(whooshing)
(keys clacking) (buzzing)
(whooshing)
- Shall we talk a little Halloween, guys?
- Okay. - Halloween.
- We have microphones and everything and cameras,
we might as well do it, right?
- Yeah. - This is like,
a stand-up comedy mic. (tapping)
- Yeah, do you have a set ready for us, Jamie Lee?
- Well, I mean, like, throw it down in front of these two.
(Josh laughing)
- I, along with many people here in Toronto are so excited.
As we tape this, we're hours away
from the world premiere of Halloween.
- Tick-tock!
- This is big, this is a big one.
Okay, so tackling this franchise,
this revitalized franchise, who has the most to lose?
Who was the most scared going into
the prospect of a new Halloween film?
- I am.
(all laughing)
Right?
- And yet you just crave
adventure and excitement and anxiety?
- You're asking for trouble when you recruit
the band of misfits that we've recruited and step into very
fragile and sacred terrain. - Hallowed.
And I'm extremely curious
and nervous, excited, and terrified
about unleashing the movie on an audience tonight.
- Jamie, talk to me a little bit about, like,
you've obviously been with the franchise from the beginning
and you've kind of come back at various times
and I'm sure for, well, you tell me,
have there been times where you've said no to coming back?
Have there been bad ideas proposed to you
where you've said, "You know what,
"let's leave well enough alone?"
- Well, first of all, I wanna remind you
that it wasn't a franchise.
- Sure.
- It started out, as you said,
a sort of band of misfits making a babysitter slasher movie
that John and Debra decided would be called Halloween.
That wasn't the original pitch, it was,
"ake me a babysitter slasher movie for Moustapha Akkad."
And so we made one in 21 days or however many days,
although now I'm hearing different numbers,
but it was a short amount of days,
very small amount of money,
and it was made with zero expectations.
If anybody, you can produce one human being who claims
that they knew when we were shooting in 1978
on the streets of West Hollywood and South Pasadena
that we were making a classic film
that would be revitalized 40 years later,
they, you know, I dare ya,
and I don't think it's gonna happen.
So, I have to remind you, it wasn't a franchise.
- Sure, sure. - It became a franchise
when the movie was very successful.
I did Halloween II because it felt like I owed,
without question, the audience that had given me
my first big hit in the movie business,
because the first movie, Halloween II took place
immediately after Halloween one,
I mean, the second that that movie ended.
I then stopped making horror movies
because I knew at that point I would be pigeonholed
even though I was employed for the first time
as a young actor, I understood that,
being the daughter of famous people,
I actually did understand that
that could become pigeonholing.
- Sure.
- I returned to H20 because I thought it was cool.
I went to John and Debra and said,
"We are all still making movies, all of us, it's cool,
"so let's do a 20th anniversary movie,"
which became H20 which ended up
not really involving John and Debra
and the next one I had to do for contractual reasons,
which I won't bore you with. (Josh laughing)
But that was sort of it,
it was all sort of like big marking moments.
The original movie, II was simply because
the original connected it, and 20 years later,
until the phone rang in June of last year.
- And for you guys, tackling this one in the writer's room,
what's the nut you have to crack
to make this work for audiences
that are familiar with the original
and hopefully bringing in new audiences?
What's the question, what's the debate
that plagued you guys in the writer's room
when you were trying to figure it out?
- Well, you know, David and I wrote it
with a good buddy of ours, Jeff Bradley
that we all met, like, back in film school and,
you know, we like the audience that's waiting for this film,
we're just ultimately humongous fans of the series,
so I think we were just constantly asking ourselves
what do we wanna see and, you know,
and what do we need to see with this?
So I think it was we just kinda started trying to find a way
to personalize it and kind of make it, you know, feel
like we could have some ownership over what this chapter was
and not that we were just sort of,
like, you know, connecting dots.
We really wanted to try to find a way to kind of, like,
get our brains into it in a way
that we could kinda put our stamp on it.
And so it was just really just kind of always
just putting ourselves in the mindset of the audience
of, like, what people like us that have seen this
and love this, what're they gonna wanna see,
what're they gonna be turned on by?
- For you, David, you know,
succeeding a master like John Carpenter,
intimidating to say the least,
and he's involved in this one,
talk to me a little bit about how much involvement he had,
did you feel like it was incumbent upon you to kind of
get his blessing throughout the process
or was it just sort of like once he's in at the start,
I do my own thing?
- For sure it was important to get his blessing.
Danny and I went to his house and met with him
and gave him the initial concepts,
he smiled and really responded to the ideas,
gave us a few notes, we wrote, he gave us a few notes,
and went on to compose the score.
It was funny, though, when we were in the writing phase,
once we has the big picture pieces of the puzzle together,
I'd go to him with little problems like,
"How do we get the mechanic suit on this guy?"
