If you’re familiar with the process of big Hollywood filmmaking, you probably understand that a film script goes through quite a few revisions before filming. Even during filming, lines are changes and scenes are altered. That’s just how it is. However, on the new “Halloween,” it appears that filmmaker David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride took things to a whole new level.
In a new interview with THR, Green discussed the many, many, MANY iterations the script went through before and during the film’s shortened 25-day shoot:
“It was probably eight months of 80 drafts, exploring different ways we could go and following different characters. Then we started casting it and we learned Jamie Lee [Curtis] wanted to be in it. So then we geeked out and wanted to beef up the Laurie Strode character. All of a sudden people started showing interest and so our opportunities started to expand even while we’re shooting the film. Every Saturday was rewrites for Sunday rehearsals so that I could feed off of what we learned that week or for what an actor’s idea might have been or a skill set that we didn’t know we had in front of us. So we were writing up until the very last week of production.”
He then goes on to discuss how he approached the idea of improv on the set of this new horror film. The director is known for allowing his actors to improvise when appropriate, and when dealing with someone like Curtis, who has been part of the “Halloween” franchise for decades, the director was fine with deferring to her.
“I do that on all my films. I go to the actors and get their feedback and we do read throughs and rewrites and improvisations. I’m all about reworking. A script to me is always just a blueprint and then [we] feel our way through it, together. There’s some scenes that we’ll say, let’s not even use the script, we know point A and B, let’s put it in our own words. I’d play music on set sometimes and just trying to keep it fresh, so it’s not so overly rehearsed,” explains the filmmaker.
The big question surrounding “Halloween” is just how much of the franchise will be included in the final film. It’s said that this new reboot/sequel ignores the other films, but Green goes on to explain exactly why that decision was made. It appears that it wasn’t always the case, but turned out to be a blessing in disguise:
“We started incorporating all the follow-ups and then it got overwhelming trying to engineer something that made sense. Some of the plot points became a little stretched thin as the franchise went on. And so ultimately finding those frustrations, [Danny] McBride came to me and just said, ‘What’s the Michael Myers movie that you really want to see?’ ‘Halloween I’ was, to me, the most pure and, in a lot of ways, the most simple. I get the real connection with the terror of a movie that isn’t so lost in its own mythology.”
The new “Halloween” hits theaters October 19.
