10 Films Directors Wanted You To Hate

After indie director Gus Van Sant’s 1997 film Good Will Hunting won awards for Robin Williams, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck, Van Sant chose to follow up the smashing success with a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic slasher film, Psycho.

Only he stipulated that he wanted to do something which had never been done before: an exact remake. The same script would be used and every single shot would be recreated exactly as it appeared in the original film. Obviously the cast would be updated and it would be in color, but aside from those, Van Sant set out to make a near-perfect replica of the film Hitchcock made some 30 years prior. The film tanked at the box office and has been hated on ever since.

So why did Van Sant do such a thing? Turns out he just wanted to see how far studio executives would let a hot director take a stupid idea. The Psycho remake was basically a big budget performance art installation.

Shortly after his first big success, Drugstore Cowboy, Universal executives offered to let Van Sant remake any of their classic films. Van Sant pitched the oddball idea of doing an exact remake of Psycho in that meeting. The executives balked at the idea and showed him the door. Fast forward to a few years later, after his Oscar nomination, and Universal rang up old Gus again asking if he wanted to do business with them. Van Sant remembered the meeting he’d had with them years earlier, and this time having the bargaining chips that he had, he reminded them of his idea: Psycho, shot-for-shot remake. They took the bait and he got to do his art project.

As Van Sant recently stated on the WTF podcast: “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.” Studios always want to make the safe bet, which is why they keep remaking old IPs. Now a couple decades later, the story is a little better known, and while the Psycho remake doesn’t have a lot of fans per se, the intent behind it and its place as an art piece that comments on the industry has gained respect in some circles.