Excluive: Jason Blum dishes on the Halloween reboot
With filming set to begin in just a few weeks in Charleston, South Carolina on the next chapter in the Halloween franchise, ComingSoon.net had the chance to speak exclusively with Blumhouse impresario Jason Blum (The Purge, Get Out, Split) about the new movie’s director David Gordon Green and bringing original director John Carpenter back into the fold!
ComingSoon.net: I was really thrilled when you got David to do the “Halloween” movie. I met him back in 2000 when he came to my college with “George Washington” and I was floored by that movie. And even though it was very tender and poetic it also has a haunting quality, so David doing horror always seemed like a cool idea. Can you talk a little bit about David bringing his style to the genre and what appealed to you about him on this project?
Jason Blum: I think that good horror movie directors are good directors. Hollywood thinks you have to have directed a good horror movie to direct a studio horror movie, but I would much rather have someone who has directed a bunch of good movies than one good horror movie to direct one of our movies. What David brings to “Halloween” is he’s an amazing storyteller. He’s writing with Danny [McBride] and we start shooting in about five weeks, but what he’s bringing to it are his abilities as a great storyteller.
CS: As a huge Carpenter fan I was always curious about the “Halloween 4” idea he had prior to the one that got made, which I believe Dennis Etchison wrote a script for, that was more about the idea of Michael Myers as a spirit. Did you ever talk to Carpenter about that script and the ideas he and Debra Hill had?
Blum: I didn’t talk to him about that but I think David might have.
CS: How would you describe Carpenter’s involvement in the movie?
Blum: We don’t take any big steps without his approval, so for instance hiring David and Danny he approved. He approved their pitch, he approved their first script. He approved bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis. So anytime we make a big creative turn he’s involved with that and we don’t do it without his blessing.
CS: I know he’s been very happy to sit back and take the checks when the remakes come around, but its good to hear he has more of an active involvement in this one, or at least a say.
Blum: We went to him and asked him to be involved. There was no contractual, financial or any other obligation to have him on this movie. We went back and asked him to join us again.
CS: Was our former ShockTillYouDrop editor Ryan Turek involved in that initiative?
Blum: He was less a part of that, but Ryan was a huge part of us doing “Halloween.” Ryan was the one who drove that decision from the very beginning. Ryan sat at the table, I still remember, and said, “We have to make ‘Halloween,’ this is what’s happened and this is where its going. We wouldn’t ever have gotten involved with “Halloween” if it weren’t for Ryan.
Jamie Lee Curtis will return to the franchise that kicked off her career and she will once again be playing the iconic role of Laurie Strode, who comes to her final confrontation with Michael Myers. Despite Curtis’ character being unceremoniously killed off for 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, in true Halloween franchise fashion the new film will ignore the continuity of many of the sequels in favor of telling its own story branching off the first two films. Curtis has previously appeared in four films in the series, including the 1978 original, its 1981 sequel, 1998’s Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, and Resurrection.
David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, Your Highness) will direct Halloween and co-write the script for the film with Danny McBride (yes, Eastbound & Down star Danny McBride).
John Carpenter will executive produce with Malek Akkad producing for Trancas and Jason Blum producing for Blumhouse. Green and McBride will also executive produce under their Rough House Pictures banner. Zanne Devine and David Thwaites will oversee for Miramax which is co-financing with Blumhouse.
The film will arrive in theaters from Universal Pictures on October 19, 2018, forty years after the premiere of the original film.