Filmmaker Rod Lurie continued his tradition of coming to Syracuse University to present his most recent work, ‘Straw Dogs,’ to a large audience Friday night at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

 

A remake of Sam Peckinpah’s controversial 1971 film starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George, Lurie’s film is just as brutal and certainly holds its own when compared to its predecessor. Here, Lurie talks to The Daily Orange about the process of remaking the film and how his version will compare to the original picture.

To be bold: Were you trying to one-up Sam Peckinpah?

Nobody, least of all myself, can one-up this master. That was not my ambition. There’s definitely an ambition to try to make a fantastic film, but it would have been a fool’s errand to say that you’re going to make a better film than Peckinpah. The truth is that Peckinpah is one of the great masters in all of cinema, one of the most imitated directors of all-time, and I frankly don’t have the experience nor do I think the genius of Sam Peckinpah. He was rather extraordinary in what he was able to create and he also had balls the size of Texas to make a movie like this. My vision is a personal one. I’ve had some critical success in my time, but what I would really like to see is a movie that’s regarded as a really well made film but also is a commercial success, and I’m hoping that this movie has the opportunity to be both.

                                                                       

What inspired you to remake ‘Straw Dogs,’ a film that is widely considered to be a landmark in cinema?

Well, ‘landmark’ is the key word here; it’s a more appropriate word than ‘classic.’ First of all, when you have an opportunity to make a film, you take it very seriously. My producing partner, Marc Frydman, came to me and told me that he thought he could pick up the rights to ‘Straw Dogs’ for a remake, and at first I thought he was bananas, that we would simply have a bullseye on our backs regardless of how well the film would be made. And that probably still is the case. But the point is that the film, even if you look at the oeuvre of Sam Peckinpah, is not a classic. In fact, I’ll take it one step further. Let’s say that ‘The Wild Bunch’ is church, and ‘Straw Dogs’ is state. And what I mean by that is that with ‘The Wild Bunch,’ Peckinpah, in all his genius, created a genre, created something that had never been done before. I think that with ‘Straw Dogs’ he was playing in the same playground as ‘The Wild Bunch.’ Also I think that unlike ‘The Wild Bunch,’ which was very specific to its era and its location, ‘Straw Dogs’ was eminently remakable (re-makable, not remarkable) as a story because it could be moved to the United States and could be set in modern times.

 

Is the transposition in setting from England to the American South vital to the film’s meaning, or did you change it merely to give the film a different feel?

I did certainly change it to give it a different feel. I know and lived in the American South, I don’t really know the country sides of England although I lived in England for a while. Those kinds of towns in England I don’t think really exist in the same way as they did 40 years ago when this film came out, but these towns do exist in the United States. The thing about these towns is that very few people are moving into them. People are moving out. So basically the same families have been in the same homes now for over a century, and the truth is that because people don’t move into the towns, the same mindset remains, be it political, racial or religious.

 

What was your mindset in adapting the infamous rape scene from the original ‘Straw Dogs’?

The rape scene is obviously very difficult to do. On the one hand you don’t want to do anything that could be perceived as misogynistic, and on the other hand you want to be true to the essence of the character of Amy. A lot of people think that when Peckinpah had Amy quote-un-quote ‘enjoy the rape’ that she was representing all women, and in my mind she wasn’t, she was representing Amy Sumner, and it’s questionable whether or not she even in fact enjoyed that rape. It’s a very controversial scene. My ambition when I did that scene was to keep some of the ambiguity of the first rape scene, to try to keep it as intense and to have it be a talking point after the film, but I also wanted it to be central to the plot of the film.

 

Of the ways in which your film deviates from Peckinpah’s work, what aspect, be it stylistic or plot-oriented, did you feel was most important in distinguishing it from the original ‘Straw Dogs?’

Well the film doesn’t have anywhere near the same style as the Peckinpah film; my film is shot in a more lush and slightly grander style. In a way, I was more influenced by Scorsese’s ‘Cape Fear’ than I was by the original Peckinpah film. He had an extremely naturalistic and very gritty style that worked extremely well in its own context. I just wanted to make a different film. I would say that the biggest deviation is a philosophical deviation, and I don’t think I’m going to expand terribly on that because it’s something I would like audiences to discuss amongst themselves rather than me telling them.

 

 

Did you feel an imperative to alter Peckinpah’s misogynist ideology in your remake?

It is interesting that in most of Peckinpah’s films someone is being raped or being abused, be it the actual rape in ‘Straw Dogs,’ the sexual humiliations in ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,’ the near rape in ‘Ride the High Country,’ the rape in ‘Pat Garret & Billy the Kid,’ the rape in ‘Cross of Iron’ or the abuse of Ali McGraw in ‘The Getaway,’ so you do have to say that this is definitely a theme in Peckinpah’s works, and you can examine all you want. I think that Sam would tell you that in ‘Straw Dogs’ he’s not misogynistic because all the brutes and all the true assholes are men, and the only person who is neither is the woman. But questions have to be raised because of the threads that Peckinpah had through his entire line of work. It’s a theme that I was not particularly interested in pursuing; there were so many other ideas to mine.

