Life & Mortality Quote by Norman Jewison

Jewison’s line lands like a laugh that curdles into a warning. The joke is the timing: remakes used to function as a kind of posthumous tribute, the industry’s way of declaring a film “classic” by reintroducing it to a new era. He’s not even dead yet, and Hollywood is already embalming his work. That’s the sting. The remark frames remaking not as celebration, but as premature canonization - and, more pointedly, as a market reflex that treats movies less like authored objects than like endlessly recyclable intellectual property.

The intent isn’t preciousness about originals so much as suspicion about motive. “Why would you want to make a remake?” is a rhetorical trap: the honest answers are rarely artistic. It’s risk management, brand recognition, and the algorithmic comfort of selling an already-tested story to an audience trained to buy familiarity. Jewison, a director associated with socially alert, craft-forward studio filmmaking, is implicitly defending a model where films are responses to their moment, not templates to be reskinned.

There’s also an auteur’s irritation hiding in plain sight. Remakes compress the messy, personal labor of directing into a “concept” that can be separated from the person who made it. By pointing out he’s still alive, Jewison reminds you that films have makers, not just titles. The line reads as gallows humor from someone watching the industry swap reverence for redundancy - and mistaking repetition for relevance.