Without Gus Van Sant’s ‘Psycho,’ We Wouldn’t Have the New ‘Lion King’

Twenty years ago today, one of the strangest and most fascinating film experiments of all time debuted in theaters. And not just a few art-house theaters in the big, cosmopolitan cities either. This film experiment debuted on 2,400+ screens, the fourth highest screen count of that weekend (behind The Rugrats Movie, The Waterboy, and A Bug’s Life). All of America was invited to head out to the movies to watch an indie director’s attempt to grapple with the work of one of the masters of cinema. Gus Van Sant set out to remake Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho shot-for-shot, and while his film was roundly rejected both critically and popularly, perhaps we should all be tipping our cap to it 20 years later as we’re all anticipating what certainly appears to be a shot-for-shot remake of The Lion King as the big box-office behemoth of 2019.

Director Gus Van Sant was coming off of directing Good Will Hunting the year before, a popular phenomenon of a film thanks to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s irresistible hook of a story. The film remains Van Sant’s biggest moneymaker (by a wide margin) and was the first of his two Oscar nominations for Best Director. Suddenly, this indie director most famous for films like Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, and the Nicole Kidman dark comedy To Die For was being given the leeway of a blockbuster Hollywood director. And for his big-budgeted follow-up (Box-Office Mojo lists it at a $60 million budget), Van San decided to remake Psycho shot-for-shot. It’s one of the most incredible, perhaps foolish ways any director has spent career capital.

Van Sant set about casting his film in a very 1998 way. Anne Heche and Vince Vaughn had just made the international legal drama/moral dilemma Return to Paradise, and now, improbably, they’d be together again as Marion Crane and Norman Bates, the roles made iconic by Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins. For the rest of the cast, Van Sant selected Julianne Moore (fresh off of her first Oscar nomination for Boogie Nights) to play Marion’s sister and Viggo Mortenson to play Marion’s lover, Sam Loomis. Mortensen had enjoyed his breakout role earlier in the year as Gwyneth Paltrow’s extramarital paramour in A Perfect Murder. And William H. Macy, only two years from his Fargo breakout, who has subsequently shown up in one billion films, from Air Force One to Boogie Nights to Pleasantville. The Van Sant Psycho is as effective a 1998 time capsule as you’re going to find.

Among the many criticisms of the Psycho remake were that Vaughn was miscast and couldn’t deliver a character even half as creepy as Perkins did. To be fair, this was before Vaughn had settled into his Old School/Dodgeball bro comedy years; his film choices around this time were more varied and often darker. But he truly was overmatched playing Norman Bates. Everything down to his physical frame worked against him as he towered over Anne Heche, far too obviously looming for the seemingly unthreatening Norman.

Anne Heche fared better in both the initial reception and in the over-the-years reevaluations of the film. Heche has always been a far more talented actress than she’s given credit for, partly because so much of her notoriety became tangled up in things like her relationship with Ellen Degeneres and her 2001 memoir Call MeCrazy. But in 1998, she was delivering consistently varied and excellent performances. Her 1996-97 run that included Walking and Talking, Donnie Brasco, and Wag the Dog was woefully underrated, and the fact that she (and not, say, Vaughn) got a Razzie nomination for Psycho is sadly emblematic of how actresses suffer more for failure.

Van Sant’s film was panned right from the beginning, even by critics like Roger Ebert, who was often ahead of the pack in appreciating daring cinema. There was a sense of rallying around the Hitchcock original in the response to Van Sant; an attempt to shield a classic movie from the grubby mitts of the present. After all, despite the “shot-for-shot” label, Van San still filmed in color, updated the story to present day, and made some small changes. Even filmmakers like Alexander Payne slighted it at the time.

Over the years, opinions became a bit kinder to Van Sant’s vision, partially because Van Sant quickly admitted that, if Psycho was indeed an experiment, the conclusions only upheld the community’s reverence for Hitchcock anyway. “You can’t copy a film,” Van Sant told the New York Times in 2005. “If I hold a camera, it’s different than if Irving Penn holds it. Even if it’s in the same place, it will magically take on his character. Which was part of the experiment. Our Psycho showed that you can’t really appropriate. Or you can appropriate, but it’s not going to be the same thing.”

Fast-forward 20 years, however, and Hollywood doesn’t seem to be doing much hand-wringing at all about making exact duplicates of its old movies. Which isn’t even a comment on the lack of imagination going into sequels and superhero franchises. Films are being fully copied, nearly to the degree that Van Sant copied Psycho, and they’re not only celebrated, they’ve become huge blockbusters. Disney threw some extra padding into Beauty and the Beast, but everything from the songs to the colors to the costumes were replicated precisely from the original. Next summer’s The Lion King appears to be doing the same thing, swapping out the old traditional Disney animation for something more realistically CGI. It would probably not be accurate to say that Bill Condon or Jon Favreau took their inspiration from Gus Van Sant’s mad little film experiment. But they sure are walking in his footsteps.

Where to stream Psycho (1998)