 

The original ‘Straw Dogs’ belongs to what is arguably one of the most important periods in the history of cinema. How do you think your version belongs to this era?

Almost every director that I know, if they had their druthers, they would make movies ‘like they did in the 70’s,’ (air quotes) and the era of…forget just the era of ‘Straw Dogs,’ think about that year. You’ve got ‘The French Connection,’ and ‘Dirty Harry’ within 12 months of (‘The French Connection’). You’ve got ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ even ‘Fiddler On the Roof,’ I mean you’ve got an extraordinary bunch of films there that…I don’t know there will ever be a time when you have so many great films clumped into a period of time. Right now, the studios are not making movies like that. Almost every film I just mentioned was made by a studio. It was a studio that made ‘All the President’s Men,’ it was a studio that made ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ it was a studio that made all these films, and it’s simply unfathomable that that could happen right now. Now you have to go to Sundance to see a movie like ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’

 

Did you view the prospect of depicting the brutally violent and sexual aspects of ‘Straw Dogs’ as daunting, or did you embrace the challenge?

Oh, you really embrace that challenge. I’ve not done a lot of action scenes, I did in ‘The Last Castle,’ and I used the same stunts and action coordinator, Mic Rodgers. But it’s very difficult to do and it’s very difficult to see if it’s working because you have to shoot it in pieces. When it comes together it’s some sort of minor miracle, and for all the testing that we’ve done on ‘Straw Dogs,’ the one thing that has always remained unquestionable is how well the siege works at the end of the film. It’s a very rousing finale I think.

 

The aesthetic of ‘Straw Dogs’ is exceptionally smooth for such a gritty film. Where modern, heavily violent thrillers are generally shot more chaotically, how did you decide to shoot much of ‘Straw Dogs’ in a sleeker, more classical manner?

It is shot in a more classical manner, although you will find several shots in the film that I think are unique. For example, the execution of the deer in the beginning of the film is seen literally through the eye of the deer, which is something that I’ve never seen before and therefore really wanted to do, the concept there being that man is not an animal, that man is capable of cruelty that beasts are not. So there are, throughout the film, some photographic flourishes that are based almost entirely on the film’s philosophical aesthetics. Almost the entire film is shot with a steady camera up until the siege, which is shot entirely hand-held, so when we go into sort of the last 25 minutes of the film we’re in a slightly more frenetic mode. The steadiness and the beauty of the camera work that precedes it is also intended to ignite a sense of the quote-un-quote ‘slow burn’ that is important to the film.

 

How is that slow-burning quality vital to the film’s impact?

One of the areas where it does stay true to the original is that we’re not making an MTV movie. Clint Culpepper (Sony Screen Gems president), when we brought the film to him, told me that he wanted to make a commercial art film, and that’s really what I think we have tried to do. We do really take our time to, without boring the audience, establish the characters, establish their place in this town and what they mean to one another, and then we unleash the dogs of war.

 

Alexander Skarsgard is absolutely dazzling in the film. How does he compare to Del Henney, the actor whose role he inherited?

Well this is the one area where I will lay my cards out and tell you that we did exceed the original in the casting of Alex. We found Alexander before he really exploded, and he met with myself and with Clint Culpepper several times, and we were unsure because he wasn’t necessarily a big name and Alexander in person is unbelievably sweet, and very Swedish. But he translated into something absolutely extraordinary and I think that the Charlie in our film is somebody that you can much better understand why Amy was ever into him in the first place. In the original film I don’t necessarily think that you spend an hour, especially the women in the audience, arguing who you would rather see Amy with. In this film that certainly is the case because he comes across as very down-to-earth, very rugged, very much a man, very unpretentious, which is sort of the opposite of how David is perceived in the film. You’re going to see the emergence of Alexander as one of the biggest stars in the world. I doubt I’ll be able to get him on the phone in two years.  

 

As actors, James Marsden and Dustin Hoffman are not remotely similar. How is Marsden’s performance unique?

It was important to get an actor that was not in the same hemisphere, personality and character-wise, as Hoffman. There are a lot of actors today that very much exist because of Dustin Hoffman, people like Ed Norton or Jake Gyllenhaal, for example. Jimmy, to me, is more in the Redford/Newman mold. While Hoffman was more of an Upper West Side, Jewish intellectual type, Jimmy, at least in this film, comes across as more Greenwich, Conn. kind of snob. He’s more finished. Clint Culpepper articulated something to me once which was to quote ‘The Way We Were,’ which was about the Robert Redford character: ‘Like his country, everything came too easy to him,’ and that’s the way that we feel about the Marsden character. In that way it’s quite a bit different.

 

Neither Marsden nor Bosworth have been in many high-pedigree thrillers. Were you shocked or impressed by an aspect of their terrific performances in some way in particular?

