“The guy’s got stones, man,” says the Hollywood star Armie Hammer, discussing how the English film-maker Ben Wheatley approached him with the offer of playing Maxim de Winter in Rebecca. “He called me and was, like, ‘Hey, listen, you wanna do Rebecca?’ I said, ‘The Hitchcock film? You’re gonna remake Hitchcock?’ He said, ‘Yeah, f*** it, why not? You wanna do Olivier’s part?’”
“I mean, ‘remake’ is something I would quibble with,” Wheatley says, chuckling. “It’s not a remake, it’s an adaptation of the book. I know film culture is so strong that it’s perceived as a remake, but Hitchcock didn’t write Rebecca — that’s just a fact.” He chuckles again. “Also, it’s a movie that is 80 years old. There’s no one left alive, I think, who saw it in its original run. So the idea that it’s eating its tail is just madness.”
