Remake: The Manchurian Candidate with Demme

[EL__SCORCHO]

Ok, so Demme remade "Charade" and now on to "The Manchurian Candidate". Why?

[cowboykurtis]

Ok, so Demme remade "Charade" and now on to "The Manchurian Candidate". Why?

maybe he can't write original screenplays worth a damn -- i dont see how one can feel creatively satisfied re-making classics. whats next, sunset boulevard?

[Gold Trumpet]

I think Demme is very much starting to reveal his own talent in these late years, or lack of. Remakes aren't necessarily the most evil thing, but with recent examples, they are worth a sigh. But opinion on Demme has never been really high anyways and only way he gets the talk he does here is because of PTA's admiration. I think opinion on Soderbergh for his reliance on previous material is starting to change for the worst as time goes on, which is more interesting and important.

~rougerum

[EL__SCORCHO]

Yeah, I don't really feel Demme is so amazing either, but I am curious about why he's doing remakes now.

[Duck Sauce]

Yeah, I don't really feel Demme is so amazing either, but I am curious about why he's doing remakes now.

Although I love Silence, I just cant see what is so great about Demme, he is a good director, maybe above average, but not great. It always gets me wondering when I see PTA praising the fuck out of him.

[MacGuffin]

It always gets me wondering when I see PTA praising the fuck out of him.

Watch "Melvin And Howard" since it was a huge influence on "Sydney."

And the Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense" is one of the best concert films ever.

[bonanzataz]

And the Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense" is one of the best concert films ever.

mos def.

he has good character pieces. something wild is a pretty cool flick.

[modage]

i just watched the original and i thought although it was good, i thought it could use a well done remake.  it was not a perfect film, and had some really great elements that if used right could make a film to stand up against the original.  i didnt think that the brainwashing should've been revealed in the beginning, but maybe unraveled slowly throughout the story.  by giving away exactly what was done to them, there was not enough tension just waiting for it to happen.  i think one of the main problems with truth about charlie was the casting.  mark wahlberg is the least charismatic performer, maybe ever, and putting him in cary grants shoes was the first mistake.  there were tons of cool stylistic flourishes and altough the script had problems, it couldve been alot better with better leads.  and since the manchurian candidate doesnt hinge on the chemistry between the two leads, perhaps this would be better suited.  (although i havent heard anything in a while about it, so maybe its not on anymore?)

[Alethia]

i say he remakes - PSYCHO

[godardian]

Remaked may be much easier projects for Demme to actually get made than projects he really wants to do. Maybe he needs to re-prove himself to the studios after Beloved. I'm not saying this is true, and I'm CERTAINLY not saying it's right, but it seems a plausible guess.

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

[Chest Rockwell]

Has no one remembered The Truth About Charlie?

[Pedro]

Has no one remembered The Truth About Charlie?

EL__SCORCHO did.

Ok, so Demme remade "Charade" and now on to "The Manchurian Candidate". Why?

[El Duderino]

[modage]

Jonathan Demme on The Manchurian Candidate
Source: Edward Douglas Tuesday, July 27, 2004

Paramount's new remake of Frank Sinatra's 1962 classic The Manchurian Candidate allows director Jonathan Demme to once again revisit an old classic after turning the Audrey Hepburn movie Charade into 2002's The Truth About Charlie. Best known for critically lauded movies like The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, Demme once again works with an incredible cast starring Denzel Washington, Meryl Street, Liev Schreiber and John Voight for a movie about a Gulf War veteran (Washington) that gets caught up in political conspiracy when a large corporation tries to put a dummy vice president into the White House.

ComingSoon.net talked to the venerable director to get his take on some of the eerie subjects covered in his controversial new movie, things like mind control, corporations and politics. Oliver Stone would be proud of his answers.

CS!: Were you wary of doing a remake after your experience with The Truth About Charlie?
Demme: No. I read a great script that Denzel Washington was going to be a lead in, and it turned me on. I'm too old to worry about that kind of stuff. I love the book and the first movie, and by the time I got the script--Dan Pine was the author of the draft that I got-- I thought that he made an original new picture from that classic. I thought that he messed with so many of the cornerstones of the original that it was all suddenly up for grabs.

CS!: What was it like working with Denzel again?
Demme: He's a very exciting, challenging actor to work with. He's very non-verbal and keeps to himself during the shooting day, and then he's adorable after the wrap. In other words, he's Jekyll and Hyde.

CS!: Was it accidental that there were so many connections to real world politics? Some people have commented that the evil corporation in the movie might be an analogy for Halliburton.
Demme: The only way to hang onto the brand name "The Manchurian Candidate" was to name the multinational corporation that profits on war the Manchurian Global Corporation. Certainly, we learned a lot about organizations like that in our research and trying to have a fairly credible world threat.

