A Short History of Great Directors Remaking Their Own Movies
“Remake” has always been something of a dirty word among a subset of film fans, and at a time when the arts are under attack by AI and multiplexes are crammed with copies of copies of copies, it conjures artifice, laziness, and flat-out carelessness. It makes any film carrying that distinction easy to dismiss. But despite its connotations, “remake” is not an inherently awful word, and plenty of cinematic luminaries agree. Filmmakers ranging from Spielberg and Soderbergh to Scorsese and the Coen brothers have tried their hand at new takes on previously filmed material, often with dazzling results. Without remakes we wouldn’t have Cronenberg’s The Fly, Carpenter’s The Thing, Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre or two of the greatest Westerns (A Fistful of Dollars and The Magnificent Seven) ever made. In the right hands, a remake, no matter how far-fetched it might sound at first, can be absolutely transcendent.
And it doesn’t always take a fresh pair of eyes to make those remakes work. In the long history of cinematic retreading, many towering figures have taken it upon themselves to remake and re-adapt their own work, creating fascinating case studies in career evolution, casting differences, and stylistic upgrades. With The Killer, John Woo becomes the latest master to join the club, directing an English-language remake of his own Hong Kong film. But he’s far from the only one. When great directors remake their own films, amazing things can happen, and in at least one case, these remakes have produced some of the most beautiful movies ever made. So, in honor of Woo’s recent remake, and in a quest to prove that “remake” is not in and of itself a dirty word, let’s take a look back at the history of legendary filmmakers trying again with their own movies. While there is certainly overlap, we can broadly sort remakes by the same director into two rough categories: The Practical Remake and the Spiritual Remake.
The Practical Remake
The first of these categories is exactly what it sounds like: A remake born of practical considerations brought on by technology, budget, or narrative expansion. The simplest version of this in the modern day might be a director remaking their own short film – think Wes Anderson with Bottle Rocket or Tim Burton with Frankenweenie – into a full-length feature, but the original remakes that fit here often have much bigger leaps.
Remakes were effectively born in the late 1920s and early 1930s with the advent of synchronized sound in motion pictures. When it became clear that “talkies” were here to stay, Hollywood saw an opportunity to revitalize silent stories with sound productions. Often this meant a change in directors, but there are several key examples of the same filmmakers stepping into try their hands at both. In 1935, for instance, Dracula director Tod Browning reunited with Bela Lugosi for a film called Mark of the Vampire, a mystery with supernatural elements that’s basically a talkie remake of Browning’s own London After Midnight, the Holy Grail of lost silent pictures.
Less than a decade passed before London After Midnight became Mark of the Vampire, but sometimes the talkie remakes took longer, and as a result got bigger. It took more than three decades for Cecil B. DeMille to craft arguably the most famous talkie remake of all time, The Ten Commandments, an epic Biblical saga that actually remade (sometimes shot-for-shot) the 50-minute prologue of his 1923 film The Ten Commandments, which opens with the Exodus story and then transitions into a modern-day fable.
By the time DeMille’s remake had rolled around, of course, color had taken over big-budget motion pictures, and remakes came with yet another technological leap. It’s during this period that other legendary filmmakers began trying for color upgrades of black-and-white classics. In 1956, no less a titan than Alfred Hitchcock released The Man Who Knew Too Much starring Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day, a remake of his own 1934 film starring Leslie Banks and Peter Lorre. Both films, the England-made black-and-white version and the American-made color feature, have gone down as Hitchcockian classics in their own right. In discussing his reasons for remaking the film, Hitchcock famously told Francois Truffaut that “the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional,” inadvertently summing up why a lot of great directors might try their hands at remakes at all. Other major remakes in the same vein include the Technicolor musical A Song Is Born (1948), remade by Howard Hawks from his own Ball of Fire (1941), and Frank Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles (1961), a remake of his Lady for a Day (1933).
Then there are the films that make up the third, and arguably least respectable, form of the Practical Remake: The ones adapted from one language, and therefore often one culture, to another. These include Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997 and 2007), Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge (2002 and 2004), and George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (1988 and 1993). These are the films where it seems easiest to crow about money grabbing, and cinephiles will often try to convince you that the original subtitled film remains superior (and in the case of The Vanishing at the very least, we’re right). Still, in the right hands, a cultural shift and another crack at the story can produce something interesting or worthwhile.
Of course, sometimes none of these things are the real engine powering the remake machine. Sometimes the filmmaker sees something vital, and decides to dip back into the well for reasons that are a little more abstract.
