The acting can’t help but be different, too. The film’s two famous murder scenes are intercut with brief flashes of Van Santian surrealness, from a cow standing in the middle of a highway to a nude woman performing in a peep show. Of course, not everything could be an exact duplication. Only here, he appears to being chastised by a second man, who happens to look exactly like Alfred Hitchcock. During production, he used a codename for the project in the same way that Hitchcock did, copied him further by locking down the set to such an extent that even Ellen DeGeneres, Heche’s girlfriend at the time, wasn’t allowed to visit, and cameos in the exact same scene Hitchcock did in the original film. After dailies each day, I’d say to Gus, ‘This is getting weirder and weirder!’”Ĭomparing his remake in interviews to Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, still art despite consisting of repeated duplication, Van Sant even began to embody Hitchcock’s own directing style. “It felt like you were welcoming old ghosts.” Added Heche, “The whole experience was a mind trip. “You’re literally stepping into the shoes of the original character, right here on the same lot, physically next to the old house,” Mortensen told the Los Angeles Times. Hyperbolic lore about the movie went even further, with Van Sant speculated to have timed his actor’s deliveries with a stop-watch, eager for them to replicate the exact pacing of the stars they were emulating.
The production crew built an entirely new Bates home and motel in front of the existing 1960s structures, which were a popular tourist destination by the time Van Sant and his crew arrived. Even by the time of the film’s release, an Entertainment Weekly cover story on the film was amusingly headlined “What are they, nuts?”įilmed on the same Universal Studios lot as the original film, Van Sant’s Psycho began shooting in the summer of 1998. Elfman’s warning was emulated far and wide, however. Elfman reportedly told Van Sant not to do the movie, sure that he’d be “eaten alive” by the critics, but that only spurred Van Sant on. Not that they were all entirely enamored with the idea of the film. Legendary makeup effects guru Rick Baker designed the new version of Mrs Bates’s mummified corpse, and Danny Elfman was recruited to re-orchestrate Bernard Herrmann's iconic original score.
Joseph Stefano, Psycho’s original screenwriter, was rehired to provide a script polish and update era-specific references (the archaic savoury jelly “aspic” was changed to the more familiar “Jell-O”, for instance), while Wong Kar-wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle was roped in to shoot the film. Van Sant also assembled a who’s-who of talent behind the camera. On the heels of the unexpected success of his 1997 drama Good Will Hunting, a project vastly different to his more outre and low-budget work that came before it, Van Sant had unexpectedly become one of the most sought-after directors in Hollywood, recognised for his ability to create arthouse hits like Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, as well as more commercial fare. The film was always met with confusion almost from the off. But it's also a fascinating experiment, a film that universally fails as a thriller but becomes a must-see in terms of its own self-indulgent oddness. Twenty years after its release, it remains one of the most superficially dismal Hollywood endeavours in recent history. In an exact tracing of the original film, the director emulated shots, angles and the entire original script, with just minor differences here and there. Because while it made sense for observers to will an atypical Psycho reimagining into existence, Van Sant's Psycho 98 was instead the total opposite. Of course, for those sitting down and watching the film, one cloaked in as much mockery as it was mystery in the run-up to its unveiling, the rumour gave way to disappointment. After that, the remake would splinter, becoming an entirely different movie to the 1960 original. The most notable, and intriguing, being that the film would be a carbon copy of the original Hitchcock classic, but only up until its reimagining of Janet Leigh’s lethal shower scene. Shrouded in secrecy until its release in December of 1998, Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho was often the subject of a number of wild rumours.