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IGNFF visits the set of the Guess Who's Coming to Dinner remake. (an outtake)
Movie remakes are a dime a dozen these days, and it seems like nothing is sacred; even the Cold War-era classic Manchurian Candidate was recently reworked to update its themes of communist brainwashing to include corporate indoctrination. But before we see Charles Foster Kane re-invented as an action hero and Rick's Place re-imagined as a weigh station for star cruisers, it seems that a few savvy producers recently saw fit to enlist two of Hollywood's most talented comedians for a remake of a film whose subject matter may in fact be even more prescient than ever: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, with no less than Bernie Mac (Mr. 3000) and Ashton Kutcher (The Butterfly Effect). Mac, Kutcher, co-stars Zoe Saldana (Drumline) Judith Scott and director Kevin Rodney Sullivan (Barbershop 2) recently granted IGN FilmForce access to the project, which has been re-titled Guess Who?, as they hustle through production at Sony Pictures' Culver City, California studios.
The original film's culture clash between stodgy white parents and their daughter's African-American suitor has been flip-flopped; instead, Mac plays the disapproving paterfamilias to Kutcher's fledgling fianc้. This change notwithstanding, Sullivan insists that the film is not so much a remake as it is a re-invention. "It's really inspired by it, but it's the same concept, and a good idea for a movie, I think, but it's forty years later," he says. "Some of the issues about interracial couples are still there; the challenges are still there, but it's a different time. I think that movie's intention was to explore America in 1967, and things were changing and it was a message piece. Our movie is more character-driven than that."
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"The beauty of this movie and one of the reasons why I did it was because this is the story of a family where a daughter can grow up with such a sense of herself, that there's so much love in this house, that she brings home whoever the hell she wants," he continues. "She loves this man and she brings him home, and that's it. That's a testament to the family that Bernie Mac made. Now, the fact that Bernie goes 'Whoa! Who is this guy?' is funny and great, but the nucleus, sort of the core of this family structure is something worth putting on film the fact that this man and his wife have made two kids who can do what they want to do."
Both Scott and Saldana, who play Mac's wife and daughter, admit that they've had a few occasions where they brought the 'wrong guy' home to meet the parents. "We've done that before," Scott says, recalling incidents she didn't deem suitable for print. "I don't know... okay, yeah, I have. Obviously this is a heightened version of what would have happened in my own life, but I can't say that anything nearly as funny as our movie happened in my life." Saldana says that the details in the film are different than her own experiences, but she recalls a few knockdown-dragouts transpiring over potential boyfriends. "Things like that have happened in my life with my family, but not for those reasons. I'm from New York, so by the time you are 22, you've pretty much dated and done everything in the book. You've converted to every religion because the person you were with was either Muslim or Catholic or whatever.
"What I identified with was the whole economic situation 'Does he have a job?' and that's the only thing I sort of clung to," she says. "In terms of drama, I'm from New York, I'm ghetto, so a lot of that has gone down in my household."
Like Sullivan, Scott finds that the material holds widespread appeal. "I would imagine that this situation is universal for any person anywhere in the world, and we just happened to do what was foremost in America's mind which was black and white," she says. "It's always a little bit of a touchy situation, and there's always room for a lot of comedy, and hopefully the comedy is a release from the tensions that people are feeling from their everyday lives. [Ashton and Bernie] have enough stuff that's going to be on the screen and that's going to look real juicy that people are going to go 'I know what that feels like' or 'I've seen that.'"
Saldana says that she found an entry point to the material, and in particular, the comedy, by pulling back and looking at the ramifications of a given scene as if it took place in her own life by "sticking to the reality of the subject" as she says. "You stick to that and you explore the psychological intensity of it, and it would sort of be impossible to exaggerate it if you stick to those basics. It comes natural it's a very organic topic that will bring the most natural reaction and instincts.
"We've concluded that if she had brought home Tiger Woods he would have found a flaw in this young man, because he doesn't want to let go. We are dealing with a very interesting topic, and what better way to display it than in a comedic fashion so that we can laugh at it but also learn from it."
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