With a solid #1 box office opening, the Stiles White and Juliet Snowden scripted Knowing is the talk of the town. But while the film was being promoted, the married couple seemed to be overlooked, which is a shame considering the high caliber projects they’re currently attached to. Thanks to Michael Adams’ “The Wrap”, we’ve got a little insight into both remakes of The Birds and Poltergeist. Read on for the skinny.
After chatting about Knowing for a bit, the duo talkes a bit about their heads were in regards to the remake of The Birds.

“With something like The Birds, you can take the concept of birds gone crazy and put that onto a myriad of situations,” Showden 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.”

Transitioning in the Poltergeist remake, they explain that it’s a much different process.

“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.”

Obviously, the couple are keeping specifics under wraps, but what White will say is this: “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?’“