Cult life-death film resurrected
▶ Flatliners director Niels Arden Oplev tells James Mottram how he updated Joel Schumacher’s 1990 original by adding strong female leads
“Today is a good day to die.” As far as classic quotes from Hollywood pop folklore go, Kiefer Sutherland’s fatalistic mutterings in Flatliners are right up there – along with Top Gun’s “I feel the need … the need for speed” and Dirty Dancing’s “Nobody puts Baby in the corner.” Sampled in Eazy-E’s rap It’s On and Natural Born Deejay’s A Good Day, it’s a phrase that’s stood the test of time.
The story of medical students who experiment with near-death experiences, 1990’s Flatliners was the archetypal Brat Pack film – with a cast including Sutherland, Kevin Bacon and Julia Roberts. “It has this status that it was a really fun, unusual film,” says Danish-born director Niels Arden Oplev. “It’s not a masterpiece and I don’t think anyone would call it a masterpiece. I think it’s more like a cult movie.”
Oplev is the man entrusted with remaking the film, introducing the story to a new generation who are maybe only dimly aware of the Joel Schumacher-directed original. “Had I considered it a masterpiece, I don’t think I would’ve remade it,” he says. “I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t feel that I could contribute something new and make an exciting new version that would talk to this generation.”
Even so, the original – which grossed US$60 million (Dh220.3m) in the United States upon release and was even nominated for an Oscar for its sound effects editing – clearly had appeal. “That subject matter is what drew me to the project for sure,” says Oplev. “This whole concept of medical students going beyond death to explore what’s on the other side is outrageous – in a very cool way.”
With a script by Ben Ripley (who wrote the time travel movie Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal), Oplev has kept the same premise – as five students attempt to taste the afterlife. “I wouldn’t call it a remake as a reinterpretation of the great plot that the old film had. One of the reasons why I said ‘yes’ to do it was it was female driven – three girls and two guys.”
While the original Schumacher film was male-dominated – with just Julia Roberts among four men – the gender balance has been reversed. Here, it is Ellen Page who plays Courtney Holmes, the self-styled leader of the group. She’s joined by Kiersey Clemons (Dope) and Nina Dobrev (The Vampire Diaries), with British actor James Norton (Happy Valley) and Rogue One’s Mexican star Diego Luna making up the male contingent.
Getting Page – the Oscar-nominated star of Juno and Inception – was something of a coup. The actress is not exactly a scream queen. “It’s definitely unusual for her to do a film like this,” says Oplev. “It is a thriller, but it has some quite scary moments. When they open a backdoor to everything that’s beyond death, it doesn’t go down quietly, right? But that’s part of the fun of the film. Ellen hasn’t really done something like that before.”
Updating the technology – all flatlining here is done in high-tech labs, not gothic blue-lit churches – Oplev also wanted to refashion the college surroundings. “I really wanted them to be Ivy League students and highly ambitious. I wanted it to be the world as it is today, going to medical school. I have a daughter that just graduated from UCLA and it’s so competitive for young people, to go to university today in the western world.”
Oplev, who previously directed the pilot for hitech hacker series Mr. Robot, is clearly fascinated by alternate science. The afterlife is a subject he investigated before, he says, after spending time on an unrealised project about the 18th Century Swedish scientist, mystic and theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg. “He was the father of Spiritism,” explains Oplev. “He wrote books about the kingdom of death that he claimed he could travel into.”
For fans of the original, Oplev also cast Kiefer Sutherland in a cameo. So does that make it a remake or a sequel, or something in between? “Well, that’s a difficult question,” says Oplev, clearly enjoying the confusion. “Kiefer Sutherland is in both films, so what does that make it? I would still call it a remake, but Kiefer reappears in the film and it’s a homage to the old film. It was cool of him to do it. For the audience who remember the old film, it’s very fun that he appears.”
Talking of the older movie, has Oplev met director Schumacher? “No, I haven’t,” he admits. “I would like to.”
The irony is Oplev has already been on the receiving end of a Hollywood remake. His 2009 Swedish-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the film that first brought Stieg Larsson’s hacker heroine Lisbeth Salander to the screen, was remade two years later by David Fincher – backed by Sony, no less, the studio also behind Flatliners.
“I was never upset with David Fincher doing an English-speaking version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; he’s a great director,” notes Oplev. “In the theatre world, people do new interpretations of plays over and over again. Why is it so controversial in film if somebody does another interpretation of the same material? I don’t think it should be that big a deal. OK, if you go out and remake Citizen Kane, that might be a little bit stupid.”
Certainly, Oplev’s love of resolute women protagonists can be traced from Salander to Ellen Page’s Courtney Holmes. “I’m very good with strong female characters; I like strong female characters that do something outrageous,” he says. “There was something very fulfilling about Lisbeth’s character in this modern world and I will say she changed our perception of female characters in a way, and that’s super-important.”
Indeed Sony is currently rebooting the Lisbeth Salander franchise with an adaptation of The Girl in the Spider’s Web – the fourth book in the series and the first not written by the late Larsson (its author is David Lagercrantz). “I don’t know if I’ll go see it but I don’t think it’s uninteresting if they can pull it off,” says Oplev. “Basically … a good film is a good film. If you tell a good story, the audience responds and there doesn’t have to be so much bull **** .”