Love Birds

Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes company exists, so far, to update. Of its four films, three (Amityville Horror, The Hitcher, Texas Chainsaw Massacre) are remakes, and the fourth (Texas Chainsaw: The Beginning) is a prequel to a remake. Platinum Dunes does have original properties in the pipeline, but the remakes will keep coming.

In 2009 or so, Platinum Dunes will bring forth The Birds, a new take on Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 nature-amok thriller. There are plenty of places to read about The Birds, so I'll skip that in favor of the remake angle.

For instance, this conversation between Michael Bay and Scarlet Johansson on a 2005 press junket for The Island - itself, of course, an unauthorized (and eventually sued for plagiarism; the case settled out of court for an undisclosed seven figures) remake of Parts: The Clonus Horror:

BAY (to inquisitive reporter): I don't want to talk about The Birds, because that's so far down the line, and I have misgivings about even trying to even do that, you know what I'm saying?
JOHANSSON: You're remaking The Birds? The one with Tippi Hedren?
BAY: You can't believe everything you read. It doesn't mean it's going to happen.
JOHANSSON: You can't remake a Hitchcock movie!
BAY: I know, it doesn't feel right. That's why you can't believe everything you read.

Almost everything else I would hope to say - Tippi Hedren's on-set abuse, the certainty of Bay employing a raft of computerized birds, a brief mention of Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake - is encapsulated in an interview Hedren gave to The Daily Telegraph around the same time. While Hedren may protest too much on Hitch's behalf, she does provide a delightful batch of rancor and some choice quotations.*

Current gossip is that Naomi Watts would take over Hedren's role. No director is attached yet, but numerous writers: besides Daphne Du Maurier for her original story, Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson, who collaborated on sequels Hellraiser: Inferno and Urban Legend: Final Cut, and Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, both of whom it took to write Boogeyman.

*"It's appalling, I find it so offensive."