Quotes of the Day

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Well finally the right questions got asked the right way to the right person and the right answers came tumbling forth! Y'all have witnessed my back and forth and back and forth over the Let the Right One In remake - and surely between now and its release in October there will be more of that to come (so stay tuned!) - but today I feel good, actually good, about it. Good, y'all! And it's due to this interview with director Matt Reeves over at HitFix. He and Drew McWeeny really have an actual substantive discussion over the ideas and themes in John Ajvide Lindqvist's book and in Tomas Alfredson's wonderful movie, and what's been hinted at so far, that Reeves might really understand what the story's about, is indeed seeming true at this point. I hesitate to quote anything too brief because their conversation is involved and really worth reading if this film's progress matters to you, but here's a passage that really hits on the head what I'd been worrying they were missing:

"Matt Reeves: ... I mean that’s the interesting thing I think about the story is that while [Eli] is… you know this character that [Oskar] meets who for all intents and purposes seems to be a real character... at the same time there’s no question that whether you want to take it literally or not, she is a manifestation of his rage.

Drew: She had to come along.

Matt: Yeah. He basically is having a romance with his rage and loneliness and all his painful feelings and she is the manifestation of that and if she hadn’t come along, yeah I think…. I mean what would you do if you were humiliated like that day after day? He turns inward and he was turning inward and then he meets her and she is… she enacts all the things he fantasizes about.

Drew: She’s the monster so he doesn’t have to be.

Matt: Yeah, exactly. And then what’s so great about the story is, it doesn’t change the fact that what’s so great about the story is the horror still remains horrifying. So it isn’t as if there is a pleasure in seeing the bullies get their comeuppance but it doesn’t lose the fact that it’s also horrific. And that there’s a consequence for everything that he goes through. It’s one thing to fantasize about something, and then to have those things actually happen and have that horror still be just as terrible as it actually would be, is really… it just creates a very ambiguous reaction to things. You look at it and you think, okay well can he really be happy that this is happening? And he’s not. He’s horrified. He’s terrified."

What happens between now and the film's release, the editing and all that post-production junk, the studio's take on the film, so forth, could shape the film away from his intentions, but for now I know that Reeves does in fact get it. Deep fucking breath, yo. (thanks to Mac for the heads-up on this interview!)
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