John Ford (For a Few Dollars More) swaps with Sergio Leone (My Darling Clementine)
David Lynch (The Fountain) swaps with Darren Aronofsky (INLAND EMPIRE).
Yep, I’m asking for it…
I (The Trial) swap with Welles (Nothin’). Actually I still haven’t seen it, but I think I could do it better. I think Welles’ ending contradicts the book’s (and the film’s? Welles includes the Before the Law story and that’s enough) philosophy re passivity and I think that Kafka’s absurdity is smothered by a batshit style. I don’t claim to be an expert on the book by the way.
Why Tarr for Taxi Driver? Only seen The Man from London and I don’t remember it.
Kenneth Branagh (DUNE) swaps with David Lynch (MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN)
Visconti (LOLITA) with Kubrick (THE STRANGER)
Ridley Scott (PLANET OF THE APES) with Tim Burton (HANNIBAL)
Martin Scorsese (The Prestige) swaps with Christopher Nolan (The Departed)
David Fincher (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) swaps with Tomas Alfredson (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo)
[P.S. Love the suggestion of Branagh doing Dune!]
Wiseman (Tie Xi Qu) trades with Wang (Belfast, Maine).
Gosho (Design for Living) trades with Lubitsch (Burden of Life).
Ozu (Doctor Bull) trades with Ford (An Inn in Tokyo).
The Lumiere bros. (At Sea) trade with Hutton (New York Portrait I, II & III).
And most interesting of all…
Tati (Rebels of the Neon God) trades with Tsai (Playtime).
Leone swaps Duck, You Sucker! with Peckinpah for his Straw Dogs.
Fincher swaps The Game with Nolan for his Following
Lang swaps M with Clouzot for his Diabolique
Scorsese swaps Goodfellas with Lumet for his Serpico
Pasolini swaps Teorema with Bunuel for his The Exterminating Angel
Fassbinder swaps In a Year With 13 Moons with Wenders for his Wings of Desire
The Wachowskis swap Speed Racer with Araki for his The Living End
von Trier swaps Breaking the Waves with Paul Thomas Anderson for his Punch-Drunk Love
Kubrick swaps Eyes Wide Shut with Kurosawa for his High and Low
Kaurismaki swaps Shadows in Paradise with Bertolucci for his Last Tango in Paris
oooh i want to see fassbinder’s wings of desire!
Angelopoulos (Wings of Desire) swapped with Wenders (Eternity and a Day)
Alfonso Cuaron (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol) swapped with Brad Bird (Children of Men)
James Cameron (Life of Pi) swapped with Ang Lee (Avatar)
David Gordon Green (Chop Shop) swapped with Ramin Bahrani (George Washington)
Martin Scorsese (Schindler’s List) swapped with Steven Spielberg (Hugo)
Arthur Penn (Badlands) swapped with Terrence Malick (Bonnie and Clyde)
Bernardo Bertolucci (Once Upon a Time in America) swapped with Sergio Leone (The Last Emperor)
George Lucas (Solaris) swapped with Andrei Tarkosky (THX 1138)
^ Ang Lee’s Avatar probably wouldn’t be so hard on the eyes, would it?
@Matthew(sic), I think that Tarr’s Taxi Driver would be quite cool, not sure why.
George Lucas on Solaris would be great!
Cronenberg (Suicide Club) switch with Sion Sono (Crash).
Cronenberg would add just enough comprehensibility to Suicide Club to make it linger near the area of uncanny, and Sono would add just enough quirk and humor to Crash to make it all feel worth it and not so dispassionate and disinterested.
—PolarisDiB
Lucio Fulci (Ikiru) switch with Akira Kurosawa (The Beyond)
Mamet swaps Oleanna with Haneke for his Cache
Polanski swaps The Ghost Writer with Stone for his The Hand
Takashi Miike swaps Graveyard of Honor with Kitano for his Getting Any?
Akira Kurosawa swaps Dersu Uzala for Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.
Robert Altman swaps The Player with Mike Leigh’s Topsy Turvy.
Wong Kar Wai swaps Ashes of Time with Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler.
Werner Herzog swaps Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans with Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
Coppola The Conformist Bertolucci The Conversation
Andrei Tarkovsky swaps The Mirror for Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.
Stanley Kubrick swaps Barry Lyndon for Federico Fellini’s Il Casanova di Federico Fellini.
Mel Brooks swaps Young Frankenstein for David Lynch’s The Elephant Man.
Marco Ferreri swaps Dillinger Is Dead for Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou.
Franco Piavoli swaps The Blue Planet for Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World.
Jacques Tati swaps Playtime for Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (just try to imagine Bill Murray as Monsieur Hulot!).
^ “Andrei Tarkovsky swaps The Mirror for Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life”
Wouldn’t they just be making the same film in different settings and stylizations? Ha ha. But it’d be interesting to try and see Malick trying to exactly replicate Tarkovsky scenes such as the bird and burning house and have the latter trying to make sense of the muted family melodrama in Texas.
The Elephant Man as helmed by Brooks without the help of Lynch is a terrifying prospect to consider, considering how it had gone down. Not that I think Brooks would do damage to the material, but imagining it in his usual comedic style is really scary. For instance, something like this coming about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMy1BibFWsc
Not a fan of the PUSHER series, so I’d like to see Michael Mann give those a go. Big improvement, surely, and the material is in Mann’s auteurist wheelhouse .
And, in return, I could live with letting Nicolas Winding Refn get a crack at the script for THE KEEP. Not that I don’t like Mann’s version.
What fun!
Brad Bird for Avatar and James Cameron for The Incredibles.
Mike Nichols (Philadelphia) swaps with Jonathan Demme (Angels in America)
Andrei Tarkovsky (DON’T LOOK NOW) with Nicolas Roeg (THE SACRIFICE)
Fritz Lang (INSOMNIA) with Christopher Nolan (M)
Henri-Georges Clouzot (THE SOCIAL NETWORK) with DAVID FINCHER (LE CORBEAU)
Alfred Hitchcock (MARTIN) with George A. Romeo (THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY)
Oh yeah, and Andrzej Żuławski (SLEEPING BEAUTY, CINDERELLA or BEAUTY AND THE BEAST) with Walt Disney Animated Classics series (THE DEVIL)
@ KONSTANTIN
I think it’d only be fitting, considering how much Drive felt like a cheap ripoff of his films.
@ JOHNNY KUO
I’d love to see the Romero version of The Trouble With Harry.
Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Cape Fear and Schindler’s List.
Fellini swaps La Dolce Vita with Woody Allen’s Manhattan
Godard swaps Le Mepris with Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies
David Lynch swaps Blue Velvet with Polanski’s The Tenant
Michael Powell swaps with Alfred Hitchcock. Peeping Tom and Psycho are often discussed in tandem, but I think even The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus could come out quite interested as Hitchcock pictures while Rear Window and The Birds would be likewise lurid if realised by Powell.
Nicolas Roeg (The Ring) with Gore Verbinski (Performance).
Moar witches and time travel in The Ring, moar dry drunk jokes in Performance.
—PolarisDiB
joey Noodles
I have basically said what I am asking in the title. We can discuss what the films would be like and how much better or worse they could have been. I will start by saying:
Bernardo Bertolucci (Days of ’36) swaps with Theodoros Angelopoulos (1900/Last Tango in Paris/The Conformist)
Bela Tarr (Taxi Driver) swaps with Martin Scorsese (Damnation) I think this swap would be very interesting, especially Tarr’s take on Taxi Driver.