Movies
‘Not Quite Hollywood’ Director to Remake Aussie Thriller ‘Patrick’
For those of you who caught Mark Hartley’s Aussie doc Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story Of Ozploitation!, which highlighted Aussie genre cinema of the 70s and early 80s, one of the highlighted films was Richard Franklin’s 1978 thriller Patrick, which follows a comatose hospital patient that harasses and kills through his powers of telekinesis. In a new interview, Hartley reveals that he’s been developing a remake with plans to shoot this year.
“After we finished NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, I had discussed this with PATRICK’s producer, Tony Ginnane, and we decided we’d take a crack at reinventing it,” Hartley told the Fango blog. “So Justin King and I wrote a treatment and Justin’s working on the script at the moment, and hopefully, as soon as MACHETE MAIDENS is finished, we’ll get right into it.”
“We’re sort of giving it a creepier, Gothic flavor, very much in a similar style to THE ORPHANAGE,” he continues. “There’s much more of a backstory for Dr. Roget, and Patrick has dream sequences and flashbacks where he’s out of the bed. We don’t want to turn Patrick into Freddy Kreuger; we like to think of it as a love story with a body count. The great thing about the original was the fact that here’s a guy with unlimited powers, but all he wants to do is use them to manipulate the events in that nurse’s life to make her fall in love with him. So we’ve kept that central premise and really upped the ante.”
One major plan is to take the story outside of the hospital room, something that didn’t really happen in the origina.
“The first PATRICK, as much as it’s a really interesting film, is very much of its time. It’s predominantly set in one hospital room, and we’re trying to open it up. To be honest–and I’ve said this to Tony–it’s not that scary when you watch it now, and we’re all about giving it those jolts. Obviously, I’m a fan of PATRICK, and I want people who’ve seen the original to appreciate the remake, so we’re certainly putting nods to the first one throughout the film, but we’re not doing a Gus Van Sant PSYCHO.”
Two things that have proven to be pretty dependable at the box office in recent years are horror movies and Christopher Nolan movies. With Nolan’s The Odyssey absolutely dominating the box office this past weekend, many fans of Nolan’s work have been left hungry for a Nolan-directed horror movie. After all, The Odyssey does whet the appetite for Nolan nightmare fuel.
Christopher Nolan has brushed up against the horror genre in the past with 2002 thriller Insomnia, but does he have any interest in someday making a full-on horror movie?
Nolan tells the Empire Podcast in a new chat, “I’ve always been interested in doing a horror film.”
“But horror is most successful when the conceptual framework of whatever the story is is just so undeniable. I think there are very few really great horror movies,” Nolan continues.
So why hasn’t Christopher Nolan directed a horror movie yet?
He explains to Empire, “I’ve never clicked with a particular idea or concept that worked for me. I love the genre. Of all genres, it’s the most visceral. Where the direct response to the audience is the most important. That is to say, you’re trying to make people literally feel something in their bones about what’s going on on-screen.”
Nolan calls horror “a genre in which experimentation is demanded.” He explains, “I go to see a lot of horror films with my kids these days, and you’ll see things in the first half an hour, 45 minutes of any horror film that you’d never see in another genre. Risks that are taken. Dangerous approaches to things. Admittedly, a lot of movies can’t sustain that to the end. But in the horror genre, that kind of innovation is not just respected – it’s really demanded.”
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is now playing in theaters.
Cillian Murphy as Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)
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