I was a huge fan of Greek myths when I was a wee lad. I used to tell the stories of Perseus and the others to my friends when we had sleepovers, and when Clash of the Titans — the last movie to feature Ray Harryhausen‘s classic stop-motion animation — came out in 1981, my friends told me all about the film and asked me how it squared with the original myths. Despite the film’s revisionism, I actually rather enjoyed it; I missed its theatrical run, but once it came out on video, I watched it quite a bit.
So my curiosity is piqued, now that the Hollywood Reporter says Lawrence Kasdan has been hired to write a remake of this film. Kasdan had the good fortune to work for George Lucas when Lucasfilm was at its creative peak — Kasdan scripted The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), as well as Return of the Jedi (1983) — and he captured the aging-baby- boomer zeitgeist quite well with The Big Chill (1983), which he also directed. But his output since then has been a mixed bag, and his last film, Dreamcatcher (2003), was an awful, awful mess.
I must confess that I had always hoped a remake of Clash of the Titans would be made further down the road, when a certain actor was old enough to step into the shoes of Laurence Olivier, who played Zeus, king of the gods, in the original film. Ten years ago, when I interviewed Kenneth Branagh, we had this exchange — riffing on the fact that Branagh was hailed as the second coming of Olivier back in the day, not least because both of them made their directorial debuts with adaptations of Henry V (1944, 1989):
PTC: Do you ever worry about being typecast with Shakespeare, in the sense that even when you’re just acting, in Othello, or just directing, in A Midwinter’s Tale, that people won’t let you do anything else?
KB: No, I don’t worry about it, because you just have to follow your nose, and you get typecast in the last thing that was successful is what happens, I think. And there are worse things to be typecast as, so that’s just the way things go. I mean, in the same way that some people find some of the American actors difficult to accept, them speaking Shakespeare when they’ve got baggage from other parts or other screen personas. It may be that I’m dogged in future by people who find it difficult to accept me in a modern role when they think I should have a pair of black tights on.
PTC: They’ll want you to play Zeus in a remake of Clash of the Titans.
KB: Oh, well, I don’t know about that. (laughs) I saw Clash of the Titans, isn’t it? With Harry Hamlin? Maggie Smith’s in that as well, with all the gods up there — they’re all looking into that wee pool, weren’t they? That was Ray Harryhausen, wasn’t it, who did — did you ever see Jason and the Argonauts? I loved that. It’s a great picture. It still holds up, even though the special effects are what they are, it still holds up, all those little skeleton men, and that big bird.
Ever since that exchange, I have secretly wanted to see Branagh in this role. The thing is, Olivier was 73 when he played Zeus, but Branagh is only 46, so it’s not quite time for him to tackle this part, yet. But who knows, maybe they’ll remake this film again in another quarter-century. Branagh’s time will come.
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