David Ayer says his script for a Scarface remake was too awesome for Hollywood
It's not that Ayer's version would've been too violent, it's that Universal wanted more "fun"
David Ayer is almost certainly the biggest David Ayer fan in the world, with the Suicide Squad directly regularly reminding people that his cut of the crummy superhero movie is actually really good and that there’s some kind of conspiracy trying to keep it buried in order to maintain the narrative that Suicide Squad is crummy (it somehow sounds more reasonable when he says it). Now his ongoing self-promotion tour is continuing with a chat with Total Film, where he talked about what went wrong with his attempted Scarface remake.
Ayer said his draft of the Scarface remake was “one of the best scripts” he has ever written, adding that it gets “passed around in Hollywood, underground.” He even suggested that when remaking Scarface comes up in Hollywood conversations, people will be disappointed to hear that they’re not using his script. But of course he’s going to say that, since writers are famously their own most forgiving critics (this newswire is going great, by the way, no complaints), so what happened?
Well, apparently, the movie was just too darn twisted for Hollywood to handle. He told Total Film that he had “created this rich, soulful journey through the drug trade” that “wasn’t too violent,” but the studio (Universal) “just wanted something more… fun.” That’s a weird thing to want out of a Scarface movie, but maybe Ayer’s script didn’t have any of the machine gun-blasting and famous quotes that everybody liked from the Brian De Palma version. It would be very Ayer to take a concept that should at least be entertaining and make it overly dour or play it too straight. But he says the script is good, so what do we know?
Actually, one thing we know is that there is a bit of complete nonsense in the Ayer interview, where he says that he understands why Universal would want to be protective of Scarface because it’s the studio’s “biggest IP behind Jurassic Park”—and that is just absolutely incorrect. Even if you don’t count movies for kids (Despicable Me and whatnot), Universal is still the company behind The Fast And The Furious, which is one of the biggest “IPs” in the whole world. That’s the problem with Ayer: It seems like he knows what’s up, but then he pulls some crazy thing out of his ass like saying that Scarface is second only to Jurassic Park in the Universal canon, and we don’t know what to think.
Still a huge fan of this newswire. When people are passing around newswires at Hollywood parties, they get bummed out when they don’t get this one.