Loved this episode. But feel like you missed the boat on Van Zant's 1998 remake. When he was on WTF? thsi summer, Gus Van Zant explained what he was thinking when he decided to remake the famed flick, which began as an idea in a studio meeting in the 1980s:
"During one of the meetings, Casey Silver at Universal brought in all of his vice presidents, and one guy was head of the library, and he said, âIn the library we have old films that you could remake, we have scripts that havenât been made yet that you could make,â and it just reminded me of that thing that they wanted to do, which is remake something. And I said, âWhat you guys havenât done is try to take a hit and remake it exactly. Rather than remake it and put a new spin on it, just remake it for real,â because Iâd never seen that done yet as an experiment. The whole thing seemed experimental to me anyway so I thought why not, and they laughed, they thought it was silly, ridiculous, absurd, and they leftâthey said, âWe wonât be doing that.ââ
After "Good Will Hunting" was nominated for a bunch of Oscars, Universal came knocking, and so:
"My agent was saying, âUniversal really wants to do deal with you, have you got anything for them?â And I was like, âUniversal, UniversalâŚoh yeah, tell them Pyscho, frame-by-frame, new cast, in color, and thatâs the idea,â and then my agent calls back and says, âThey think thatâs fantastic.â So all of a sudden they were in.â
Sure, it bombed. BUt to Van Zant it was a worthy experiment:
"the idea was whether or not you could remake something and it would repeat the box office. That was the sort of weird science experiment⌠â
So, it was not a case of him exercising his ego, or him trying to mimic what Hitchcock did after the success of NBNW by making a challenging movie (as Amy suggests), but simply a giant meta-middle finger experiment to the remake-obsessed studios of the 90s.
