Modern Adaptation Quotes

I'd love to do like a modern day 'Shining' and play the Jack Nicholson role.

There's no recreating what Michael Jackson and Diana Ross did in 'The Wiz'. We're trying to figure out who these characters are in 2015. How would these times change their motives, change the things they would say and do?

When I first heard 'Robocop' was going to be remade. I said, 'Yeah, that's interesting. I'll probably watch that at some point, but I'm not interested at all to be in it.'

'House of Wax' is a remake, but 'House of Wax' is very different. It's like a background concept, but it's a completely different story.

We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.

I think when the movie 'Roxanne' came out, which I also had written, I felt something new that I never felt, which was respect.

I've always wanted to play Maria in West Side Story. My idol is Natalie Wood, and I love the movie, so I think a modern-day twist on it would be really neat.

You can see that ladylike kind of dressing with a twist coming back at Dior, and I think that a lot of the fashion is following in those kinds of footsteps. It's wearable. It sits in your wardrobe forever.

It was great, because as far as playing such an iconic character that Cinderella is from the Disney world, walking into such a raw and authentic environment - even though it's the real world, and it's Jacinda, it's still Cinderella that's being cursed, and now she's in the real world as Jacinda.

The designs were based on quite a lot of research of what a movie musical is, filtered through the eyes of today. If we'd gone strictly with the '20s, the movement would have been impaired.

No, it's interesting to remake a film for the contemporary audience today. I think it's a good idea; it needs to respect the original idea. Don't just take the title and change everything else.

The whole idea of going out to a movie was really a secularized version of going to church.

I've always thought it would be fun to update "Hansel and Gretel." I'd have these white parents in the suburbs with an income of fifty or sixty thousand dollars. Daddy loses his job, and the wicked stepmother says, "We could get along, we could keep our Mastercharge, if you'd just get rid of those shitty kids." Finally the father hires a limo and tells the driver, "Drop 'em off on Lenox Avenue in Harlem at two in the morning." These two little white kids land there. They're menaced. And this supposedly nice black lady says, "Would you like some candy?"

I've always liked the idea of taking old dramatic ideas and devices and making them feel relevant or contemporary or whatever.

I went back to Australia to do a show called 'The Beautiful Lie,' which is a retelling of 'Anna Karenina' in a six-part mini-series - a modern, contemporary version.

I stick closely to the structure of the myths. I may have some fun with the mythology by changing the environment to modern-day, but the structure of the myths, the monsters, the relationships of the gods - none of that is made up.

If 'Hamlet' had been written in these days it would probably have been called 'The Strange Affair at Elsinore.

One of my ambitions has been to go back to what those great authors were doing then ... to bridge that sensibility of old Victorian Gothic tales and reconstruct them in a modern way.

The idea of doing a production of 'Carousel' that doesn't feel like it's stuck in the 1950s really intrigues me.

There's something about taking a classic movie that people love and doing another version of that, you're setting yourself up for a mistake.

Across all Cinderella versions it was clear that the 21st century was not very much in evidence, particularly in the character of Cinderella so it seemed, it felt actually as though it hadn't been done for quite some time, not with the kind of lushness that we could do it with, with an absolute removal of the passivity of Cinderella and finding an amusing way, a lighthearted but significant way of making her proactive and not a girl who's life is about waiting for a bloke.

If I ever see another Shakespeare production where somebody drives a Jeep on stage, I'm going to run screaming up the aisle.

I'm inspired when I find out about something that I didn't know was a remake.

The success of the '86 movie with Brandon Lee demanded some kind of continuation. Plus, I had always contemplated a modern version.

Why would you want to remake a movie that has endured for more than 25 years?