Are you fans of the Psycho movies like we are?

If so, then you might agree with us that the Psycho remake should have NEVER been made, but wait until you hear how director Gus Van Sant got to direct the Psycho remake.

In a recent interview, director Gus Van Sant explains that it was just an experiment to him and that is all that mattered? Huh? Continue on…

Who knew that director Gus Van Sant would have this to say about his motivation behind his Psycho remake.

We are fans of Hitchcock horror movie classic, but the Psycho remake was such a let down.

Now, director Gus Van Sant is speaking out about his motivation for the Psycho Remake while promoting his new film Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, during his interview with Marc Maron’s WTF podcast:

There’s a whole reason behind it… I think the process of doing it was the learning, it wasn’t necessarily the result. It wasn’t really about learning about Hitchcock, it was more than during the 90s the joke about the executives was that they would rather make a sequel than they would an original piece because there was less risk. They would rather continue a story that’s already known in the public, and they were really searching for some way to do that. Now they’ve found out that comics is the way to do it… but back in the 90s, they hadn’t found that yet.

Van Sant added this about the Psycho Remake:

When I did Drugstore Cowboy, I was all of a sudden meeting with the heads of studios because they knew that actors would work with me, therefore if they got me on their movie they could get the actor that they wanted. So it was less about me than it was about the actors. 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, ‘In the library we have old films that you could remake, we have scripts that haven’t been made yet that you could make,’ and it just reminded me of that thing that they wanted to do, which is remake something. And I said, ‘What you guys haven’t 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,’ because I’d 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 left—they said, ‘We won’t be doing that.

The road to the Psycho Remake took longer that Gus Van Sant expected.

Every time I would meet with Casey I would bring it up, and I locked in on Psycho—I’m not sure why Psycho, but it just seemed like the movie that would work the best. I would bring it up again and they would laugh again. And then later when we did Good Will Hunting and it did really well at the box office, it also got nominated for nine Oscars or something. But what they like to do the week before the Oscars happen is they like to get new deals in place with the people that are nominated, because as soon as you win they’ve got your movie going—they can just lean over to their buddies and say, ‘We’ve got that guy’s next movie’. Then they forget that they have it after the night’s over. So they were trying to make a deal with me, and I had a deal with Paramount, I had a deal at some other studio, and my agent was saying, ‘Universal really wants to do deal with you, have you got anything for them?’ And I was like, ‘Universal, Universal…oh yeah, tell them Pyscho, frame-by-frame, new cast, in color, and that’s the idea,’ and then my agent calls back and says, ‘They think that’s fantastic.’ So all of a sudden they were in.

At the end of the day, Gus said the movie bombed in the box office, but he explains that the film was an experiment:

So it didn’t work. But 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… It’s more important now I think, because people like yourself will ask questions about it. It’s more alive now than it was back when it failed, just with the art world or the modern world.

What did you think of the Psycho Remake?