Scarface Director Reveals Why He Chose Remake

Scarface director Luca Guadagnino has revealed why he chose to pursue the remake. The Suspiria director is aware of the jokes around his choices in projects. However, he feels that Scarface has something to say about our current world as well. When the film was announced originally, a lot of people wondered what a modern Scarface film would even look like. Guadagnino thinks that the story is fertile ground in the year 2020, and talked to Variety about his motivations. Yes, remakes are popular business in Hollywood now, but selecting a script and a project is always a personal journey. For someone like the director, he’s not just going to pick a project because of name recognition. Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone’s version spoke to him as a younger filmmaker.

“People claim that I do only remakes but the truth of the matter is cinema has been remaking itself throughout its existence. It’s not because it’s a lazy way of not being able to find original stories. It’s always about looking at what certain stories say about our times,” Guadagnino explained. “The first “Scarface” from Howard Hawkes was all about the prohibition era. Fifty years later, Oliver Stone and Brian De Palma make their version, which is so different from the Hawkes film. Both can stand on the shelf as two wonderful pieces of sculpture. Hopefully ours, forty-plus years later, will be another worthy reflection on a character who is a paradigm for our own compulsions for excess and ambition. I think my version will be very timely.”

Gabriel Luna dropped out of the project earlier this year. It’s been a long road here for Scarface. As Comicbook.com’s Spencer Perry described in the spring, the task ahead is still more than a little bit daunting.

“Scarface has gone through many filmmakers and screenplays since Universal started developing the remake. Suicide Squad’s David Ayer was attached to write the script back in 2011 with Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts director David Yates attached at one point as the director. Other screenwriters and directors became attached to the project throughout the years, some of them more than once as Ayer himself circled back to the project and was attached as a director in-between the TWO times that The Equalizer’s Antoine Fuqua. Even Oscar-winning writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen were attached to pen the script at one point. Like we said, there’s been a lot of cooks in the kitchen.”

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