Kate is younger, she’s young, and what will really surprise you with someone that young is that amazing work ethic. We started talking about this film four months before we even began shooting it. We talked almost every day about the film. She was even sending me music that she though Amy would listen to. As a director/writer it’s easy to become arrogant and assume you know the character better than they do and that you’re going to get a great performance. I tell all my actors that I know the character better than you do, until about a week or two into the movie, in which case they better know it better than I do, and Kate came up with several ideas that I didn’t necessarily agree with intellectually right away but assumed they were right because she was beginning to understand the character so well. And it’s a performance for the ages. And Marsden is just magnificent, and you know he does an amazing Hoffman impersonation, but he’s not Dustin Hoffman in the film at all, and it took a lot of balls to take on this role, because he will nonetheless be compared, but less so than if he had been in that circle of Hoffman-like actors. 

 

You’re famous for the wealth of strong, confident female protagonists in your films. How does Amy Sumner (Kate Bosworth) fit alongside the best female characters in your work?

One of the most interesting things you can do in a remake is take different human beings, different personalities, and put them in the same situation and see how that new personality would react. The Marsden character is nothing like the Hoffman character and the Bosworth character is certainly nothing like the Susan George character and so it’s simply different. Kate played Amy based on the life experiences she thought Amy had gone through.

 

The ending of your film is more visceral and less open-ended than that of the original. What led you to alter the film’s final moments?

The end of the original film is a conversation between Dustin Hoffman and Peter Arne, and I remember reading Roger Ebert’s review where he blasted it for being overly pretentious, and I sort of agreed with him. It was a tacked-on ending, literally. If you look at the history of the film, the screenplay ends much differently. The screenplay doesn’t have that scene at all, and I wanted to have a greater sense of emotional finality to the Marsden character. I don’t want to go at all into what the actual ending is, but I will go back to what I was saying before, in that he’s not the Dustin Hoffman-Sumner character, he’s someone completely different. He would not have said that to the Niles character.

 

As in the original, it is hard to determine who the villain of the film is. How essential is that ambiguity to the overall complexity of the film?

If this was an independent film and I was doing the poster and I had to come up with a tag line, my tag line would be, ‘They all had it coming.’ Which is really true of all of us, we all do things in life where we have it coming, and certainly one of the themes to examine in the film is the responsibility we all have to take for the actions that run our lives.

 

By making the setting a football town you imbue the setting with an identity that the original lacks. How does this identity contribute to the overall feel of the picture?

It’s an identity of violence, isn’t it? If you think about this movie, everything is solved through violence, be it the bar fight that you see in the beginning of the film to how (Daniel) deals with his mentally challenged brother, to how they go hunting for fun. My daughter even pointed out that the only way to make a living is when violence hits the town, which is the hurricane that they then have to fix, and then the ultimate violence is the football games that are played on every Friday, and when you see the football game there is a bloodlust, so violence is the ultimate identifier of the town.

 

In remaking a film, is it much harder to articulate your personal philosophy and ideals?

Sam Peckinpah had a philosophy in the film that was rooted in a couple of books written by the author Robert Ardrey. One was called ‘African Genesis’ and the other was called ‘The Territorial Imperative,’ and so in both of those books, Ardrey was saying that we need to watch out for man’s innate genetic proclivity to violence, which I utterly reject as an idea and find to be almost fascist, which Pauline Kale was saying in her famous review of the film.

 

The David and Amy characters are much more vibrant and have much more personality than the characters in the original. How does that change the dynamic of their relationship?

I think that in the original film, the Hoffman character had much more power over the Amy character only because he was so much more intellectual than her and had so much more life experience. These two characters are more equals. He’s certainly more intellectually gifted than her but she has a sense of competition with him. They’re simply different. Again, people will say I didn’t get the original, and those critics are not going to get the fact that that’s not how you make a remake: you make a remake by creating brand new characters, brand new human beings, and putting them in the same situations.

 

What do you expect the reaction to be, and what would you say to the skeptics?

I would say, pretend like you haven’t seen the original film and watch this thing as its own entity. It is not the Peckinpah film; it is not a film about the territorial imperative; it is not about man’s genetic proclivity for violence; it’s not about the things that were near and dear to Peckinpah’s heart; it’s about the things that are near and dear to my heart. I took the same tableau and I’m very grateful to have a genius providing the framework for me. I certainly expect to be assaulted by critics whether they like the film or not, because it’s an opportunity to show how smart you are, to show what a cineaste you are, and how well you know Peckinpah. The truth is, I doubt there are many people who know the original ‘Straw Dogs’ as well as I do, that know what Peckinpah’s intentions were because I’ve read every one of his memos, every casting note, read almost every essay about the film, and if these guys want to go on Jeopardy with me with the category ‘Straw Dogs,’ I’m very happy to go against them.

 

smlittma@syr.edu