Creative artists who have remade their own works

Hitchcock made a lot of movies about people who aren’t what they seem, mistaken identity, and the like. These are variations on a theme. The so-called “Master of Suspense” also just straight-up remade one of his own movies. Hitch was making movies for years before his career really began to pop in the 1940s, and that includes 1934’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” In 1956, with Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day at his disposal, Hitchcock would make a second “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” He must have liked the story, and he was not in love with the first version. In the storied interview between Francois Truffaut and Hitchcock, the latter remarked of his two films, “Let's say the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.”

Lucas is the textbook case of when a director’s affinity for new technology gets in his way. That’s happened with Ang Lee as well, but Lee at least leaves his movies alone. Lucas just couldn’t resist tinkering with his beloved “Star Wars” movies. His famed, polarizing “special editions” of the original three “Star Wars” movies were given a sheen of modern technology that did nothing to help the movies. Lucas scratched an itch, but we were left with films where charm was replaced with coldness.

Mann is a perfectionist, and while he puts a lot of work into his preproduction, sometimes that just isn’t enough. He famously remade his movie-length failed TV pilot “L.A. Takedown” into some movie called… “Heat” we think? Mann is also one of the preeminent director’s cut aficionados. The dude made a director’s cut of his flop film “Blackhat” just for its TV premiere on FX. Any excuse to tweak, you know?

Scott’s work on his famed sci-fi cult classic (maybe just a classic now) “Blade Runner” is well known. The 1992 director’s cut, which got a proper release, is one of the most famous director’s cuts in history. In 2007, for the movie’s 25th anniversary, he also delivered “The Final Cut” for Warner Bros., who finally gave him complete artistic control. That isn’t all, though. Scott also released a director’s cut of “Kingdom of Heaven,” which some have called one of his best movies.

When Woo came to America after decades in Hong Kong, he dropped “Hard Target,” “Broken Arrow,” and “Face/Off” on us. That’s legendary stuff right there. He’s no stranger to full-on remaking his own stuff as well. He remade his movie “Once a Thief” as a TV movie to serve as a jumping-off point for a TV show that never happened. More recently, Woo remade his Hong Kong action classic “The Killer” as a Peacock original film.

Walsh made movies from the 1910s until the 1960s, and he really churned them out. He was an old-time Hollywood hand. Also, he played John Wilkes Booth in the infamous “Birth of a Nation,” a movie that, um, has an interesting take on the Confederacy. Still, Walsh gave John Wayne his first leading role and directed the seminal crime movie “White Heat.” He was apparently a big fan of the novel “High Sierra.” He adapted it into a movie of the same name in 1941 (with Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino), and then adapted it once more as “Colorado Territory” in 1949. Also, he remade his romantic comedy “The Strawberry Blonde” as a musical called “One Sunday Afternoon.”

Ford directed over 140 films. Does that make it less impressive he won a record four Best Director Oscars? Probably not. It does make it less surprising there is a remake in the mix. While Ford is famed for his Westerns, that’s not all he did. “Judge Priest” sounds like it could be a moody Western, but it’s actually a comedy. In 1953, he remade “Judge Priest” as “The Sun Shines Bright,” which still has Judge Priest as the main character.

Capra was one of the biggest directors in Hollywood, and he bet big on himself by starting his own production company, Liberty Films. He released “It’s a Wonderful Life” through Liberty. While it’s a classic now, the film flopped, Liberty flamed out, and Capra’s career never recovered. He directed five narrative films after “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and two of them are remakes of earlier movies of his. He turned “Broadway Bill” into “Riding High” and “Lady for a Day” into “Pocketful of Miracles,” his final film.

Hawks is one of the foremost genre directors of classic Hollywood, equally adept at screwball comedies and hard-boiled noirs. He was out of ideas by the end of his career, though. His last two films are essentially remakes of an earlier film of his. “Rio Bravo” is a classic Western, so classic Hawks redid it in 1966 as “El Dorado” and in 1970 as “Rio Lobo.” The latter version barely conceals the fact it’s a remake.

Like John Woo, Sluizer remade his own work for an American audience. The Dutch director put out the psychological thriller “Spoorloos” in his home country in 1988. A few years later, he remade it for 20th Century Fox as “The Vanishing.” While Sluizer had Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, and a very young Sandra Bullock in the movie, it didn’t do much at the box office, and Sluizer never really found a foothold in America.