Or, "How do we get the mask back?"
These things that, like, you have to hit certain things
to be able to fully realize the character.
Then those became the real challenges.
It wasn't so much what you could do in that world,
it's how do you get him to become him again
and find news ways in.
For some of those ideas, he'd be like,
"You're on your own, kid."
(all laughing)
- Do you think about, sort of, you know, audiences change
and tastes change over the years
and it's arguably a different expectation
for a young audience today for a horror film.
Do you think about that?
About sort of how young people receive horror films today
or are you just sort of trusting your own gut
and making the film that you would respond to?
- I think everything's cyclical.
You know, there's sometimes werewolves are cool,
sometimes you wanna see a vampire,
it's been a while since we saw a movie
about a bad guy with a knife in your house.
So I feel like if you keep it
within the genre of horror movies, if you pace it out right
and you don't overextend your welcome, there's that,
and then there's also just the simplicity
of the story that I think works.
You know, we're in a world now,
as opposed to 40 years later,
that epic headlines and world-wide disasters
and catastrophes and those ring
so obviously horrific in our lives and in the media.
And for us we're really betting on the simplicity,
the intimacy of that bad guy with a knife
that will terrify you equally today as it did 40 years ago.
- And I can tell you that the original concept of the movie,
which was a babysitter slasher movie, was about a babysitter
and, you know, there is a ubiquity to,
and particularly in America,
where it's a rite of passage for young people
to start babysitting for other people's kids
and the simplicity of setting it in a small everytown,
Haddonfield, Illinois, and making it so real,
making the people so real so that when this
terrifying unreal person showed up,
it made you really care for the people.
I think you guys also really focused on making sure
that that simplicity of the town,
even though the town has a lore to it,
the lore is just a bit of history,
and you really still meet, I mean,
the kids that they're babysitting,
all of the young people that you have in the movie,
particularly the kid at the beginning of the movie,
it's just beautiful because they're just regular people
and I think that's what makes it also so terrifying.
- Danny, remember when we talked relatively recently
when you joined the Alien franchise, like, you're kind of,
like, tongue-in-cheek concern was, like,
"I just don't wanna ruin an Alien movie,
"I don't want my presence to ruin the movie."
So you didn't, so why not insert yourself
into this one in an organic way?
- You know, I just, you know, acting is,
you know, it can be a pain in the ass sometimes.
I like just being involved with this
behind the camera just creatively,
but I also think that that's part of what was also so good
about the first one, to what Jamie was saying,
is the simplicity of it, the idea that the characters in it
are very recognizable of the people that,
like, live in your own town, - Right.
- And so in some ways this doesn't feel like
the appropriate movie to have a bunch of cameos in it,
it doesn't seem like it's that kind of film.
- So is it true that you guys were initially planning this
as two films that you were gonna do back-to-back?
- You know, I think we were just kind of
in our early ideas of it of just, like,
what would you do if you could, you know?
But I think that both of us were just sort of
just trying to make sure we didn't blow this one
before we got ahead of ourselves
and try to make a whole universe out of it, yeah.
- So there are ideas in the closet?
- [Danny] Yeah, there are ideas, yeah.
- There are ideas, okay.
You were talking about shooting the original in, what,
18, 21 days, whoever has the actual knowledge.
- Right. - Vibe of this one,
the vibe on the set, you were gushing about your director
before he walked in here. - Whoa!
- I gushed. - It was pretty disgusting.
- You know what, here's the thing.
We were a band of very young people,
I think the oldest person was John and he was 30,
they were all film school friends of John, Debra,
and this really small little guerrilla band of filmmakers
made something together, we all knew what we were doing
and it was very special.
And when I showed up on the set, it's not different at all.
School friends, geeky, sorry.
(all laughing)
You know what, but the term film geek,
John Carpenter's a film geek. - Of course.
- You're all handsome men
but you're film geeks and I just loved
that you work with your old friends
are making the movies just like John's old, I mean,
Nick Castle, Tommy Wallace were in a band with John
called the Coupe De Villes for all those years.
They were in a rock band together
and Nick Castle was the shape
and Tommy Wallace was the art director
whose wife, Nancy Loomis, played, um...
I was gonna say Nancy but that's not her name,
what's her name, come on people,
who knows the movie Halloween?
(Danny laughing)
- I've heard of it.
- Ah, but it was very familiar - Got it, like a family.
so the vibe was very, very similar to me.
Small town filmmaker weirdos making a movie together.
This one particularly, really inventive, fun,
doesn't take it seriously at all,
and it just was very special, very similar.
'Cause John Carpenter and you are very similar,
you're both Southern, you're both very mannered,
and you're very kind of sweet and quiet
and then you're both really smart
and sort of laser-focused when you need to be.
(whooshing)
(buzzing)
(upbeat rhythmic music)