The only movie Quentin Tarantino wanted to remake: “I keep working it in my head”
Many filmmakers have swallowed their pride and become directors-for-hire at least once in their careers, but Quentin Tarantino has never been drawn to the idea.
Of course, he wasn’t quite so picky during his early days before Reservoir Dogs catapulted him into the spotlight and Pulp Fiction made his name an entity unto itself, with Tarantino selling off his screenplays for True Romance and Natural Born Killers for others to direct, as well as his period spent as an uncredited script polisher for films like Michael Bay’s The Rock, Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide, and the woeful feature-length Saturday Night Live spinoff It’s Pat.
However, once he’d established himself as one of his generation’s most important and influential auteurs within the space of his first two features, he’s rarely contemplated tackling somebody else’s property, never mind mounting a full-blown remake.
There was that period when he was repeatedly touting an R-rated Star Trek flick, but after announcing his intentions to retire after his tenth directorial effort, there was little chance it would happen. Tarantino is happy to pick and choose inspiration from countless other movies, but outside of loosely adapting Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch as Jackie Brown and repurposing the title of Enzo G Castellari’s The Inglorious Bastards for his own World War II-set adventure, everything else has come directly from his own imagination.
There are always exceptions to the rule, though, and for Tarantino, it was Lucio Fulci’s 1977 supernatural whodunnit The Psychic, which starred Jennifer O’Neill as a clairvoyant woman who discovers a skeleton hidden in the walls of her home. After her husband is charged with the murder, she teams up with a paranormal researcher to uncover the truth and discover the real perpetrator.
He even had a leading lady in mind, explaining to Ain’t It Cool that he couldn’t stop thinking about redoing Fulci’s Giallo favourite with Bridget Fonda. “If I do it, I’ll do it with her,” he said. “But I don’t even know if I’ll do it, but it’s a movie I keep thinking about remaking. I keep working it in my head.”
“I showed it to Bridget and said, ‘I’ve been thinking about remaking this movie for about three years now,'” he continued. “We screened it, and she was all, ‘Oh my god! It was great! I loved it!’ It was cool. She called the next day and was all, ‘Aw, Quentin! You’re driving me fucking crazy! I’m walking around thinking about that character and how I would want to do this or that and everything.'”
Fonda has his number, right enough, telling Tarantino that she knew he “won’t do it for five years if you’ll do it at all.” It floated around in his head for a while, but like many of his other mooted projects, it came to nothing, and his one and only contender for the lead retiring from acting in the early 2000s hammered a final nail into The Psychic V2.0’s coffin.
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