The Alex Proyas-directed sci-fi thriller “Knowing” hit the top of the box office at the weekend, raking in $24.8M, which is pretty solid for an effects-driven feature made for just $50m.
While reviews were all over the place -- ranging from Roger Ebert’s ebullient appraisal (“among the best science-fiction films I've seen”) to Owen Gleiberman’s derision (“so inept that you may wish you were watching an M. Night Shyamalan version of the very same premise”) -- many fans have taken its angels and bunnies under their wings, signified not only by the strong revenue but also by a healthy 7.2/10 rating on the user-voted IMDB chart.
And that bodes well for two of “Knowing's" writers, married couple Stiles White and Juliet Snowden. These guys took Ryne Pearson’s original script from being about predicted assassinations to predicted disasters for Proyas.
But what’s really had them on fanboys’ radars is that they’re the “Boogeyman” duo who’re writing not only the remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” but also the update of the beloved Steven Spielberg-produced, Tobe Hooper-directed “Poltergeist.”
Now my reflexive position is that I’m no fan of such “reimaginings,” but it’s always a position I have to temper with the admission that one of my favorite movies is John Carpenter’s 1982 “The Thing,” which was a new version of John W. Campbell’s novella “Who Goes There?” filmed in 1951 as “The Thing From Another World.” I also loved Zack Snyder’s 2004 amped-up interpretation of George A. Romero’s 1978 classic “Dawn of the Dead.”
So in the interests of fairness, and with hope that these new films might not go the way of “The Invasion” or “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” I wanted to hear what White and Snowden had to say about approaching their very tough two assignments.
“Those are treasured films,” White says in acknowledgement of the fans’ concern over new versions of “The Birds” and “Poltergeist.”
“Those are classics, those are beloved movies that go beyond just a good film. People really embrace those as part of their lives, the power they were at the moment, what was going on in their lives when they saw that movie. You know, it’s like riffing to a Beatles record: it’s more than just a record -- it’s fused into your life.”
Spoken like a true fan. But would a true fan tamper with such movies?
“We actually do get offered a lot of remakes that we do pass on,” Snowden chimes in. “With something like “The Birds,” you can take the concept of birds gone crazy and put that onto a myriad of situations. 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.’
White continues about “The Birds”: “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.
