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If you could direct any movie you wanted... what would it be? 
Here would be a couple of my own personal choices, all of them adaptations...
SENTINEL II: THE GUARDIAN
(based on the 1979 novel by Jeffrey Konvitz)
In a way, the whole mythology of Jeffrey Konvitz's The Sentinel and The Guardian is probably my favorite horror mythos of all the post-Rosemary's Baby, post-Exorcist cash-ins from the 1970's. I even like it better than the Omen trilogy, quite frankly. The Sentinel, of course, was made into a movie by Michael Winner in 1977, starring Cristina Raines and Chris Sarandon as well as a plethora of former big names and big names to be. An adaptation of The Guardian could be rather problematic in this day and age, because there's a big plot twist involving a character's sexual identity that might be considered less than "woke." But my approach to that would be to just "steer into the skid" and make that particular character revelation part of what the film's about, and do it in an enlightened, humane and intelligent way.
THE SOUND
(based on a novel and a short story by Hubert Selby Jr.)
Quite possibly one of the great "unfilmables" of all time, Selby's second novel The Room is an uncomfortable look inside the head of an unidentified, unnamed prisoner - whose crime is never explicitly identified - who's awaiting his trial date. As the book progresses, we experience his memories, childhood traumas and his fantasies of vindication and revenge. Believe me, his head is a place no one in their right mind would want to be inside of, and yet this guy's not so different from you and me. Sometimes the line between his actual experiences and his imagined experiences and fantasies is rather blurred, and that's certainly not an uncommon phenomenon. Now, due to the whole thing about The Room also being the title of a rather notorious so-bad-it's-good film from 2003 (which I haven't seen), I'm using the title The Sound, which is the name of a short story from a Selby collection called Song of the Silent Snow, which also deals with an incarcerated man with a traumatic past, and from which story elements could be incorporated into the film. As a film taking place within the mind of a confined, traumatized character, obvious cinematic role models would be Alan Parker's Pink Floyd: The Wall from 1982 and Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun from 1971 (from which footage was incorporated into the video for Metallica's One video in 1988).
SON OF CELLULOID
(based on a short story from Books of Blood by Clive Barker)
Quite amazing to think that this story has never been made into a movie yet, given its subject matter. The problem is, whenever Clive Barker himself pitched the idea, he would always say that it was about a cancer capable of imitating movie stars... and then the executives would take a hard pass! Maybe it was mention of the big "C" which did it. But what it basically amounts to is a story about a haunted movie theater, the offending spirit being a sentient parasite which originated as a stomach cancer within the body of an escaped convict who perished in a crawlspace behind the screen. And if memory serves me correctly, the movie theater used to be a church, so that particular area was already kind of a "charged space"! Apparently, this creature is compelled to literally feast upon the eyes of its victims, being of course the spawn of the viewers' gaze. And it can send out telepathic signals to its victims, making them hallucinate that they're wandering into a scene from a movie and actually meeting one if its characters... at which point it strikes! A good cinematic role model would be something like Lamberto Bava's Demons from 1985. An interesting story element to incorporate into the story would be a blind woman with psychic abilities, accompanied by a relative and a service dog, who would know and sense that something was bad about the theater and feel a malevolent presence. Of course, the intuitive or psychic blind character is kind of a staple of many films of the horror genre, including Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now from 1973, Dario Argento's Suspiria from 1977, Lucio Fulci's The Beyond from 1981, and of course the aforementioned Demons. (I also can't help thinking of the character played by Maxine Audley in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, the blind mother of the heroine played by Anna Massey.)
INVISIBLE MONSTERS
(based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk)
So far, I believe there have only been two adaptations of Chuck Palahniuk novels, those of course being 1999's Fight Club and 2008's Choke. Given Palahniuk's penchant for the outlandish and discomfiting, it is quite understandable that his work would be a hard sell for many people in the biz. Anyway, Invisible Monsters is the tale of a young fashion model named Shannon McFarland who - apparently accidentally - gets shot in the face and has her jaw torn off. Shannon eventually becomes friends with a trans woman named Brandy Alexander, who helps her adapt to her situation and create a new identity and life for herself. There are also elaborate back stories, twists and shocking revelations involving the characters of Shannon's boyfriend, her best friend and her long-lost brother who - it is presumed - died of AIDS many years before. The story is told in a very cut-up, non-linear style which jumbles the chronology. Stylistically, I'm not 100% sure how the movie should play. I'm guessing something approximating Robert Aldrich or Rainer Werner Fassbinder on bad acid...
