The “very special” movie Willem Dafoe wanted to remake
Remaking a film is very rarely a good idea. The craft of reimagining an existing story has provided studios with an easy option to play on nostalgia and guarantee box office numbers, filling cinemas worldwide with prequels, sequels, and remakes, but very few of them have added artistically to their source material.
Though certain directors have been able to breathe new life into stories first penned by others – Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, which was based on Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Internal Affairs, for example – those feats are few and far between. More often than not, remakes are merely a substandard effort at capitalising on existing art and audiences, usually failing to do justice to either.
From Gus Van Sant’s near-exact and consequently pointless remake of Psycho to a lifeless Americanised version of Oldboy, many all-time greats have fallen victim to the incessant recycling machine. The latter is an example of how Hollywood has particularly latched onto a movement of great film and television coming out of Asia.
Seemingly spawning from the success of The Ring two decades ago, American studios have remade and ripped the life and creativity out of a number of Asian horrors, sci-fi and thrillers, from Death Note to Ghost in the Shell. At one point, Willem Dafoe was even signed on to create a new version of Kaneto Shindō’s 1964 horror, Onibaba.
The chilling film follows two women who embark upon lives of crime in order to survive until their plans are complicated by the return of a neighbour. Dafoe has named the film as one of his all-time favourites several times but recently acknowledged that he could not have done the source material justice with a remake.
On a trip to the coveted collection of the Criterion closet, Dafoe was immediately drawn to the film amidst the countless DVDs lining the walls of the wardrobe. He declared Onibaba a “very, very special” film before revealing his prior plans to reimagine it.
“In fact, I wanted to remake it,” he shared, “I even got the rights for a while”.
Ultimately, though, Dafoe accepted that he could not add anything to the original artistry. “I couldn’t find a way to do it because it’s so specific to its time and I felt like every time I tried to put a spin on it I ruined the source material,” he accepted, “So I couldn’t do that.”
It’s a refreshing take to hear amidst the relentless recycling of truly special cinema, which is an ever-increasing rarity. Understanding that certain works of art might not need revamping and, in fact, might be better left admired and untouched is a lesson Hollywood would do well to learn sooner rather than later.
Watch the trailer for Onibaba below.
