'Psycho' Analysis

The idea first came to Van Sant when he was meeting with Universal executives in 1989. They owned all these old properties, which would cost them nothing to rework. Was there one the director might be interested in redoing? "Psycho," he said, pulling the notion out of the air. "But only if you don't change anything." This was not a concept the suits could wrap their minds around. But a decade later Van Sant had made a movie that grossed more than $100 million--"Good Will Hunting." Numbers like that, in the eyes of the studios, turn your idle whims into brilliant inspirations. Meeting with Universal again, he resurrected his "Psycho" idea. He loved the "austerity and simplicity" of the movie, and thought it more conducive to a remake than his very favorite Hitchcock, "The Birds." To his amazement, they said OK, and for a shaky moment Van Sant had to gulp and ask himself, do I really want to do this?

To the intellectually playful Van Sant, this new movie is as deliberately anti-auteurist as moviemaking gets--he has erased his own ego as a director. "My filmmaking is not particularly like Alfred Hitchcock's," he says with some understatement. He found that when he tried to add a new scene, in his own style, the whole design fell apart. Also, as the director cheerfully admits, "This was quite a bit a marketing idea."

What will make Van Sant's "Psycho" an entirely new experience--even more than Christopher Doyle's color cinematography or the updated set decorations--is the actors, who were all allowed, within the parameters of Stefano's screenplay, to create their own characters. Julianne Moore, who plays the sister (the Vera Miles role), explains her approach. "The movie was made in 1960 so it was a little anachronistic, and you have to translate it into your own vernacular. Instead of just being kind of upset, I tried to make her kind of angry and aggressive. It wasn't a matter of being feminist or not; it was a matter of making it work in a somewhat modern setting."

Anne Heche watched every one of Janet Leigh's scenes right before she did hers. "I did as much exactly as she had done as I possibly could. Down to what hand she held her purse in and how she walked. I really tried to mimic her behavior, the same way that Gus was mimicking Hitchcock's, and yet putting a '90s spin on it." For William H. Macy, who plays the Martin Balsam role, "It's not unlike going to see 'Hamlet' again. The scripts were the same, the sets were similar. I think it's going to be remarkably different even while being the same."

For troubled Universal, reeling from the disappointment of "Meet Joe Black" (a remake of "Death Takes a Holiday" gone wrong) and a disastrous year at the box office, its relatively modest $25 million investment seems a safe bet. It's counting on a vast new audience of kids who will be setting out for the Bates Motel for the first time. That's who Van Sant had in mind, says Heche. "Gus's whole theory was it's not about making it better, it's about 'Look how brilliant Hitchcock is; I'm gonna do it and give it to a new generation as a gift'."

"It's exactly what I wanted to make," claims Van Sant, who is thinking of returning to low-budget independent filmmaking in the future. But you can't be sure what this guy will do next. You see, he has this crazy idea, which he confides with only the slightest twinkle in his eyes: "I'd be interested in redoing 'Psycho' again." Any takers?