About that ‘Bad Lieutenant’ remake…
In Internet time this is already old news, but in the interest of following up on stuff I’ve already talked about, here it is anyway.
Speaking to Defamer’s Stu VanAirsdale, Werner Herzog shed some light on his upcoming Bad Lieutenant project with Nicholas Cage.
Turns out he’s not actually remaking Abel Ferrara’s film so much as making another movie about a different bad lieutenant, this one based in New Orleans. He likens it to a James Bond movie not being a remake of the one before it.
He also says he doesn’t know who Abel Ferrara is and he seems amused at Ferrara’s wish that the people making Bad Lieutenant would “die in hell.”
Says Herzog “… it’s like theater thunder. It’s like being backstage in the 19th century, with the machines that make thunder. It has nothing do with with his film. But let him rave and rant; it’s good music in the background.”
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wipe Defamer off of me.
Filed under: News, Upcoming
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These Internets create a roller coaster ride out of this stuff.
“…I have to go wipe Defamer off of me.” Ahahaha…
Defamer comes off with some soap and water, it’s the TMZ that leaves a permanent stain.
So now I just wish they’d retitle the movie “The Other Bad Lieutenant”.
I also think it’s funny, albeit not shocking, that Herzog doesn’t know who Ferrara is. You’d think they would have met at a festival or something.
With all due respect to Herzog, hasn’t pretty much every single director ever assigned to remake in the last ten years played this sort of game of semantics where they claim that they’re not doing a remake, but rather a “reimagining” or “reshaping” or “continuation” or some other bullshit. I mean he’s making a dark story about a dirty cop with the same title and the same producer as the original. They also presumably needed to own the rights to the original to make this one. In my mind, that’s enough to consider this film a remake. Who knows, maybe I’m not open minded enough.
If we’re to use Herzog’s logic, the Steve Martin version of The Pink Panther is not a remake because the plot of the film is completely different from that of the original. So what if they changed the plot? So what if the cop is no longer investigating the rape of a nun? It’s still a remake regardless.
They raped a nun in the original Pink Panther?!?
Heh, I probably should’ve noticed that poor syntax.
My sense is that someone approached Herzog with a script and he really has no knowledge of or interest in the original. Maybe.
It’s also possible he’s playing a semantic game though as alynch suggests.
Even if he’s not, the screenwriter obviously knew the Ferrara original.
You’d think at one point in the deal, Ferrara’s name would have come up. And I don’t like the cavalier way Herzog dealt with the issue. Not that they deserve to burn in hell. Typical Ferrara!