Mel Gibson Thought Remaking The Wild Bunch Was A Bad Idea At First

In an interview with Deadline, Mel Gibson spoke about his upcoming remake of The Wild Bunch, which he admitted he thought was a bad idea at first. Here are highlights:

On his new film Dragged Across Concrete: “This film is related, it’s in that Peckinpah realm. I wanted to strip away a lot of stuff, all my bad mannerisms and bad habits and just channel one of my heroes, the great Lee Marvin. The character is a cynical guy and tried to reflect what was there on the page. In the script it doesn’t refer to my character by his name — it doesn’t call him Ridgeman — it calls him the ‘the grim fellow.’ That stuck with me. So I stayed as grim as possible.”

On remaking The Wild Bunch: “I thought it was a bad idea at first. Why make The Wild Bunch again? Who would do that? I thought about it and I thought about it some more, and then I thought of a way [into the story]. A way to tell the story. So I’ve been sitting in a room with a writer and it’s been a blast. So it started as a bad idea, but it’s heading toward something that could be special. It’s about last chances and guys with lives of accrued violence. … Those guys [in the original film]? They laugh a lot, but it isn’t funny.”

On the projects he has in development: “You write stuff and you never know, really, what’s going to happen with it. Some things take 10 years before anything happens at all; other things come together after nine weeks.”