THERE'S SOMETHING YOU DON'T SEE EVERY DAY

Paul Feig explains where his spooks come from – and how he made them real

“I don’t believe in ghosts, but I was like, okay, as a science head, where do I think ghosts would come from? It’s not like there’s a hard science on ghosts, but for me, it’s like, ‘What could I see as the most logical reason that ghosts could be pulled back or energised or brought into this world? How would that work?’ That’s the element we added. It wasn’t as interesting to me personally to have it be ‘the gods have sent something down’. The original Ghostbusters really planted a flag in that. You want to have ghosts in it, but we thought it would be fun to change their origins.

“[When it came to creating the ghosts in the movie] it was really important to me to have as many practical elements as I could, because for me it’s all about the interaction of the actors with their environments. I worked as hard as I could to provide those practical elements, knowing we would either augment or replace them with CG.

“A lot of our ghosts are played by people because, you know, ghosts are dead people! And for any of the ghosts that were played by humans, we put this LED light rig on them. Pete Travers, my special effects supervisor, felt very much that the way to make them seem real was light interaction – if you have ghosts that are emitting this kind of light and you don’t compensate for that with the environment, then it just looks like a cartoon piece popped into a shot.”