Ben Wheatley: Don’t call his Rebecca a remake of the Hitchcock film

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Dame Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel REBECCA (pick up a copy HERE) has been adapted for the screen multiple times over the last eighty-two years; in fact, IMDb lists fifteen film and television adaptations. The most popular of these, by far, was the very first adaptation, which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1940. (You can buy it HERE.)

Hitchcock's version is so popular, when it was announced that director Ben Wheatley (his credits include KILL LIST, HIGH-RISE, and FREE FIRE) would be helming a new take on the material for Netflix, many reports called his film a remake of Hitchcock's movie. Wheatley doesn't agree with that label. Speaking with Empire, he said, 

It's not, in any sense, a remake of the Hitchcock film. Firmly not. Remaking a film is not that interesting to me, but the original source material is. I watched all the adaptations. It's important to see what's gone before, but that's certainly not the focus."

Wheatley has described the source material as a "Russian doll" of a novel, saying the author fit "a ghost story and a thriller and a betrayal inside a romance story". His film is said to be "a mesmerising and gorgeously rendered psychological thriller", and it has the following synopsis:

After a whirlwind romance in Monte Carlo with handsome widower Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer), a newly married young woman (Lily James) arrives at Manderley, her new husband's imposing family estate on a windswept English coast. Naive and inexperienced, she begins to settle into the trappings of her new life, but finds herself battling the shadow of Maxim's first wife, the elegant and urbane Rebecca, whose haunting legacy is kept alive by Manderley's sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas). 

The director said he was drawn to this material because he

wanted to make something that had more love in it (than his previous films). It's part of trying to investigate other parts of being human. Rebecca has dark elements, and it has a psychological, haunting story within it, but it's also about these two people in love. That was the main thing."

Ben Wheatley's version of REBECCA will be available to watch on the Netflix streaming service as of October 21st.