'Psycho' Analysis

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.