Hey, Nic and Werner:

As a fellow member of the film industry (OK, so writing the occasional movie review in some little town in Michigan doesn’t really make me a member of the industry, just humor me on this), I read the trade papers on a regular basis, and I recently saw an article in Variety which said you guys were planning to work together on a remake of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, which starts shooting this summer. Now, practically every issue of Variety includes at least one announcement of a project that ends up never seeing the light of day, but this piece seemed reasonably plausible, so I wanted to step forward with some friendly advice on how you should approach this particular film. It’s quite simple, really – you should drop the idea now while you still can. No one is going to come out ahead if this movie ever gets made, and I think we all realize this in our heart of hearts.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not here to badmouth anyone. Heck, I’m actually a fan of both you guys. Werner, I’ve been following your work ever since Aguirre, The Wrath of God turned my head around sideways when I saw it in college. And Nic, if you had a nickel for every time I quoted your great line in Wild At Heart, “This here jacket represents a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom,” you’d be considerably wealthier than I am. Of course, you already are, but adding that money could well push the proportions into the algebraic.

But if I had to name a project that’s clearly not suited to your combined talents, a remake of Bad Lieutenant would have to be it. Abel Ferrara’s original was several notches short of a masterpiece, but love it or hate it, it’s personal filmmaking in the raw, and its rough but passionate fusion of Catholic guilt and New York City street life served up bloody and steaming is the sort of movie no one else could bring to the screen with the same ravaged immediacy. Not Martin Scorsese, not James Toback, and certainly not Werner Herzog. Werner, we all know you’re a guy fascinated with human obsession, so I can see the attraction to this story. But it’s one thing to make a movie about a loony who wants to pull a steamship over a mountain or lord it over the monkeys in Peru, and quite another to make sense of a guy trying to find the soul he’s been burying under massive quantities of drugs, booze, cheap sex and a dizzying range of corruption for who knows how many years. The cool, intellectual perspective you bring to your tales of holy madmen, Werner, is not the way to tell this story. Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant worked, for good or ill, because it was the work of a filmmaker willing to wallow through the same swamp it’s title character had been drowning in. And even when you had certifiable nut case Klaus Kinski in your employ, Werner, you were never willing to go quite that far, and that’s why I can’t help but think you’re too governed by the Superego rather than the Id to pull this one off.

And Nic? We all recall that you won an Oscar playing a guy committing slow suicide thanks to his addictive impulses in Leaving Las Vegas, and I can understand how you might see remaking Bad Lieutenant as a chance to relive that moment of glory. And you’ve played a whole bunch of guys who are edgy, morally questionable and driven to drive in the wrong lane of life. But the trouble is, you have this habit of making your anti-heroes seem somehow likable – you play fevered lunatics with a wink and a smile, and while that might work in a picture like Face/Off, Snake Eyes or Gone In Sixty Seconds, Bad Lieutenant requires something a good bit different. One of the reasons Harvey Keitel’s performance in Ferrara’s original is so compelling is because he never asks us to like his character or forgive him for his many sins – every moment of corruption and self-destructive decadence is laid bare before us (sometimes literally, given Harvey’s willingness to get naked on screen), and the grim immediacy of Keitel suffocating in his own damnation is the sort of acting that leaves a welt on the psyche of those with the stamina to watch. Nic, even if you were willing to smoke crack, shoot heroin, engage in a threesome and force two teenage girls to enact one of your less wholesome fantasies before the camera (which I somehow doubt), you just seem like too nice a guy with too much heart to convince us you’d pan-fry your own soul like that, and even if you could, the more I think about it, the more I don’t want to see you try. That’s not the Nic Cage we know and love, and I think we’d all be happier if it stayed that way.

So Nic and Werner, please believe me that speak with love and genuine respect when I ask you to please leave Bad Lieutenant alone. This is one experiment that seems doomed to failure, and I’m convinced this will leave a stain on everyone who comes too close. Besides, there are too many other films you could be making to waste your time and talent on so dim a prospect. How about you guys teaming up for a remake of Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie? Maybe Arthur Ripley’s Thunder Road? Or perhaps Larry Cohen’s Q? Now those are movies I’d pay to see on opening weekend. Think about it, guys.

Cheers,
Mark Deming