A long, long time ago, in episode 4 of the Who Goes There Podcast, we mentioned that French film, and fan favorite Martyrs was slated to get the American remake treatment. Thankfully (for us and haters of remakes) that movie hasn’t seen the light of day. Movies.com recently sat down with Daniel Stamm, who was supposed to direct the remake, and asked him, just why we’ll never see it. Continue Reading to find out why.

“What happened was the French had done these 30 pages of just mind-numbing, repetitive violence, which is genius because it makes you feel the actual horror of that stuff, but there is no entertainment value. And so the Americans come in and go, ‘We have to spice this up and make it more entertaining,’ so suddenly it’s 30 pages of Saw that just didn’t work.

“The American remake keeps both girls alive, whereas the French version kills one of the girls very early. If you keep both of them alive this gives you a really great chance to have this psychological play between them and the torturers. Everything was going great creatively, and then the call comes in. ‘The option ran out a week ago and the French producers now want so much money that we can’t make the movie.’

“I think they’re now back to making the movie for like $1 million, really low budget, which I think you could almost do, it’s just there’s this philosophy in Hollywood that you can never go back budget-wise. As a filmmaker you are judged by that. And then there’s also this concept I was unaware of called plateauing, where if you’re a filmmaker who makes two movies in the same budget bracket, that becomes your thing. You are the guy for the $3 million movie, and then that’s all you do. And so my agents wouldn’t let me do the $1 million movie, because then that’s it for you, you’ll supposedly never get that bigger budget.”