Knowing Duo talk Poltergeist, Birds Remakes
With Knowing nabbing the #1 slot at the box office (lord only knows why), two people who are the toast of the town are the film’s writers, married couple Stiles White and Juliet Snowden. Why should you care? Because they’re also the duo who will be responsible for the upcoming Poltergeist and Birds remakes.
The twosome sat down with The Wrap today to talk Knowing, but they also spilled the beans on the aforementioned remakes. Dig it.
“With something like The Birds, you can take the concept of birds gone crazy and put that onto a myriad of situations,” Snowden tells The Wrap. “Whereas with some other remakes, we really felt that those were movies that we really couldn’t think of new scenes or ideas. Some of these remakes are already-perfect movies. We’re not saying The Birds isn’t a perfect movie — but when we heard about that we had, instantly, a lot of ideas about what we could do [in the present] and how we would change it.
It was presented to us as they wanted to go back to the original source material because you just don’t want to attempt to remake a Hitchcock film. But the original novella, by Daphne du Maurier, had a lot of interesting source material. Alfred Hitchcock used it as his jumping-off point and told a story that was somewhat different from the novella.
We took that same approach and went back to the source material rather than going to his film. Ultimately, what you would get is a modern-day telling of what if a bird phenomenon happened like that again — rather than saying, ‘This person’s gonna play the Tippi Hedren role,’ and ‘Here’s the famous moment on the jungle gym.’ We really tried to avoid those things.”
From there the talk switched gears to Poltergeist.
Poltergeist was a seminal film for us, you know, in our lives, and it’s like your dad’s classic vintage car that’s been in the garage and you’re not allowed to touch it,” says White. “It’s treasured; it’s valuable. We see Poltergeist as if, um, as if we’re being handed the keys to the car and we’re gonna be really careful with it.
Poltergeist was a real snapshot of the American family in the year that it came out — 1982 — and I think what we would do with the reimaging of it is, ‘What is the American family up to today?’”
I dunno, as long as Nic Cage isn’t in either movie, I’ll begrudgingly give them the benefit of the doubt. Keep it here for more.
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