Idon’twatchthese movies. I’m not a fan of the genre
JAMIE LEE CURTIS TALKS TO LAURA HARDING ABOUT HER NEW MOVIE HALLOWEEN KILLS AND MAKES A SHOCK CONFESSION ABOUT HER FAMOUS FILM FRANCHISE
JAMIE LEE CURTIS cannot believe she is playing Laurie Strode again.
She couldn’t believe it back in 2018 too, when she reprised her most famous role for a reboot of the Halloween franchise, which made her a mega star back in 1978.
But here she is, at the age of 62, facing off with Michael Myers again in the next terrifying instalment of the modern trilogy helmed by filmmaker David Gordon Green.
“The last thing I thought I would be doing is a Halloween movie in 2017, when Jake Gyllenhaal called me and said that his friend David Green wanted to speak to me,” she remembers. “It was not my intention to do another Halloween movie, I felt like I had done them.
“And yet what he had written, and how he told the story of Laurie, and her daughter, and her granddaughter, and all of the conflict, I felt it was really a very exciting way to tell that story. It was a no brainer for me. I just said yes immediately.
“I didn’t know it was a trilogy when we signed up for the first one. I found that out only after we’d shot the first movie. That is when I learned we were doing more. But as soon as I understood what David was doing, to bring back not only legacy characters, but to talk about the concentric circles of grief and trauma that happened around a centralised figure, a community in trauma.
“Now watch these people start to reject the system, the system fails, the police officers seem inept, they cannot help. And to watch that growing tide of people was very scary and powerful.”
The daughter of Hollywood legends Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Jamie Lee was dubbed a scream queen for her star-making turn in the 70s horror film and she has returned to the role of Laurie numerous times over the years, including in the 1981 sequel, 1998’s Halloween H20 and 2002’s Hal- loween: Resur- rection.
In between she’s had roles in box office hits such as A Fish Called Wanda, My Girl, True Lies, Trading Places and Freaky Friday, as well as turns on TV in shows including Scream Queens and New Girl.
But it’s the new trilogy, which this week brings Halloween Kills, and will conclude with the third instalment, entitled Halloween Ends – slated for release next year – that has seen the character of Laurie Strode win a new generation of fans.
“I think that’s when a movie becomes a universe,” Jamie Lee reflects.
“Before it was just a little lowbudget slasher movie, made in 21 days for $300,000.
“Then there were a couple of movies, so you could call it a franchise... Now it’s a franchise, you’re just going to churn out movie, movie, movie, movie.
“When David Green showed up, he had prescience about female trauma, colliding with the Me Too movement, a movie written two years before.
“In the same way, he wrote a movie in 2018, that we shot in 2019, that talks about mob violence, and a group of people rising up saying we are not going to take it any more, the system is broken – prescient to what’s going on socially all over the world.
“Now it’s a universe. Now it feels like because you’re bringing back legacy characters, you’re bringing
in a whole new group of people, audience members and young people who are seeing it for the first time.
“It feels now that it has become the Halloween
universe and that elevates it, because now it can grow and continue.”
Does she have any concern about revisiting the world so often that the franchise may be run into the ground?
“Sure,” she says frankly, “which is why it’s a trilogy. I think there’s a very clear path here that I think will be incredibly satisfying to the audience at the end.
“I think it will make them ask a lot of questions, I think they will be shocked by the ending of the next movie, and will be sort of stunned by what David Green is talking about.
“So that seems to be a perfect place to not run it into the ground, but actually put it up into the cloud, put it up into the universe, and let it just sort of spin around for a while.
“Obviously, I’m not going to re-join another Halloween movie so quickly, but it certainly tees it up for you to be able to explore other characters. It’s quite extraordinary what they’re doing.”
But for all her protectiveness of the world of Halloween, Jamie Lee drops one surprising fact.
“I don’t like these movies. I don’t watch these movies. I’m not a fan of the genre.
“I am a fan of the fans of the genre. I love that people love them. I don’t have to love them. I don’t have to say they don’t have value, they have value. People love them.
“I love the filmmakers. I love the filmmaking. I think the last 20 minutes of this movie are so beautiful. And yet they’re incredibly violent.
“But I also think the filmmaking is exquisitely beautiful, beautiful homages, beautiful orchestration, visual orchestration.
“So I can appreciate the genre without being a fan of it.”
Spoken like a true scream queen.
Halloween Kills is out now
I am a fan of the fans of the genre. I love that people love them. I don’t have to love them...