Since announcing his retirement from film-making last year, Steven Soderbergh has been remarkably busy. He has developed a TV drama called The Knick, is planning a Broadway musical on the life of Cleopatra and flogs booze and T-shirts on his wonderfully esoteric website, Extension 765.
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Movies still seem to fascinate him, though, and a couple of weeks back he posted an intriguing new version of Psycho on his site. Soderbergh’s Psychos is essentially a ‘mash-up’ of Alfred Hitchcock’s original 1960 film and Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot 1998 remake. For the most part, a scene from one version is directly followed by a scene from the other, but at several crucial points Soderbergh splices together Hitchcock and Van Sant shots from the same scene.
All of which might sound pointless and hopelessly nerdy to some readers, but Soderbergh’s edit is strangely fascinating to look at. The shower scene, for instance, is given a horrifying new power by intercut colour and black and white shots of Jamie Lee Curtis and Anne Heche meeting the same grisly fate at the hands of crazy Norman Bates.
The reason I find Psychos so interesting is that by taking apart and putting back together Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film, Steven Soderbergh shows us how it works and why it’s so very, very good. In a way, Gus Van Sant was doing exactly the same thing with his 1998 film – remaking Psycho in order to reveal its perfection.
Psycho is an odd film, no question about it, a masterpiece constructed at speed using the hack language of B-movies. And while in ways it’s totally untypical of the great director’s output, you could also argue that it’s quintessential Hitch, the purest and most uncompromised expression of his perverse genius.
It was uncompromised because Hitchcock was forced to make the film alone and using his own money after Paramount had refused to back the project. It was a huge risk, because the tone and content of Psycho were unlike anything seen in mainstream cinema to that point and could conceivably have destroyed Hitchcock’s career and reputation.
Instead, they enhanced it, and make one wonder what other weird and wonderful films he might have dreamt up if he’d managed to free himself from studio constraints earlier.
He stumbled on the idea by chance. In 1959 a Paramount project called No Bail for the Judge had fallen through when its star, Audrey Hepburn, became pregnant. Hitch was bored, restless and desperate for a new idea when his assistant, Peggy Robertson, handed him a copy of Robert Bloch’s novel, Psycho.