CS!: Was there a concern at all about having this movie come out during an election year?
Demme: When Paramount realized that the picture was going to be finished sometime this year, the question was do you release a picture set against an election backdrop before the election when people are interested in elections? Or do you wait until the election is over and then release your election movie? It seemed like the path of wisdom to get it out beforehand, and then the next thought was better to try to get it out as well in advance as possible. If it came out in the fall, which I thought would be a good time for it, it could easily get lost in the shuffle, because no movie can compete with the high drama of what's really going on in the world today.


CS!: That said, the movie is rather vague about which political party Meryl Streep and Liev Schreiber's characters are a part of. Was this intentional?
Demme: We decided that in terms of the political parties, it seemed like we would have to make a choice if only because on TV, when people are making speeches, it always puts their party affiliation. Early on, [screenwriter] Dan Pine and I spent a lot of time making choices about how to present this. Many people today really look slightly askance at the notion that we have a really legitimate two party system going on. There is nothing fresh about the idea so ultimately, what's the difference? Especially with certain parties, in which the politicians speak one set of beliefs and then they seem to vote a whole different way, if you look at their voting records. So is this still a functioning two party system? We decided to have fun that way by having a typical American political party, but not get bogged down in the partisan stuff. We didn't want to burden ourselves with all the disciplines that would come with that. In our movie we focus on the one party, but clearly, there is an off-camera other party that they're running against. The game that we hope people will play, and it's irresistible, is to try to guess which party it is. What I like about that is that it makes us think about both parties a bit.

CS!: Is it true that you recut some of Meryl Streep's scenes because her character was coming across too much like Hilary Clinton?Demme: No, that's something that came out in the newspapers, which I was happy to see because it sounds a little spicy, but no, there was nothing like that.

CS!: In your mind, is The Manchurian Candidate a science fiction movie?
Demme: It had aspirations to be science fiction, but then the more we researched what kind of experimentation and what the new frontiers are in scientific efforts today to alter personality and shape the way people behave either through implants, electronic impulses, genomic restructuring at the prenatal state, we discovered that it's either happening or they're out there trying to make it happen. A lot of it is government funded. The two doctors that are assisting our fabulous Dr Noyle in that procedure we show, they are neurosurgeons who do that operation all the time, not for the kind of devious goals that Dr. Noyle does but for other kinds of behavior modification. They're like benign, state of the art, quasi-lobotomies. This implant will short circuit depression impulses and implant a sense of positive memory to replace a traumatic memory.

CS!: Were you at all frightened by any of the things you learned while doing your research?
Demme: We read about how the government is spending a lot of money today working on chemical approaches and impulse reward mechanisms that can be implanted into fighter pilots and soldiers to keep them alert and on the game for days on end, the goal being to create an army that doesn't need to sleep for a week. Who can fight that army, the army that never gets tired? I don't think there's anything in our picture that is as creepy as that.

I don't know if you've ever come across this book called "The Search for the Manchurian Candidate". It's a book by John Marks that came out eight or nine years ago that consisted of the writer's interpretation of files and records of CIA mind-altering experiments on unsuspecting people throughout the late 60s and 70s. He got access through the Freedom of Information Act, and wrote this up, because the CIA was actively trying--and we still are I'm sure--trying to control minds. In sleep deprivation, drugs-they use a lot of LSD-all kinds of stuff. Scientists would get the grants to go into mental institutions and experiment on people who were under treatment in these places. I find that frightening, because you realize that there are no boundaries on what big modern science will attempt to achieve. There's always the upside and there's always the good reason, like what if you could take someone who was profoundly traumatized and remove that trauma from their mind and they can live happy productive lives? But the trouble is that the guy around the corner is going to want to do something evil with that technology and he's going to want to do it for power, money and whatever.

CS!: Isn't it a bit scary that there may be companies that might try to take advantage of this type of technology? That's what the movie seems to be implying.
Demme: This is a movie and a cautionary tale and it's a hot-blooded thriller, so we have fun with the notion that in their quest for total control and a total amassing of profits, these companies would go so far as to find the idea of a human being conditioned to never change their mind and to do exactly as they're told. That would be an asset to have in the White House.


CS!: Do you think that this type of mind control is really possible?
Demme: Let me just tell you that in the book, all these CIA efforts to try to gain total control of people, they all ultimately failed. They came to the mundane, exquisite realization that you could not achieve unlimited control over individuals to the extent that you could cause them to do things that they were deeply opposed to for sustained periods of time. There was a limit to the control you could exert.

CS!: Do you think that this movie might increase the paranoia?
Demme: We certainly hope that it won't relieve any of the paranoia. We've got a lot to be paranoid about today.

The Manchurian Candidate comes out everywhere on Friday. Look for interviews with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep later this week.