If the Original Could Talk: Imaginary Interviews with the International Films Hollywood Remade

📌 What would Infernal Affairs say to The Departed? What would Ringu think of The Ring? Imaginary interviews with the international films that Hollywood decided to remake.

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What if the films could speak? What if Infernal Affairs (2002) could sit across a table from The Departed (2006) and have an honest conversation about what it felt like to be remade? What if Ringu (1998) could tell us, in its own words, how it felt to watch The Ring (2002) crawl out of the television and into American multiplexes? In the spirit of creative inquiry — and with a deep respect for the originals — we present a series of imaginary interviews with the international films that Hollywood decided to remake.

These films have been waiting a long time to speak. Let us listen.

Interview 1: Infernal Affairs (2002) on The Departed (2006)

Q: How did you feel when you heard Martin Scorsese was remaking you?

A: Complicated. Scorsese is a master — I have enormous respect for his work. But I am a Hong Kong film. My soul is in the neon of Mong Kok, in the specific moral exhaustion of a city that spent decades not knowing whether it belonged to Britain or China. My two moles — the cop who is a criminal and the criminal who is a cop — are not just characters. They are a metaphor for Hong Kong itself, for a city that has always had to be two things at once. When Scorsese moved me to Boston, he kept the structure but lost the metaphor. His film is about Boston Irish gangsters. My film is about identity under colonial pressure. These are different things. Q: But The Departed won the Oscar for Best Picture.

A: Yes. And I won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Film. We are both right. We are just right about different things.

Interview 2: Ringu (1998) on The Ring (2002)

Q: The Ring made $249 million. How does that make you feel?

A: It makes me feel like a composer whose melody was used in a very successful advertisement. The melody is mine. The advertisement is theirs. The people who heard the advertisement and then went looking for the original melody — those people I am grateful for.

Q: Is there anything about The Ring that you think is better than you?

A: The production design is extraordinary. The American version of the tape — the images that kill you if you watch them — is genuinely terrifying in its own right. Gore Verbinski understands visual horror. What he does not understand — what no American remake of a Japanese horror film has yet understood — is the specific quality of Japanese dread. Japanese horror is not about the monster. It is about the wrongness. The sense that the world has been contaminated by something that should not exist. The Ring is frightening. I am wrong. These are different experiences.

Interview 3: Let the Right One In (2008) on Let Me In (2010)

Q: Let Me In is widely considered one of the better remakes of an international film. How do you feel about that?

A: I feel… cautiously warm towards it. Matt Reeves understood something important: that my story is not primarily a vampire story. It is a story about loneliness, about the desperate need for connection that children feel and adults forget. He kept that understanding. He also kept my snow, my quietness, my refusal to explain everything. What he added — a slightly more explicit backstory for Abby, more visible violence — I would not have chosen. But I understand why he made those choices for an American audience.

Q: Do you think American audiences are less comfortable with ambiguity than Swedish audiences?

A: I think all audiences are less comfortable with ambiguity than they think they are. The difference is that Swedish cinema has a longer tradition of respecting its audience’s discomfort. We believe that the thing you don’t show is often more powerful than the thing you do. American cinema is still learning this. Let Me In is part of that learning.

“Japanese horror is not about the monster. It is about the wrongness. The Ring is frightening. Ringu is wrong. These are different experiences.”

Interview 4: Oldboy (2003) on Oldboy (2013)

Q: Spike Lee’s remake of you was not well received. Does that surprise you?

A: No. I am, with respect, unremarkable. My story is not just a revenge thriller — it is a philosophical trap. Everything in my narrative is constructed to lead the viewer to a revelation that destroys the very concept of revenge, that makes the protagonist’s entire quest not just futile but monstrous. This is not a story that can be softened. It cannot be made more palatable. It cannot be given a different ending without ceasing to be itself. Spike Lee is a brilliant filmmaker. But he was asked to make a film that was, by its very nature, resistant to the kind of moral clarity that American mainstream cinema tends to require. The result was a film that was neither my story nor a new story. It was a compromise, and compromises in art are almost always failures.

Q: What would you say to a filmmaker who wanted to remake you today?

A: I would say: only remake me if you are willing to make the audience as uncomfortable as I made mine. If you are not willing to do that, please leave me alone.

Interview 5: La Cage aux Folles (1978) on The Birdcage (1996)

Q: The Birdcage is often cited as one of the most successful Hollywood remakes of an international film. How do you feel about your American cousin?

A: I feel genuine affection. Mike Nichols understood something essential: that my story is a comedy of identity, not a comedy of sexuality. The humour does not come from the fact that Renato and Albin are gay — it comes from the universal comedy of people trying to be something they are not, of love asserting itself in the face of social expectation. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane found that comedy and made it their own. They did not copy Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault — they found the American equivalent of what Tognazzi and Serrault were doing.

Q: Is there anything The Birdcage does better than you?

A: The relationship between Armand and Val — the father and son — is, I think, more emotionally developed in the American version. Nichols gave that relationship more time, more complexity. In my version, the comedy is the priority. In The Birdcage, the love is the priority. Both are valid. Both are true. We are the same story told by people who love different things about it.

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Which international film would you most like to interview about its Hollywood remake? And what do you think it would say?

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