Steven Soderbergh Mashes Up Hitchock And Van Sant Into One ‘Psychos’

Steven Soderbergh is “retired” from filmmaking, but he’s still a very active editor.

The man whose Sex, Lies, and Videotape put himself and Sundance on the map and later went onto direct such critical and box offices hits as Traffic, Ocean’s 11, Magic Mike, and HBO’s Behind The Candelabra (some, if not all of which resurrected careers and/or made new Hollywood stars) just posted Psychos on Extension 765 (Soderbergh’s website for hawking T-shirts, pimping his own brand of imported Bolivian liquor, selling art and movie ephemera, and posting weekly drops of creative detritus).

Psychos is a full-length mashup of Alfred Hitchcock’s original Psycho from 1960 and Gus Van Sant’s 1998 near-shot-for-shot remake of the same name. Soderbergh converted Van Sant’s version into black-and-white except for the signature shower scene, where the flesh and blood of Marion Crane (played by both Janet Leigh

and Ann Heche) is the only color seen in the film.

You can watch the one-hour-and-27-minute edit at Extension 765. Soderbergh is using a Vimeo player on his site, but disabled embeds.

It’s also worth noting the release of Psychos comes just a few days before the second season debut of A&E’s Bates Motel, a television drama that delves into the Psycho prestory and Norman Bates’ tragic formative years. Coincidence or not, Robert Bloch‘s novel is currently in the Hollywood ether.