Dear Hollywood: A Love Letter About the Films You Should Never Have Touched

📌 A lyrical love letter from a devoted film-lover to Hollywood — celebrating the international films that changed cinema, and pleading for the ones that should never be remade.

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Dear Hollywood, I have loved you for as long as I can remember. I grew up in your light — the warm gold of your studio-era comedies, the cool blue of your noirs, the electric colour of your musicals. I have defended you in arguments, championed your best work, and forgiven you more times than I should. But I need to talk to you about something. I need to talk to you about the films you keep trying to remake — the ones that were never yours to begin with, the ones that belong to other languages, other skies, other ways of seeing the world. I need to talk to you about what you do to them, and why it breaks my heart every single time.

What You Do When You Love Something Badly

When you love something badly, Hollywood, you try to own it. You see a film like Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) — that slow, dread-soaked Japanese horror film with its image of a woman crawling out of a television set like a nightmare made flesh — and you think: I want that. I want that feeling, that image, that story. And so you take it, and you dress it in American clothes, and you give it American faces, and you release it as The Ring (2002), and it makes $249 million at the box office, and you call it a success. And it is a success, in the way that a very good cover version of a song is a success.

But the original is still there, still waiting, still more terrifying than anything you made from it. Because Nakata’s film is not just a horror story. It is a film about the terror of the image itself — about what happens when the thing you see on screen reaches through the screen and touches you. That terror is Japanese. It comes from a specific cultural anxiety about technology and the uncanny that has no American equivalent. You can copy the image, Hollywood. You cannot copy the dread.

The Films I Would Give You, If You Asked Nicely

I am not entirely unreasonable, Hollywood. There are international films I would willingly give you — films whose stories are so universal, so portable, so hungry for new interpretations, that a remake would not be a theft but a gift. I would give you Caramel (2007), Nadine Labaki’s Lebanese film about five women in a Beirut beauty salon, navigating love and identity and tradition. Set it in Detroit, or Atlanta, or Birmingham.

Cast it with the extraordinary Black British and African-American actresses who are currently redefining what it means to be seen on screen. Let it breathe in a new language, a new city, a new community of women who recognise themselves in the story. I would give you A Separation (2011), Asghar Farhadi’s Iranian masterpiece about a marriage dissolving under the weight of duty and deception. Set it in any city in the world. The story is about the impossibility of knowing another person’s truth — and that story belongs to every culture that has ever tried and failed to be honest with itself.

The Films I Would Never Give You

But there are films I would never give you, Hollywood. Not because they are too good for you — though some of them are — but because they are too specific. They are too deeply rooted in the soil of their own culture to survive transplantation. I would never give you Bicycle Thieves (1948), Vittorio De Sica’s Italian neorealist masterpiece. The film’s power comes from its specific post-war Roman context — the rubble, the poverty, the desperate dignity of a man whose entire livelihood depends on a single bicycle.

To remake it in Los Angeles would be to miss the point entirely. I would never give you In the Mood for Love (2000), Wong Kar-wai’s Hong Kong film about two neighbours who fall in love without ever quite falling in love. The film’s beauty is inseparable from its restraint — from the specific social codes of 1960s Hong Kong that make every almost-touch, every averted gaze, charged with unbearable longing. You would give them a kiss, Hollywood. You would ruin everything.

“When you take the image and leave everything else behind, you are left with a beautiful shell. The soul has gone back where it came from.”

What I Wish You Understood

What I wish you understood, Hollywood, is that the films you most want to remake are often the ones that are most resistant to it. You are drawn to the images — the girl in the red coat, the woman crawling from the television, the two lovers who never touch — because the images are extraordinary. But the images are extraordinary because of everything around them: the culture, the history, the language, the specific way a particular director sees the world. When you take the image and leave everything else behind, you are left with a beautiful shell. The soul has gone back where it came from.

I am not asking you to stop remaking international films. I am asking you to remake them with love — not the love that says ‘I want this for myself,’ but the love that says ‘I want more people to find this.’ There is a difference. It is the difference between a tribute and a theft. I know you know the difference. I have seen you at your best. I am still waiting for you to be your best, more often.

P.S. — A Note on Subtitles

One more thing, Hollywood. I know you believe that audiences won’t read subtitles. I know the data you cite, the focus groups you run, the marketing executives who tell you that foreign-language films are a niche product for a niche audience.

But I want to tell you something that the data doesn’t capture: the night I watched Cinema Paradiso at seventeen, in a language I didn’t speak, with subtitles I read as hungrily as I have ever read anything, was the night I became a film lover for life. The subtitle is not a barrier. It is an invitation. It says: come closer. Pay attention. This story is worth the effort. Every time you remake a film instead of distributing the original, you are telling your audience that they are not worth the invitation. I think you’re wrong. I think they are.

Yours, always, A Film Lover.

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💬 Join the Conversation

Which international film would you give Hollywood permission to remake — and which would you protect at all costs? Write your own love letter in the comments.

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