IN THE KINGDOM OF EL REY
(based on Chapter 14 of Jim Thompson's The Getaway)
As you probably know very well, Jim Thompson's crime thriller The Getaway has been adapted to the big screen not once but twice before - in 1972 by Sam Peckinpah with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, and in 1994 by Roger Donaldson with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. But both of those adaptations opt for a Hollywood happy ending, with of course our hero and heroine literally getting away. And neither of those two films deals with the events of the final chapter of Thompson's novel. When I first heard the Robert Rodriguez / Quentin Tarantino commentary track for the DVD of 1996's From Dusk Till Dawn, I head Quentin make mention of Thompson's original novel and its extremely dark final chapter. If you remember that movie, the two criminal Gecko brothers (played by George Clooney and Tarantino) are headed for a place in Mexico called El Rey, which is supposed to be an almost mythical kind of paradise retreat which criminals on the lam run to when they've got nowhere else to go. Problem is, El Rey is a very expensive paradise. Those who arrive there are forced to spend most of their ill-gotten gains, and when they've exhausted their big score... well, things really get bad. I mean, like, Dante-circle-of-Hell bad. Turns out that whatever it is that people were trying to get away from, El Rey only ends up being much, much worse. Tarantino had said in the FDTD commentary that El Rey would probably be a good subject for an entire movie in its own right. So why not? I'm thinking that this movie could begin with a disparate group of people who arrive at the El Rey villa and are probably thinking they've got it made in the shade, they pulled off the big heist, the big score, and gotten away with it! We don't know who any of these characters are when we meet them, but as the story progresses, we get flashbacks - or perhaps not even "flashbacks" as such but just a non-linear Tarantino-esque approach - which reveal their various capers and crimes, and how they came to El Rey in the first place. Stylistically, I'm thinking... I don't know... Sam Peckinpah meets Luis Buñuel meets Robert Rodriguez?
Here would be a couple of my own personal choices, all of them adaptations...
SENTINEL II: THE GUARDIAN
(based on the 1979 novel by Jeffrey Konvitz)
In a way, the whole mythology of Jeffrey Konvitz's The Sentinel and The Guardian is probably my favorite horror mythos of all the post-Rosemary's Baby, post-Exorcist cash-ins from the 1970's. I even like it better than the Omen trilogy, quite frankly. The Sentinel, of course, was made into a movie by Michael Winner in 1977, starring Cristina Raines and Chris Sarandon as well as a plethora of former big names and big names to be. An adaptation of The Guardian could be rather problematic in this day and age, because there's a big plot twist involving a character's sexual identity that might be considered less than "woke." But my approach to that would be to just "steer into the skid" and make that particular character revelation part of what the film's about, and do it in an enlightened, humane and intelligent way.
THE SOUND
(based on a novel and a short story by Hubert Selby Jr.)
Quite possibly one of the great "unfilmables" of all time, Selby's second novel The Room is an uncomfortable look inside the head of an unidentified, unnamed prisoner - whose crime is never explicitly identified - who's awaiting his trial date. As the book progresses, we experience his memories, childhood traumas and his fantasies of vindication and revenge. Believe me, his head is a place no one in their right mind would want to be inside of, and yet this guy's not so different from you and me. Sometimes the line between his actual experiences and his imagined experiences and fantasies is rather blurred, and that's certainly not an uncommon phenomenon. Now, due to the whole thing about The Room also being the title of a rather notorious so-bad-it's-good film from 2003 (which I haven't seen), I'm using the title The Sound, which is the name of a short story from a Selby collection called Song of the Silent Snow, which also deals with an incarcerated man with a traumatic past, and from which story elements could be incorporated into the film. As a film taking place within the mind of a confined, traumatized character, obvious cinematic role models would be Alan Parker's Pink Floyd: The Wall from 1982 and Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun from 1971 (from which footage was incorporated into the video for Metallica's One video in 1988).
