Let Me In To Be "Darker, Scarier" Than Twilight
Posted 01.20.10 by Ryan
Matt Reeves, the director of Cloverfield and Let Me In, the upcoming remake of Swedish vampire flick Let The Right One In, knows he's in trouble. Reeves admitted to VH1 that directing the remake of a critically-acclaimed movie has put a "real bull's-eye" on his version, though he claims that it will please everyone who loved the original
[F]or me, what was important was to have reverence for the original while at the same time trying to find the way to make it our own. That has been what this process is about, to really want to mine the foundations of that story. It's very much an Americanization of the tale that John Ajvide Lindqvist tells. It reminded me so much of my own childhood in certain ways. It's so much about that period of preadolescence, that feeling of being a child and of being bullied, the difficulties of growing up. It's such a beautiful coming-of-age story, in addition to being such a terrific genre story. One of the things I really wanted to do was find my own way into the story while still being very, very reverent to the beautiful film and to the wonderfulstory that they created. And so the story in many ways follows the same trajectory.
Reeves realizes that the movie will draw comparisons to Twilight, but he isn't concerned, as Let Me In is a different kind of vampire movie.
To me, the thing about genre stories that is the most interesting thing is what you do with the metaphor of the genre. You can do a grand, sweeping love story, like Twilight, and use that metaphor of the two people that are just being torn apart and the aching-ness of it, and that's a great fantasy. Whereas Twilight is kind of a fantasy, this will be a darker, scarier kind of journey.
The movie will also benefit from its cast, which includes Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road) and Chloe Moretz (Kick-Ass). Reeves is extremely pleased with his two young stars.
Chloe is just remarkable. The thing that we always talk about is trying to find the way to not have her... she is a vampire in the story, so what does that mean? How do you play a vampire? The idea is to have her not play a vampire at all but have her play the reality of her life and the difficulty of her life, and that's the way these two lonely souls connect. The two of them are just a joy to work with.
After Let Me In, Reeves hopes to work on an Invisible Woman project, while admitting that a Cloverfield sequel "continues to percolate."