|
|
Features
|
|
The Horror, the Horror
Even though his last two movies have been remakes, John Moore draws the line at Casablanca and Citizen Kane.
Tuesday, June 6, 2006 at 4:00 PM
By Ian Spelling
|
|
|
Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
Photo
|
|
Not an obvious leading man
|
|
John Moore may be going straight to Hell.
The filmmaker, who’s already done a remake of The Flight of the Phoenix, has now gone and remade The Omen. The original film, directed by Richard Donner, became a horror classic upon its release in 1976 and now, Moore hopes that audiences will clamor for a beat-by-beat remake designed to capitalize on today’s admittedly cool release date tie-in of June 6, 2006 (6-6-06).
Still, the 35-year-old Irishman, who came from the world of TV commercials, admits he was never secure in the notion that moviegoers would buy into the idea of a film as leisurely paced as its 1976 counterpart.
“You know what?” he begins during a recent interview with FilmStew in New York. “There wasn’t a day gone by where I didn’t remark to Glenn Williamson, the producer, that I felt anxious. I said, ‘You know what? I don’t know if people are going to sit around and listen.’”
|
|
20th Century Fox
Photo
|
|
Moore, on set with his little devil
|
|
|
“You kind of have to pay attention to The Omen,” he continues. “Otherwise, it’s just some guy saying a poem. Honest to God, I have had cold sweats thinking, ‘Jesus, we should have done a f*cking page one rewrite on this one.’ But we didn’t, and I’m glad we didn’t. We would have been pandering.”
“This is a fragile piece of work. If you don’t follow that poem, if the text of the poem and the delivery of the poem isn’t embraced, understood, then it’s a fragile thing. That’s also part of the reason I didn’t want to gore up the movie. The movie has shocking moments, but they’re not cheap and gory.”
At the end of the day, Moore and his cast, which includes Liev Schreiber as the American politician who unwittingly replaces his dead baby with an infant Antichrist, Julia Stiles as his gravely endangered wife, Rosemary’s Baby star Mia Farrow as the couple’s all-too-perfect nanny, Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick as the demonic six-year-old Damien, David Thewlis as a doomed photographer and Pete Postlethwaite as a doomsday-spouting priest - are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
In other words, some people will complain that this is a shot-for-shot remake, while others would have bitched if he had greatly tampered with the original. Unless the movie makes an absolute killing at the box office, everyone will find something to grouse about.
|
|
Warner Bros.
Photo
|
|
A friendship that should be left alone
|
|
|
“Even then, you don’t win,” Moore insists, “because you have to go to bed at night and suffer that criticism, which is part of the contract of doing a remake. When you sign up, you are signing up to be criticized for doing a remake. It is inevitable.”
“I don’t know the answer,” he adds. “And I don’t say this in defense of doing remakes. But it’s curious to me, and I think this has something to do with snobbery. There’s an ironic example not 20 yards from here: Liev can do a do a movie like The Omen and get beat up for doing a remake, as I do on occasion. And then he can do (a staging of a classic play in) [for] Shakespeare in the Park.”
“It seems like maybe the art form [of horror films] isn’t old enough, and people are rightly, in so many cases, cynical about the recycling of material that quickly.”
Though he’s remade The Omen, Moore acknowledges that there are certain films that just simply should’t be redone, remade, re-imagined, re-anything-ed. Among them: Casablanca and Citizen Kane.”
“People accuse me of remaking a classic,” Moore observes. “I’ve done remakes of two classic films, but I feel that if you’re going to remake anything, remake a classic film.”
|
|
RKO
Photo
|
|
An inevitable remake target?
|
|
|
That other remake, of course, was the aforementioned Flight of the Phoenix. “Don’t worry, nobody saw it!” Moore interjects with a laugh, referring to his Dennis Quaid update of the 1965 James Stewart drama, “That’s how I got off the hook on that one!”
Oddly enough, Moore and Fox will be counting on youthful moviegoers to flock to theaters for The Omen, even though that demographic may only be familiar with the title and convenient release date. Worse, some younger moviegoers may actually think that The Omen cribs bits from, of all things, Final Destination 3, which actually borrowed liberally from the original Omen, right down to the notion of deaths foretold in photographs.
“I’m sure there will be ironic, frustrating moments like that,” Moore concedes. “At the end of the day, what I hope is that The Omen - and I say this with every sense of the irony of what I’m about to say, as I know it’s a remake - but if it’s embraced by the younger audience it could be a good sign of things to come, because The Omen is first and foremost a damn good story.”
“It’s not full of CG, it’s not intended to be part of a trilogy. If the younger audience could groove on this movie, I would say that’s a good sign.”
|
|
|
|
|
 Email
|
 Print
|
|
|
|
|
|