Empire has an interview up with Scott Stuber, producer of the upcoming remake The Wolf Man, based on the 1941 original which starred Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot, man who gets bitten by a werewolf and survives to carry the curse.
The original flick had its charms, and it really boiled down to a monster movie with an interesting love angle. There was a conflicted family issue, but it was only hinted at and never really expanded on, and rightly so, because it didn’t matter. Unfortunately, as is the case with the majority of movies these days, it seems the remake feels additional plot mumbo jumbo is necessary.
Here’s a snippet:
We’ve added a lot of complexity. There are some great twists in this movie that were not in the original. But what we have done is stuck to a similar story about a guy who comes home and we’ve changed a few things. Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro) is someone who went through a family tragedy and now has come back to England to see his father, played by Tony Hopkins, and face up to some of the problems with his family. So it’s a family that’s got very dramatic issues when he returns. What we’ve tried to do is honour the original in a number of different ways, so you’ll see some fun things in the movie that hark back to the original.
In the original, the troubles in the family’s past are only really hinted at. So how are you expanding on that?
Well, I don’t want to give it all away, but there’s some pretty heavy stuff that happened during their childhood that has been a thing that fractured the family and was one of the reasons that Lawrence left. So, it’s something that hangs over father and son.
Why is it that filmmakers feel the need to add things that don’t matter to films? The original Wolf Man was great without the added “complexity” and if history teaches us anything, the added complexity turns out to be added minutes of worthless shit.
It’s not exactly a perfect comparison, but I can point to the love story angle in Semi-Pro as an example. It was worthless and just dragged down the movie.
Larry Talbot is a werewolf, there is your complexity. If I was a werewolf I would be like, “Shit, I’m a werewolf! How do I not let on that I am a werewolf?” That is complex enough if you ask me without adding a bunch of daddy/son troubles at home along with the obvious love story that will be involved with Emily Blunt. The first one did an excellent job focusing on the werewolf issue and allowing audiences to build the rest of the story in their head.
Two things keep me motivated to see this movie. The first is Andrew Kevin Walker only because he wrote Seven and that movie is the absolute shiz. The other is the Benicio Del Toro factor, but Del Toro’s love for the original gives him a bias to be involved, making his involvement not worth as much. Anthony Hopkins is hardly the actor he once was. Emily Blunt? Hugo Weaving? Joe Johnston (Hidalgo, Jurassic Park III, Jumanji) directing?
For some reason I don’t see how all of this fits together. When Mark Romanek was aboard as director his sense of style seemed to match up with the tone I would expect from this film and what I expect from a Walker script. Now? Well, not so much. No matter how good Rick Baker’s make-up on Del Toro looked (click here for the pics).
