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At Friday's panel for Spike Lee's latest, Oldboy, screenwriter Mark Protosevich was on the defense. Facing a room full of fans of Park Chan-Wook's original—a quick, applause-based survey of the audience revealed that most (or at least a loud contingent) was familiar with the 2003 cult favorite—Protosevich reiterated to the crowd just why the film was being made in the first place.

"I know that there are people out there who feel sort of this fundamental resistance to the idea a remake," he said. "I would just advocate give us a shot."

Though the Q&A session seemed to indicate that audience members feared that the US interpretation of the revenge story about a man mysteriously imprisoned for 20 years would not be as dark or as violent as the Korean film, the clip shown would seem perfect for dissuading those concerns. The footage, at one point, showed Josh Brolin's Joe Doucett (Oh Dae-su in the original) taking out men with a hammer and then torturing Samuel L. Jackson's character by cutting chunks out of his neck with an X-ACTO knife.

But early in the Q&A one fan asked whether the film would be as psychologically dark as the original. In his answer Protosevich explained: "I know there are people out there who are skeptical about our version or were and I think the expectation was is that we were going to wimp out or try to make it more palatable to an audience. Everybody involved was very determined to do this as darkly and as intensely our point of view would be that as it was in the original."