‘Suspiria’ Remake Director Reveals What He Hopes to Accomplish With His Film

A filmmaker will craft a remake of a popular film for a variety of reasons, whether it be to approach the material from a new perspective or to take a core concept and flesh it out to its potential. Director of the Suspiria remake, Luca Guadagnino, recently revealed his main incentive was realizing a dream he had since he was a teenager.

“Every movie I make is a step inside my teenage dreams, and Suspiria is the most remarkably precise teenage megalomaniac dream I could have had,” the filmmaker told The Guardian. “I saw the poster when I was 11 and then I saw the film when I was 14, and it hit me hard. I immediately started to dream about making my own version of it. So in a way it makes me smile when I hear people say, ‘How dare you remakeSuspiria. Typical commerce-driven mentality.’ I was just a boy who had seen a movie that made him what he became. So that’s how I am approaching it: a homage to the incredible, powerful emotion I felt when I saw it.”

The new film is set in 1977 Berlin and follows a young American woman who joins a prestigious dance company. She arrives just as one of the members mysteriously disappears. As she gets more involved in the dance company, she begins to suspect that the dance troupe is harboring a disturbing secret.

The filmmaker also pointed out that the negative outlook of a remake in film is different than the outlook in theater.

“Do you stop watching Tristan und Isolde’s mise-en-scène because Patrice Chéreau’s was so incredible? No, there will be a new one that will be fantastic,” Guadagnino pointed out. “How many Hamlets have we experienced in our lifetimes that were fantastic? Human art is not about inventing originality, it’s about finding a new point of view.”

Earlier this year, the filmmaker went so far as to say his film isn’t a “remake” per se.

“It’s inspired by the same story, but it goes in different directions, it explores other reasons,” he told French magazine Allocine. “It’s semantics, of course, but I think people really have to understand that this is not a remake, because the word ‘remake’ gives the impression that we want to erase the original, and the opposite is what we tried to do.”

Suspiria will be hitting theaters next year.

[H/T The Guardian]