Q. When explaining why in my film "The Last Castle" we see none of the dead strewn in the prison yard after the film's climactic battle sequence, you wrote in the Answer Man that it would diminish Robert Redford's heroism to see that he was responsible for far more deaths than Gandolfini's character. The truth is this: There are no corpses because nobody was killed. We spent much of the movie establishing that the guards use rubber bullets and not live ones (at the very end of the battle, one of the guards switches to live ammo). Some men may have been wounded, but unless there were hit with direct shots to the temple (very hard to do with moving targets) they all would have survived. (Rod Lurie, director, Pasadena)

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Q. Today, I read that a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" is shooting this summer with Gus Van Sant as the director and Anne Heche taking the Janet Leigh role and Vince Vaughn the Tony Perkins role. My first reaction is--"why?" There are great novels and screenplays floating around that don't get made, and here comes yet another remake of a film that was plenty good the first time around. If a film was popular and successful, a remake automatically has things going against it from audiences who liked the first one. So, why? (Vicki Halliday, New York City)

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