Psycho, is generally considered the watershed wherafter films were only made in black and white for artistic reasons. Van Sant, with equally deliberate decision making, chose to shoot in colour. But not just colour, there is more going on here. The lighting for the film can’t be considered natural, it’s surreal. Shadows and lines appear in high contrast, almost as if the set was lit for a black and white movie, and then shot in colour. Bright lights glow and bathe their surroundings in a warming glow, a little like the central suitcase in Pulp Fiction. The film is colourful, and vivid, it feels fresh, despite us all having seen it many times before our first viewing.
Then, we have the directing. “Scene for Scene” is the term used. Each scene is reshot with apparently the same setup as the original. The camera in the same place, the lights in the same place, actors speaking the very same lines...but nothing is quite the same. Sets are updated to be equally dated for 1998. The Bates mansion now being furnished in a mid-century style, clothing and colour choices on sets looking equally new and yet dated. Actors deliver their lines, the same old lines, but somehow the nature of the words is different. Marion Crane feels more outspoken, yet more empathetic than we recall. Norman, no longer frail and passive, seems altogether more intimidating when worn by Vince Vaughn. In fact, the actors are another point of difference. While the characters remain the same, the calibre of supporting actors in the 1998 incarnation must be remarked upon. Superbly talented supporting work provides each and every character in the film with more integrity, more depth than we have ever seen before. Everything in Van Sant’s work has been coloured in, and now lives in vivid colour.
Without going any further we begin to see the idea here. What does it mean to remake a film. Is it possible to capture the essence of something we know and love, and reincarnate it? Can art be appropriated? Time and again we see films remade and reimagined, and the criticisms made are predictably repetitive. “Why fix what isn’t broke”, “why change a perfect formula”....”why change anything”. Well, here we are, we are watching a film where they changed nothing. The script and the direction are the same, the work of a master studiously recreated by what can only be a devoted fan. The ultimate remake, presented as a study on the appropriation of art. Here straight away we must separate this film from all other remakes. The others all appear lazy and perhaps even naïve in comparison. They always break from the formula to offer something unique, all the while based on something borrowed. Their interpretation, their expression, will never be honest, because they are anchored to something they didn’t summon, something we all recognise, something fully formed within us. They will always pitch themselves against our expectations, those nostalgic memories that even the original couldn’t possibly live up to.
Then we have Psycho. A film that seems fully aware of this. A remake that seeks to alter nothing of it’s raw material. It seeks only to explore it further. To play it over, to experiment. We have new ideas, but here they don’t infringe upon old ones. Both the original and the remake exist side by side as unique entities, despite being the same. Never have I seen a more lucid statement on what it means to invent. There is no appropriation or imitation when you have truly understood and studied the source of your inspiration, and the more carefully you study your source, the more closely and faithfully you can replicate it, and the more uniquely you can express yourself through it. It’s all pictures on celluloid after all, and that hasn’t been a new idea for a long time.
Van Sant includes a couple of shots that Hitchcock wanted but couldn’t include for technical and censorship reasons, as such offering a more faithful replication of the old master’s vision in those moments. The rest of the film is all Gus Van Sant.
If you haven’t seen it, see it. This is real movie making.
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