Remake: The Manchurian Candidate with Demme

[Ghostboy]

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.

That's a brilliant movie, I think. I caught a screening of this this evening, and the whole way home, I was trying to figure out which party the film was focusing on -- I was convinced that I had missed some line of dialogue in which it was mentioned, but I honestly couldn't figure it out -- they really do a good job of blending parties.

It's a really good movie -- hindered only by memories of an original that was probably not that much greater but still had the advantage of being the original (my memories of it are full of strong impressions, but slightly fuzzy regarding the details).

Before and after I watched it, I was listening to the Deomcratic Convention on NPR and going into the movie in that mindset hammered home the timeliness that, as Demme attests in the interview above, was certainly no accident.

[ono]

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?
...

That's a brilliant movie (move?), I think.

Freudian slips = fun.

[Ghostboy]

True, true. That one's not nearly as bad as the one I made in the At Home At The End Of The World thread, though...

[godard]

they showed the former vice president and said here he was from, and it was the last state that was left to be won by archer and shaw.
what state was it?

[sickfins]

saw it last night.  dug the demme

[metroshane]

Haven't seen it yet, and rarely give a damn about denzel....But can't wait to see this.  If the movie is anything like the previews...then this is the oscar that denzel actually deserves.

[picolas]

- if you've seen the previews, you already know too much.
- Demme has to control his look-o-rama fever.
- mostly too vague to be interesting
minor minor spoiler
- in the future, the news may be delivered through more split screens and text, but there's no way it will look like that.

[modage]

TAKE FIVE WITH JONATHAN DEMME

Jonathan Demme's 'The Manchurian Candidate' isn't just a remake (of the 1962 political paranoia classic), says the celebrated director of 'The Silence of the Lambs' and 'Philadelphia': "I had hoped and wanted to do another Clarice Starling film, and that didn't come to pass, so I had this kind of unrequited desire to do another thriller when 'The Manchurian Candidate' came along, so the spirit of 'Lambs' hovered very, very strongly over this one." But 'Silence of the Lambs' wasn't the only movie Demme actively consulted when tackling his ambitious remake of John Frankenheimer's film. Read on to discover Demme's five strongest influences.

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No Way Out
(1987, dir: Roger Donaldson; starring: Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman)
'No Way Out' helps define for me the kind of picture that 'Manchurian Candidate' wants to be. 'No Way Out' has a guy in pursuit of the truth. His life is in peril, and the deeper he digs, the more vulnerable he makes himself, the more he puts himself in peril. As a moviegoer, I love that. So when I read 'The Manchurian Candidate,' I thought, "I love this genre." There are other great movies that function along the same lines. 'Night Has a Thousand Eyes' is about a reporter who can see tomorrow's headlines. He sees a headline predicting his own death, and he's going to work very hard to avert that headline, and as the story unfolds, we realize he's actually helping fulfill the prophecy. It's like their journey is preordained. In 'The Manchurian Candidate,' Denzel Washington plays a character who is deeply disturbed and may be insane. The more he tries to pursue proof of his sanity, the crazier he appears to everybody, even as he's unearthing evidence of a conspiracy that may be his ultimate paranoid fabrication. Or it may be the truth.

The Silence of the Lambs
(1991, dir: Jonathan Demme; starring: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins)
A huge influence on 'The Manchurian Candidate' is 'The Silence of the Lambs,' and that's the movie that I most actively referenced in my mind while making 'Manchurian Candidate.' [There are] a couple of obvious big similarities: Each film has a [character] who has set a deadly, impossible task for themselves and is forced to navigate through a world filled with treachery. Each film also has a completely unexpected relationship at its center. In 'Silence of the Lambs,' Clarice Starling, the force of good, has an extremely unlikely relationship with Doctor Lecter, and in this one, part of Marco's [Washington] journey involves getting deeper and deeper into a relationship with Raymond Shaw [Liev Schreiber]. In making 'Silence' and seeing how people reacted to it, I think I learned about that genre. Both films have similar aspirations: They both want to be extremely disturbing, and they both aspire to intense emotional involvement with the characters. When I read the script for the first time, I felt, "I know how to do this."

The Manchurian Candidate
(1962, dir: John Frankenheimer; starring: Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey)
'The Manchurian Candidate' starring Frank Sinatra was a major resource, and in this regard, what I felt [screenwriter] Dan Pyne had achieved was a movement away from the old movie, an effort to try and reinvent the wheel. The 1962 version became an influence -- to try not to get sucked into recycling great moments from that movie. The image of the corporal being shot in the head and the blood splattering on the wall is one of the most vivid moments in American film as far as I'm concerned, so we were influenced by that film not to trade on that, and instead discover our own way of doing that. In the original movie, the only way we get to see what really happened is as part of Marco's dream. And the choice that Dan Pyne made, in an effort to get away from that, was to show the audience an abstract dream that doesn't make any sense until later. On Marco's journey of discovery, he will have an actual retrieved memory, and we will show the audience exactly what happened to him in Desert Storm.

The Conformist
(1970; dir: Bernardo Bertolucci; starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Sanda)
One of the most horrifying killing scenes I've ever seen occurs in 'The Conformist,' where the professor and his daughter are caught in the woods, and there's a chase amongst the trees. It's done with such fantastic cinematic values, that crazy handheld camera that can't keep up with it. The moment in the lives of these people becomes so desperate and out of control that even the camera's out of control. I wanted to try to take advantage of that feeling for the death scene of an older man and a younger woman in our movie. In the original 'Manchurian,' the deaths are so perfect and so unique to themselves, with the milk coming out of the [bullet hole], there's no way that we would dare recycle that and imagine that it would be fresh. What Dan Pyne did that I think was marvelous was, in removing another great key moment from the original, he referenced the line where the guy says, "Why don't you go jump in the lake?" So Dan chose to have Raymond enter a body of water in order to commit the murders.

All the President's Men
(1950; dir: Alan J. Pakula; starring: Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford)
'All the President's Men' was another picture that we watched very, very closely as a possible reference point for how we might light our picture to make it feel as realistic as possible. There was a point in the evolution of the style when my impulse was to make everything in this movie horrifyingly believable, to give it an almost docudrama feel. Basically, 'All the President's Men' has a very invisible style, which wasn't particularly pertinent to us because we wound up wanting to invent an aggressively off-kilter visual style. But when we watched the movie, it was very interesting for us [that] you never really got to see or spend time with the villains. There had been endless discussions at script level asking, "Don't we need to get to know these guys better in order for Manchurian Global to have the proper weight as the force of darkness in this movie?" And yet 'All the President's Men' was always with the good guys or the witnesses, and that gave us confidence in resisting the impulse to spend a lot of time with the guys from Manchurian Global.
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haha, he listed his own movie as an influence.  haha.

[SHAFTR]

I enjoyed it.  It's not as good as the original, but it's much better than most remakes.  I enjoyed the pacing, I'm curious to hear the views of people who haven't seen the original.  There wasn't as much tension for me while watching this one since I knew what, for the most part, was going to happen.

[Finn]

I really liked it. Strong performances, Demme has tons of signature shots and a solid if almost satirical take on the story. I'm gonna watch the original tonight.

[Alethia]

this was pretty solid i thought.  not terrific, no, but it's great to see demme make a good movie again.  i haven't liked a movie of his since cousin bobby.  or philadelphia.  whichever one came last.

[SiliasRuby]

DVD Release
Source: www.davisdvd.com
Release Date: December 7.

[cine]

how many more release dates are left...

[SiliasRuby]

Only a couple.

[MacGuffin]

Should I mark my calendar?