Set Up by Set Up - Interview with Gus van Sant

When word got out Gus Van Sant was remaking Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, there was a lot of "How dare he!" Here, the dating director gives Interview an exclusive look at his artwork inspired by the film. He also tells us why his risky project got him all psyched up

PAIGE POWELL: Some people have jokingly called you psycho for wanting to remake Alfred Hitchcock's unforgettable film Psycho.

GUS VAN SANT: I know.

PP: Yet I sense you'd been wanting to do it for a long time. Because after the success of Good Will Hunting you could have done anything. And, It's Psycho you've chosen.

GVS: Absolutely. I first brought up the idea of remaking Psycho in 1989, but it took a while. Every now and then, when your name is in the papers, the studios want to sign you up for a project. For instance, when Drugstore Cowboy came out, I had a meeting at Universal, which owned Psycho. In the meeting the studio mentioned some of their old films that are great stories and that they intended to remake. My opinion of remakes then and now is that it's too bad studios change the films they are remaking. Routinely they take an older film and update it. They change it stylistically, and usually that method doesn't work for me.

PP: So you didn't approach this remake with an eye to updating, to make it resemble contemporary horror movies which have recently done so well?

GVS: No. Originals have a mood that gets erased when they're redone in a modern fashion. My idea in that first meeting about Psycho was that it would be interesting if we remade something really good and didn't change it, except to make it in color with a modern cast. At the time the studio didn't really latch onto the idea. It wasn't something that had ever been done, and I wasn't yet a player because my films hadn't made a bunch of money. But doing a literal remake was an idea I kept in my head every time I went to Universal. Eventually they said OK. I was thrilled.

PP: So in your version did you shoot Psycho frame by frame to resemble the original?

GVS: Not frame by frame, but setup by setup. And the dialogue is from the original script.

PP: When you first saw the 1960 Psycho, what immediately struck you about it?

GVS: I think I was probably taken with the story. But I was already looking at it from the standpoint of the filmmaking, not just the gore.

PP: What about Hitchcock? Were you a big fan of his from the start?

GVS: In the '60s Orson Welles was the director I was most interested in. I knew about Hitchcock but wasn't necessarily a fan until later, when I went to art school.

PP: Do you feel any similarity between yourself and Hitchcock?

GVS: Well, we're both Leos. But I don't have his dark, macabre sense of humor.

PP: How do you deal with situations or issues that might play differently for today's audiences? For example, the sexist way the Marlon Crone character, played by Janet Leigh before and Anne Hocha now, is treated by her boss?

GVS: I think such treatment is still commonplace today in the places Marion finds herself - car lots, real estate offices. Marion is locked in this weird world where all the men may as well be the same guy. They all seem to be somewhat menacing and oppressive, and then Norman is ultimately the crazy one - the one who seems the least dangerous until the last minute. We just played the way the guys came on to Marion in the manner it was originally written. Men still act the same.

PP: Today?

GVS: Yeah. I mean, guys still make passes at girls.

PP: Does Pat Hitchcock [the director's daughter] play Marion's coworker, the way she did in the original?

GVS: No, she doesn't.

PP: Does she have a cameo?

GVS: No. She visited the set the day we were filming the real estate scene, but she has no cameo in the film.

PP: What character do you identify with most in Psyche? I was surprised you didn't cast yourself as Norman Bates [played in Van Sant's version by Vince Vaughn].

GVS: I probably identify less with the Norman Bates character than with how Anthony Perkins [the original Bates] appears physically. I'm not sure I relate to Norman's living with his mother and working at a motel in the middle of nowhere.

PP: Do you think Hitchcock had anything off-screen in mind when he cast Perkins as the schizophrenic, possibly gay Norman Bates?

GVS: I don't think casting Perkins had to do with anything like his sexuality, which was not an open issue in 1959. It had more to do with wanting the character, who was middle-aged in the book, to be younger and more sympathetic. Anthony Perkins also had a kind of nervous quality they liked, which was part of his appeal as a movie star of his day - he was not a particularly he-man lead but more the vulnerable type.

PP: There is talk that your shower scene Is bloodier and gorier than Hitchcock's.

GVS: It is, partly because it's in color. In 1960 it was perhaps the first time that particular kind of murder had been done in such an elaborate way in a movie. I'm sure if Hitchcock had cut his footage and done the sound differently, and had shot in color, it would have been way more gory. What happened with us is we could use the ends or beginnings of some of the shots that he had cut down. That made it more grisly, not particularly more gory.

PP: When Hitchcock shot Psyche he replaced his usual film photographer, Robert Burks, with John L Russell, Jr., who was a television photographer. Whom did you use? At one point, I thought you were going to use an older, television-production photographer.

GVS: Yeah, we were thinking of using somebody who was familiar with shooting television, to fit into the mold of the way Psycho was originally made, with a low-budget television crew. But as we progressed we opened up the search to find somebody with experience in features rather than television, which I've never worked in. In the end, we hired Chris Doyle, who had never worked in the United States but had worked in Hong Kong and mainland China, doing both low-budget action and kung fu movies and movies with people like Chen Kaige.

PP: When you open the movie are you going to enforce the same rule that Hitchcock suggested - that no one Is allowed Into the theater once the movie starts?

GVS: Yeah, we've been thinking about that. We're also toying with the idea of not having advance press screenings.

PP: I've read that the reviews of the original Psyche were pretty bad at first, but then they changed because the audience was so supportive. And that Hitchcock made a comment that he only made films for audiences, not critics.

GVS: That's true. When the original opened, critics were not allowed to see the movie beforehand. They had to go to regular theaters to watch it, which meant that they couldn't meet their opening-day deadlines. So I think that didn't put them in the greatest mood. Then they saw that the movie wasn't North by Northwest - or any of Hitchcock's usual elaborate large-scope movies - but was very small, very dark, and also grisly and scary and grotesque. So a lot of the critics just said that Hitchcock had made a very nasty little movie. But then audiences really liked it and their opinions changed.

PP: Hey, do you have a Hitchcock-like cameo in your movie?

GVS: Yes. I appear in the same scene Hitchcock did, along with a figure who resembles him.

PP: You yourself wouldn't impersonate the master?

GVS: No!

Paige Powell "Hitch up - interview with movie director Gus Van Sant - Interview".
Interview. Dec 1998. FindArticles.com. 24 Apr. 2008. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1285/is_12_28/ai_53368770