Since June we know that Zack Snyder will direct for Studiocanal the remake of 1997: Escape from New York by John Carpenter with Kurt Russell: a delicate undertaking that would scare most, but not Snyder, who has just presented at Toronto his (apparently) violently war drama The Last Photograph. Interviewed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the director of 300, Watchmen and Justice League revealed, somewhat coyly, a glimpse of his approach to this cult material. What does he have in mind to reimagine the myth of Jena Plissken?
Zack Snyder, his 1997 Escape from New York does not change the setting
Taking on the remake of 1997: Escape from New York, for Zack Snyder there is no need to alter its dystopian time frame: “The film will be set in ’97, from the perspective of 1981. I will set what happens, the beginning of the war between the U.S. police forces and the criminals, the 9 July 1981, which is the date the original film was released. For the rest you’ll see Escape from New York.” There is no particular reinterpretation anticipated even in the contents of the script that was written by John Carpenter and Nick Castle: “We are talking about a film that is the perfect fuse of kitsch and camp. It is all of these things together, which is why I love it. But it is also, in a sense, a satire, and it works for us today as well. We can talk about the government, about overstepping or however you want to phrase it, there’s the Front for the Liberation of the American People, all that stuff is… it’s in today’s news, you could say it’s right on the pulse.” During the podcast Snyder wisely dodged questions about the protagonist, because stepping into the shoes of Jena Plissken, made mythic by the looks and the inimitable irony of Kurt Russell, is another undertaking in itself: he might already have the right person in mind, but he does not wish to spill. He does admit, however, to being pursued by his friend Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who played the Comedian in Watchmen, but if he involved him it wouldn’t necessarily mean casting him as Jena. We will have to wait to learn more, provided you are understandably among the cultists of the original and the mere idea of this gamble doesn’t make you tremble.
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