If you like J-horror, you know Shimizu’s name. In Japan, he released two movies in his “Ju-on” series with English subtitles that may strike your memory: “The Grudge” and “The Grudge 2.” While some Japanese horror movies have been remade by American directors, Shimizu directed both “The Grudge” and “The Grudge 2” in America, turning his own J-horror films into something more in line with what American audiences are accustomed to.

Akira Kurosawa is the most acclaimed Japanese director of all-time, but Ozu is not far behind him. His iconic “Tokyo Story” is considered by many one of the best movies ever made. In 1959, toward the end of his career, Ozu remade two of his early films from the silent era of Japanese cinema. “I Was Born, But…” became “Good Morning,” and “A Story of Floating Weeds” became “Floating Weeds.”

Like Truffaut, Assayas is both an acclaimed French film writer and maker of movies as well. He’s notable for changing mediums for his remade work. His 1996 movie “Irma Vep” is acclaimed, and fittingly for a film critic about making movies. In 2022, “Irma Vep” was remade as an HBO miniseries. Assayas did not hand the work off to anybody. He wrote and directed every single episode.

Early in his career, America’s number-one spooky boy Tim Burton made a couple shorts that got him some acclaim. One of them was “Frankenweenie.” He turned that into an esteemed, immensely successful film career. Burton had essentially a blank check, and one of the things he did was flesh out “Frankenweenie” on Disney’s dime. He turned his short into a feature-length movie that actually got good reviews, which is unusual for post-2000s Burton.

Raimi made his name with “The Evil Dead,” a nasty, grimy, beloved horror movie. He followed that up with “Evil Dead II” which is essentially the same film. Even Raimi seemed to find the first “Evil Dead” movie too nasty, and “Evil Dead II” tells almost the same identical story but in more of a horror-comedy way. Oh, it’s still gory and violent, but it’s less grim and a lot more fun.

Judge has rebooted “Beavis and Butt-Head,” but that’s not fully in line with what we are talking about. Instead, let’s look at the early shorts Judge made. Famously, “Beavis and Butt-Head” was born out of shorts shown on MTV’s “Liquid Television.” That’s not all, though. There was also a short about office life featuring an odd man named Milton. Yes, “Office Space” began with an animated short.

Here, we should also credit Andy Berman and Todd Harthan? What are we talking about? USA’s classic blue-sky procedural “Psych.” While it was a quirky detective show, “Psych” became a show primarily focused on riffing on different tropes and genres. In the final season, the show (created by the aforementioned Franks) tried out another kind of trope. They did a full-on remake episode. The season-one episode “Cloudy…with a Chance of Murder” was remade with most of the same plot but several actors from the show’s run strewn through it.

Clement and Taika Waititi co-wrote, co-directed, and co-starred in the beloved horror mockumentary “What We Do in the Shadows.” The cult classic was then turned into a mockumentary TV show. While neither Clement nor Waititi returned to act in it, Clement is credited as the creator of “What We Do in the Shadows” the TV show. Clement wrote and directed episodes in the first season, and Waititi popped in to direct a couple episodes as well. By the second season, only Clement was still picking up credits on the show, and even he hasn’t written or directed any episodes in the last few seasons.

Heart’s debut album “Dreamboat Annie” was quite successful, but the band had real issues with their record company Mushroom. Things got so bad during the recording of their second album “Magazine” they effectively quit on the company. During a lengthy, testy legal battle, Mushroom went ahead and released “Magazine,” a mixture of live recordings and five unfinished tracks from the studio sessions. Unhappy with Mushroom, the band took the label to court to get the album taken off the shelves. They succeeded, but the settlement required Heart to provide Mushroom with a record. Heart decided to re-record, remix, and re-sequence “Magazine” and released a new version of it in 1978.

In the world of music, nobody’s reworkings are as famous as Taylor Swift’s. She has been churning out “Taylor’s Version” takes on her albums in order to own her own masters for her works, as opposed to a label owning them. While the sound of her albums isn’t changing a ton, she’s been able to sell plenty of albums to her devoted fans who want to have Swift’s own “version” of each recording.