Ross McElwee's 'Remake': A Father's Grief on Film — SkimNews
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- Ross McElwee's new documentary 'Remake' confronts the death of his son Adrian, who died from a fentanyl overdose at age 27 in the bathroom of McElwee's Boston home.
- The film originated as a meta-documentary about a Hollywood producer's attempt to fictionalize McElwee's 1986 'Sherman's March,' before being repurposed after Adrian's death into a reckoning with grief and filmmaking ethics.
- McElwee had filmed Adrian for a few minutes each month from infancy to adulthood, and now questions whether his 2011 film 'Photographic Memory' — which they promoted together at the Venice film festival — gave Adrian a 'false impression' of invincibility that contributed to his drug use.
- Charleen Swansea, McElwee's former English teacher who was named 'the greatest documentary character of all time' by American critics for 'Sherman's March,' reappears in 'Remake' suffering from dementia with no memory of the film or of having taught him.
- The Hollywood remake project is shown passing through absurd incarnations — a Paul Blart: Mall Cop director's comedy, a dramatic miniseries, a TV sitcom, and finally a verbatim live opera.
- Filmmaker Victoria Mapplebeck, director of 2024's 'On Motherboard,' says she sees 'Remake' as raising the same ethical questions about consent and compulsion that shaped her own two-decade project filming her son Jim.
- McElwee, now 79, says he wants to stop turning his life into film: 'I want to take a break and let life be life without me trying to turn it into art.'
Why it matters: The film reframes a 40-year career of autobiographical documentary through a parent's worst-case ethical audit — McElwee is using the very medium he fears contributed to his son's addiction to interrogate itself. For documentarians and parents weighing artistic access against a vulnerable subject's wellbeing, 'Remake' makes the question unignorable: McElwee openly asks whether showing Adrian at Venice left him believing he was 'more or less invincible.'
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