Originality doomed the Safdie brothers' 48 Hrs remake

“Walter Hill came to a Gems screening,” Josh Safdie told us at the time. “I’d heard that he had seen Good Time and was a fan of that. He really liked Uncut Gems, too. The Driver is one of my favorite movies. 48 Hrs is great, but The Driver is his masterpiece. And I said, ‘Let’s just get this out of the way immediately. We’re not remaking your movie.’ And he said, ‘Okay. It’s weird, I watch these two movies and think that these guys are not short on original ideas. Like, why would they need to do a remake?’ [Laughs.] So what happened was, we wrote a few drafts for the studio, and it just wasn’t a remake. We tried, but I just don’t know how to do it. Maybe the general structure was kind of 48 Hrs. And there was a cop and an inmate. But it’s going to be re-shifted into something original.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Paramount felt the same way. The script was no longer a remake, and apparently, the studio had no interest in an original script from them. On a recent episode of Deadline’s Crew Call podcast, Safdie explained what happened, and it’s really as simple as it wasn’t the 48 Hrs remake Paramount asked for. “We wrote a remake of 48 Hrs for Paramount, and they read it, and they were like, ‘This isn’t a remake, what is this? This is an original film.’ We’re like, ‘Sorry, we tried.'” That’s what they get for writing an original film. Still, apology accepted. We’d still like to see whatever they were working on.