SON OF CELLULOID
(based on a short story from Books of Blood by Clive Barker)
Quite amazing to think that this story has never been made into a movie yet, given its subject matter. The problem is, whenever Clive Barker himself pitched the idea, he would always say that it was about a cancer capable of imitating movie stars... and then the executives would take a hard pass! Maybe it was mention of the big "C" which did it. But what it basically amounts to is a story about a haunted movie theater, the offending spirit being a sentient parasite which originated as a stomach cancer within the body of an escaped convict who perished in a crawlspace behind the screen. And if memory serves me correctly, the movie theater used to be a church, so that particular area was already kind of a "charged space"! Apparently, this creature is compelled to literally feast upon the eyes of its victims, being of course the spawn of the viewers' gaze. And it can send out telepathic signals to its victims, making them hallucinate that they're wandering into a scene from a movie and actually meeting one if its characters... at which point it strikes! A good cinematic role model would be something like Lamberto Bava's Demons from 1985. An interesting story element to incorporate into the story would be a blind woman with psychic abilities, accompanied by a relative and a service dog, who would know and sense that something was bad about the theater and feel a malevolent presence. Of course, the intuitive or psychic blind character is kind of a staple of many films of the horror genre, including Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now from 1973, Dario Argento's Suspiria from 1977, Lucio Fulci's The Beyond from 1981, and of course the aforementioned Demons. (I also can't help thinking of the character played by Maxine Audley in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, the blind mother of the heroine played by Anna Massey.)
INVISIBLE MONSTERS
(based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk)
So far, I believe there have only been two adaptations of Chuck Palahniuk novels, those of course being 1999's Fight Club and 2008's Choke. Given Palahniuk's penchant for the outlandish and discomfiting, it is quite understandable that his work would be a hard sell for many people in the biz. Anyway, Invisible Monsters is the tale of a young fashion model named Shannon McFarland who - apparently accidentally - gets shot in the face and has her jaw torn off. Shannon eventually becomes friends with a trans woman named Brandy Alexander, who helps her adapt to her situation and create a new identity and life for herself. There are also elaborate back stories, twists and shocking revelations involving the characters of Shannon's boyfriend, her best friend and her long-lost brother who - it is presumed - died of AIDS many years before. The story is told in a very cut-up, non-linear style which jumbles the chronology. Stylistically, I'm not 100% sure how the movie should play. I'm guessing something approximating Robert Aldrich or Rainer Werner Fassbinder on bad acid...
IN THE KINGDOM OF EL REY
(based on Chapter 14 of Jim Thompson's The Getaway)
As you probably know very well, Jim Thompson's crime thriller The Getaway has been adapted to the big screen not once but twice before - in 1972 by Sam Peckinpah with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, and in 1994 by Roger Donaldson with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. But both of those adaptations opt for a Hollywood happy ending, with of course our hero and heroine literally getting away. And neither of those two films deals with the events of the final chapter of Thompson's novel. When I first heard the Robert Rodriguez / Quentin Tarantino commentary track for the DVD of 1996's From Dusk Till Dawn, I head Quentin make mention of Thompson's original novel and its extremely dark final chapter. If you remember that movie, the two criminal Gecko brothers (played by George Clooney and Tarantino) are headed for a place in Mexico called El Rey, which is supposed to be an almost mythical kind of paradise retreat which criminals on the lam run to when they've got nowhere else to go. Problem is, El Rey is a very expensive paradise. Those who arrive there are forced to spend most of their ill-gotten gains, and when they've exhausted their big score... well, things really get bad. I mean, like, Dante-circle-of-Hell bad. Turns out that whatever it is that people were trying to get away from, El Rey only ends up being much, much worse. Tarantino had said in the FDTD commentary that El Rey would probably be a good subject for an entire movie in its own right. So why not? I'm thinking that this movie could begin with a disparate group of people who arrive at the El Rey villa and are probably thinking they've got it made in the shade, they pulled off the big heist, the big score, and gotten away with it! We don't know who any of these characters are when we meet them, but as the story progresses, we get flashbacks - or perhaps not even "flashbacks" as such but just a non-linear Tarantino-esque approach - which reveal their various capers and crimes, and how they came to El Rey in the first place. Stylistically, I'm thinking... I don't know... Sam Peckinpah meets Luis Buñuel meets Robert Rodriguez?
Last edited by Darth Pazuzu; 07-19-23 at 10:15 PM.
