What movie remakes have to do with previs?

05/03/2007 by Stiglic Dragan.

Few days ago I have seen The Departed - an Oscar winning film directed by Martin Scorsese. It had really very high level of maturity, and it seemed to me that it has almost perfect story structure. I haven’t seen so well knitted storyline since The Usual Suspects.

Only few days later - I have lerned that the film is actually a re-work of Infernal Affairs, a Japanese produced movie, created few years ago. Well, that explains few things : ) I Wonder how amazing it was for Martin to watch and analyze Infernal Affairs while building his own movie. In a weird way - we can assume that Infernal Affears was actually some kind of previs (or more likely superprevis : ) for The Departed.

Now - estethic question remains: If The Departed won an oscar - should it be shared with authors of the seminal work - Infernal Affairs? I would say: yes. If a movie has main key value that originally belonged to previous work - It is very questionable to award only what is another “performance” of the same “composition”.

Just like in movies, similar phenomenon currently rules in music: There is a practice of western popular culture industry to give more credits to performers (singers, directors, producers) rather then to creators (music composers, scriptwriters). Reasons are logical: first group is more popular, and… it’s simply closer to the money!

How many actor’s names you remember? How many directors? And how many scriptwriters you can name? It’s logical why it is like it is, but to the creators of artistic seed of all these masterpieces - it’s not really doing much of a justice….

Mozzart was lucky he was born before western industry was formed… if he worked in our times - his music would have probably been labeled “produced by the makers of The Little Night Music”…

 I’m so glad for Dan Brown who first published his books, and made his name before hollywood started turning his novels to movies : )

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