“We’ll definitely have to top ourselves.”
Likely to be forever dubbed the “man of many projects”, David Goyer has ably jumped from screenwriter to producer to director, his latest project in the latter role being the thriller The Invisible, about a teen who discovers that no one can see him then has to discover why that is.
Having finished that up, Goyer has put his screenwriting cap back on to adapt and update David Cronenberg’s classic 1981 horror film Scanners for The Weinstein Company, and when ComingSoon.net/ShockTillYouDrop.com spoke to the multi-hyphenated filmmaker, he let us know how that was going and what his take will be.
“That’s going really well, it’s been a lot of fun,” he told us. “I’m not producing it, just writing it. That’s the thing, if it’s the right project, I’ll certainly write for people again. They came to me and I love that movie so much, and I’m such a Cronenberg fan. It seemed possibly rife for remake only because it’s been so long since the original had come out”
Cronenberg himself directed a remake of a classic horror film when he made The Fly in 1986, but he has been vocally adverse about people remaking his movies. “I haven’t talked to him,” Goyer admitted. “I hope to when I finish the script, but if it were me, and someone were remaking one of my films, I wouldn’t want to be involved. It would be too weird. I would just go say, ‘Go with God and hopefully it will be good.’ I’ve heard that way back when he’d prefer that they not remake his movies, but he remade âThe Fly.’ I liked the original ‘Fly’ and I liked his movie, so I think that as long as they’re not just slavish duplicates of one another or if you can take the spirit of the original and do something different. That’s what I’m hoping to do here. I’m hoping to analyze what it was that Cronenberg did in the first ‘Scanners’ film. His films are always very political in their own ways, very subversive. So I’ll analyze what he was doing at the timeâthere’s a lot of subtext in his moviesâand then say, ‘What’s going on now?’ and apply the same rules. Necessarily, you’re gonna get a slightly different film, because that film was made as we were moving into the Reagan area and we’re living in a very different world now. That’s going to reflect a different kind of movie.”
Although most people would hope that by the time this remake comes out, things might be different in our country, Goyer’s not so optimistic. “No, no, we’re still going to be in a post-9/11 Iraq quagmire world. That’s the world I’m drawing from right now and I’m sure we’ll be stuck in that world for another decade.”
Since exploding heads aren’t nearly as impressive or shocking as they were 25 years ago, he added that they’ll definitely have to “top themselves.”
Check ComingSoon.net next week for our exclusive, extensive interview with David Goyer, talking about his upcoming thriller The Invisible, which opens on April 27.
Source: Edward Douglas
