Danny Elfman Quotes

I think plays deserve other interpretations. They should live on, and other people should should take their hand at them. I'm very supportive of that.

There are a lot of different elements in play when you're remaking something people care about.

I like the idea of taking a true classic written by a true genius and destroying it essentially! I like the idea of bringing it down to earth a bit - and even a bit lower than that.

I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed, in other words: how the artist made it his own.

Any scene in Shakespeare can be vulgarised almost out of recognition with the wish to have a modern concept.

I'm not big on remakes.

The truth is that we're not remaking Sam Peckinpah's 'Straw Dogs,' we're making 'Straw Dogs.' We're taking this story, and we're putting our own spin on it. The mere fact that I have James Marsden in it is an indication that it's a very different film than the one that had Dustin Hoffman in it.

All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X', a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction', is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third-person present indicative: S is P.

There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.

When something is written for you or handed to you, sometimes there's a very interesting dance as you discover what it is that's required.

It's always that tricky thing with a remake, especially when it's something that's well loved. You're coming to something that has a built-in fascination, but with that comes people ready to feel disgruntled that it's being remade at all.

After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades - even if it's now close to aesthetic kudzu.

I wish someone would redo 'Dune.'

Personally, I'm not too fond of remakes.

I'm not a big fan of remakes. I never wanted to do a remake.

An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.

Shakespeare has always been up for grabs, and choreographers have every right to use him any way they choose.

I'm inspired when I find out about something that I didn't know was a remake. An example is, of course, stuff like 'The Fly,' or 'The Thing,' or even 'The Blob.' For our generation, all those things, whether it was 'The Blob' or 'The Fly' or something else, we had no idea they were remakes.

Whenever you do a new interpretation of a great, previous text of any kind, you always look for some kind of immediate significance right now.

I regard remaking a film as creating something again.

You could go so wrong with a 'Planet of the Apes' reboot; you could make it melodramatic, you could make it campy, you could fall into so many traps with it.

Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.

Another thing that really excites me: I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film.

Classics stay alive because a great actor or a great director wants to do them.

I think a lot of fans immediately go, 'ugggh' when they hear that someone is doing a prequel or a remake, they sort of assume the worst sometimes.