When NBC announced last summer at a critics’ conference that it was going to remake “Rosemary’s Baby,” reporters in the room were incredulous. Even in an age of remakes, surely this — an update of Roman Polanski’s 1968 masterpiece of witchcraft and horror, set in NYC’s Dakota apartment building — was sacrilege.
“We expected that reaction,” says executive producer David A. Stern. “Our mission was not to try to outdo Polanski, but to go back to the book and contemporize it and make Rosemary a stronger woman.”
Director Agnieszka Holland (“The Killing”) says Polanski was onboard with the project. “[The producers] wanted him to read [the script]. He gave his OK.”
Both the 1967 novel, by author Ira Levin, and Polanski’s film tell the story of Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), a young mother-to-be who suspects evil forces surround her — and that her husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), has made a deal with the devil.
Although there are plenty of nods to the film’s memorable images — the Scrabble tiles Farrow uses to work out a mysterious anagram show up — Stern and his team take a radical approach in making “Rosemary’s Baby” relevant.
The story takes place in Paris, and the dynamic is different between Rosemary and Guy and their neighbors the Castevets: Now the Satanists next door are decades younger than the eccentric busybodies originally played by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer.
But nothing was going to work without the right Rosemary. In the novel and movie, she is a naive Irish Catholic from the Midwest married to a struggling actor. In the two-part remake, which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. and wraps up Thursday, she is a Latina married to a teacher who gets a job at the Sorbonne while he struggles to finish a novel.
“We needed someone who could . . . come off as paranoid and delusional [and] that the audience can still have sympathy for,” Stern says.
Enter Zoe Saldana.
“Rosemary’s changed here,” says Holland, “from the quiet, naive person who’s a little disconnected from the world to somebody who … fights for her survival.”
Speaking to The Post, Saldana says, “I didn’t want to do a remake of Mia Farrow’s performance. She was playing a woman of that era who was much more subservient and innocent. I don’t think a lot of women would identify with that [now].”
When it came time to film, “to not be able to speak French helped,” says Patrick J. Adams, who plays Guy. “In Paris, you feel like you’re in a place where you can’t take care of yourself. ”
It makes sense, then, that Rosemary and Guy are seduced by the Castevets (Jason Isaacs and Carole Bouquet). The Woodhouses are invited to live in an apartment owned by the couple in a grand building on the Avenue Victor Hugo. The Castevets ooze a high-society glamour not within the budget of a professor.
“Rosemary’s very moved by their kindness,” Saldana says. “They make her kind of lean in and trust, because they’re from Paris.”
One person you won’t see? The controversial Polanski. “He wanted to make a cameo,” Holland reveals. “I thought it would be better not to do so.”
— additional reporting by Reine Marie Melvin