“Comedies have pushed the edge in the past 30 years,” he continues. “I think our movie is more modern because of its edginess and the fact that it’s a little more audacious, a little more politically incorrect. But the reality is that Faust, whether it’s 200 years ago or 30 years ago, is still about the human condition - about people’s ability to be seduced by temptation.” They mulled over ways of bringing the story into the 21st century, but it was Ramis’ wife who came up with the first big change: why not make the Devil a woman? As Ramis tells the story, her suggestion was made at least partly in exasperation at hearing the guys sit round talking about who could play the Prince of Darkness. Why, she suggested sweetly, did it have to be a guy at all? Why couldn’t it be the Princess of Darkness? Ramis loved the idea.
“Most men are bedevilled by women,” he points out, “and with women achieving real power in our society, why not a female Devil? One of the things most people remember from the original Bedazzled is Raquel Welch in red lingerie playing the part of Lust. And so I thought, for most men, lust would be one of the Devil’s most powerful weapons. The end result was casting Elizabeth Hurley as an incredibly sexy Devil.”
The other big change was to reshape the story in terms of just what it is that Americans might wish for in these days of carefully cultivated image and male insecurity. Without, of course, going too far down the ‘serious theme’ route: this was always going to be a comedy in which, even at that early stage, Brendan Fraser was going to play the Dudley Moore role.
“Brendan has this tremendous physical strength and energy and he appeals to both men and women,” says Ramis. “But he can also be really goofy and completely self-effacing and humble, and he’s one of the few handsome men who can play a nerd and make it convincing. Brendan has heart and soul, which I think is essential in comedy. But he’s also got the soul of a misfit in the body of a hero, and the role seemed like a natural for him.
“When I sat down with Larry Gelbart and Peter Tolan, the other writers who worked on this script,” continues the director, “I kept trying to catalogue what I thought were the things nine out of 10 Americans would wish for. I ruled out things like ‘I wish I could fly’ or ‘I wish I was invisible’, and went for the ones that I think most people in our culture would wish for. Most would want to be rich and powerful or famous or really brilliant or athletic. “Some of the wishes hark back to the original film,” he adds, “but we spun them in different ways. We tried to give them a more contemporary feeling. I was also going for a bigger point, which is that all the things we think will make us attractive to other people, the things we think will make us happy or successful, really don’t.

"Most men are bedevilled by women, so why not a female Devil? I thought, for most men, lust would be one of the Devil’s most powerful weapons. The end result was casting Elizabeth Hurley as an incredibly sexy Devil"

“A lot of people spend their lives wishing for things, and it occurred to me that that’s not an answer. I remember telling a friend of mine once that a wish is not a goal: wishes are things that happen to us by magic. Goals are things you can actually accomplish by setting achievable steps for yourself.”
In the story which Ramis, Gelbart and Tolan finally settled on, Fraser plays Elliot Richards, a goofy employee at a company called Synedyne who is the butt of all his fellow-workers’ jokes and is hopelessly in love with a colleague called Alison. She is played by Australian actress Frances O’Connor, who is currently on the brink of major stardom midway between her critically acclaimed role in Mansfield Park and the female lead in the new Steven Spielberg movie, A.I.
“Elliot is a man in search of a personality,” notes Fraser of his character. “We all know someone like him - someone who is friendly and benign, but who hasn’t exactly figured out how to communicate with people in a way that isn’t overbearing. He’s inoffensive and harmless, but he’s a social misfit.”
“Elliot is really a delayed adolescent,” adds Ramis. “He’s like a big puppy dog. He’s just so desperate to be liked that people literally run from him in the office. He is also hopelessly in love with Alison and he thinks, like most people do, that if he was rich and powerful or tall and athletic or brilliant, then women would go for him. And Elliot finds out, as we do in life, that nothing’s perfect - that the things we wish for are not necessarily the things that will make us happy.”
Another innovation that gives the new Bedazzled its comic edge, reckons Ramis, is that, as Elliot becomes each of the things he wishes for - a British rock star, a Latin hero, a basketball genius - he takes the people around him into his new personality. Alison gets to be his partner in each fantasy, and the people he work with show up as a kind of chorus.