The Razzie-winning flop Quentin Tarantino called one of cinema history’s “most interesting experiments”
There can often be fine margins between a cinephile and a cinema snob, but it’s not a line Quentin Tarantino has ever found himself in danger of crossing.
The filmmaker knows more about the history of the moving image than most people, but he also loves his trashy movies. From exploitation to grindhouse via the towering influences of Mario Bava and John Carpenter on his own work, Tarantino embraces all sides of celluloid with equal amounts of relish.
There are terrible movies he’ll defend to the death, and there are indisputable classics he despises with a passion. There are B-tier journeymen he’ll label as being among the greatest to ever step behind the camera, while there are more than a few directorial icons he’ll denigrate as overrated hacks.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but when he’s the transformative two-time Academy Award-winning auteur behind Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, Kill Bill, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood who entered the cinematic lexicon as a summation of the generations he inspired to try and put their own spin on the Tarantinoesque, his word carries plenty of weight.
Of course, that doesn’t mean he needs to be blindly followed and agreed with no questions asked, with one feature he deems being historically significant generally remembered as anything but. In fact, it was a critical and commercial disaster that never needed to exist, failed to justify that existence when it did actually happen, and was written off as a vainglorious exercise in egomania.
Barely recouping half of its hefty $60 million budget at the box office, winning Golden Raspberry Awards for ‘Worst Sequel or Remake’ and ‘Worst Director’, and earning its star a nomination for ‘Worst Actress’ are not the hallmarks of a movie that deserves its own place in the annals of history. However, Tarantino vehemently disagreed.
“I really loved Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho,” he informed Rolling Stone. “I thought it was one of the coolest, most interesting experiments in the history of cinema.” In isolation, it was an interesting undertaking, but in the grand scheme of things, re-doing a classic was completely and utterly pointless.
Van Sant’s Psycho only underlined that even working with the exact same shot compositions, camera movements, characters, editing choices, screenplay, and score, nobody could come close to telling an Alfred Hitchcock story on a level even remotely comparable to the ‘Master of Suspense’.
Shot-for-shot remakes are the laziest form of repurposing existing stories, and from the second Psycho V2.0 was first announced, the overriding question was a simple one: Why? Van Sant hardly illustrated the necessity, but at least he found a staunch and very famous supporter in Tarantino, even if he’s squarely in the minority.
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