The Spiritual Remake
Sometimes remakes happen, when it really boils down to it, because the filmmaker simply wanted another crack at the material. It’s not that anything went especially wrong the first time, or even that the previous film was limited in some way (though sometimes a bigger budget is definitely a lure). It’s that there’s a chance to mine the themes and concepts in a new, possibly more interesting way. It’s this approach that grants us the Spiritual Remake, one that’s not always a direct one-to-one comparison, but shares enough DNA to be called a remake nevertheless.
The patron saint of this particular form of remake is Abel Gance, the legendary French filmmaker who directed the silent masterpiece J’accuse in 1919 as an indictment of World War I, then turned around and made a sound version of the same film, 1938’s J’accuse!, as a pre-emptive indictment of the coming World War II. Both films are indictments of war, feature the dead from the conflict literally rising from their graves in stirring finale sequences, and serve as spotlights on the hostility of Europe at two key points in the early 20th century.
But spiritual remakes aren’t just reserved for trying to make the same point twice. For proof, we can look to Raoul Walsh, who delivered the film noir classic High Sierra in 1941, then eight years later adapted the same story into a Western with Colorado Territory, proving that the same tale of a crook getting out of jail to pull one last job is beautifully done in two different genres. In the case of Howard Hawks, he didn’t even need the genre jump to do spiritual remakes, as he proved with Rio Bravo (1959), El Dorado (1966) and his final film, Rio Lobo (1970), all three of which are John Wayne-starring vehicles about small-town sheriffs facing outsized odds. The remakes are a case of diminishing returns, to be sure, but El Dorado in particular is a classic unto itself. Then, of course, there’s Sam Raimi, who delivered The Evil Dead, then gave us Evil Dead II, a film with roughly the same plot and the same main character, but with a more screwball tone. Both films stand today as horror classics.
In other cases, the Spiritual Remake emerges simply because the director couldn’t do everything they wanted the first time. The most famous example of this, though most people don’t realize it, is Michael Mann’s Heat, which is a refined version of a concept he’d been developing for years and finally made in the form of the TV movie L.A. Takedown in 1989. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the first version, but it’s clearly a made-for-TV production with room for expansion. Heat is Mann unchained from restrictions, with incredible results. Then there’s John Ford and William Wyler, both of whom remade films as the society around them became more acclimated to liberal ideas and diversified characters, Ford with Judge Priest (1934) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953), and Wyler with These Three (1936) and The Children’s Hour (1961). In both cases, the filmmakers returned to the same territory at least in part because they wanted to insert story elements – in Ford’s case a story of the horrors of racism, in Wyler’s LGBTQ characters – previously dropped amid 1930s studio standards.
The Spiritual Remake runs the gamut, and often blurs with the Practical Remake in instances where a filmmaker wants both a technical upgrade and a new take on an old story. This blurring can deliver wonderful results, and in the case of one particular remake, an absolute masterpiece.
The Practical and The Spiritual Merge in Floating Weeds
The Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu was no stranger to Spiritual Remakes by the time he came to Floating Weeds. He’d already directed 1959’s Good Morning, a remake of his own 1932 film I Was Born, But…, and his films in general are treasure troves of recurring themes, structures and stock characters. In Floating Weeds, he found another repository of wonderful material worth revisiting.
A remake of his own 1934 silent film A Story of Floating Weeds, the film emerges first as a Practical Remake, a chance for Ozu to revisit the story with sound and, for just the third time in his career up to that point, in color. It was also, crucially, a chance for Ozu to root the same story of a wayward troupe of actors and their troubled leader in a post-World War II version of his home country. This sense of transition, of the world moving on from old-fashioned ideas of the Japan that was, runs throughout the 1959 version of Floating Weeds, as Ozu ponders high art and low art, propriety and passion, and moral duties in conflict with emotional debts.
The plot remains largely the same, as do the characters, though with different names this time around. What changes is Ozu’s maturation as both artist and humanist. A Story of Floating Weeds is a wonderful film, but Floating Weeds is positively breathtaking, a film that deserves to be considered alongside Ozu’s Tokyo Story as one of the finest to ever emerge from Japan. Most importantly for our purposes, it got that way not just because Ozu grew and changed as an artist over time, but because it’s a remake. There’s a refinement to the material, to the visuals, to the way the seaside location serves as a reminder of the vastness of our world and the smallness of the human figures moving within it that only a more mature filmmaker could give us. More importantly, because 25 years had passed and Ozu was nearing the end of his life (he would die just four years later), he seems to have a more intimate, more precise grasp of the film’s themes of regret and loss, and the wisdom to understand that while we grieve the world that’s faded, we also have to embrace the new world that’s coming. It’s the kind of depth that could only have come from a master filmmaker daring to take another shot at the same material. It is, easily and without reservation, one of the most beautifully made films I have ever seen, and proof that remakes always deserve our consideration. Some may be duds, some may be interesting cultural detours, but others emerge as absolute masterworks.
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.