2021 PREVIEW
It’s time to slime again. The first in-canon adventure since the ’80s is almost here — and this time it’s personal
First looks at the movies that will, Covid permitting, be rocking your world in cinemas this year. And no, we didn’t just copy and paste the 2020 preview. Cheeky! And it all kicks off with…
LIKE EVERY YOUNG BOY in the mid-1980s, Jason Reitman was obsessed with Ghostbusters. But unlike any other young boy, he was the son of the man who had directed the popcultural phenomenon, Ivan Reitman. So instead of your bog-standard 12” Egon toy aiming its proton gun out of his toy box, Jason had props from the movie, including a chunk of the actual Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, decorating his bedroom. “I had to check underneath my bed before I went to sleep looking for a Terror Dog,” he laughs. “Except
I was the only kid where there might actually have been one under there!”
In the sequel, an 11-year-old Reitman made a cameo, aiming the meta quip, “My dad says you’re full of crap,” at the Ghostbusters, and being called “ungrateful little yuppie larvae” by Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz. And then the years rolled by. Reitman himself became a Hollywood filmmaker, directing the likes of Juno, Up In The Air and The Front Runner. And at no point did the idea of making a Ghostbusters film himself occur to him.
“I always thought, ‘There’s no need for me to walk into that woodchipper,’” he tells Empire, in his first-ever interview about the film. “I think every young person stands in the shadow of their parents to a certain extent. And spends their life looking for a piece of sunlight only to discover themselves. I felt like I’d kind of accomplished that. I’d become a filmmaker in my own right, made films in my life that were very personal to me. And Ghostbusters always felt like a third rail as far as a career choice.”
Yet slowly, inexorably, he found himself
being drawn towards it, like a museum supervisor towards a haunted painting of a Carpathian warlord. Years ago, a vivid image popped into his head — a 12-year-old girl wearing a proton pack in a field of barley — and wouldn’t leave. Imagining the possibilities in not repeating his dad’s vision, but expanding on it and making it his own, he and screenwriter Gil Kenan started fleshing out a story. And Ghostbusters: Afterlife, set in a rural town, not New York, and featuring the surviving OG ’busters and two young kids who get sucked into a spectral adventure, was born.
In some major ways it is a new direction for the series. But at every step, Reitman has remained reverent to his father’s vision. “Every person wants to make their parent proud,” he says. “And that’s kind of our mission. I certainly judged every day of shooting on that metric.” He compares filming scenes with Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson to making a documentary; “It’s not my job to shape who Venkman is. It’s just my job to be there when he starts talking.” And he studied the original movie’s exquisite blend of comedy and horror, making sure to focus as much on the latter as the former. “The feeling I’ve kind of held onto is that while it is very funny, it really scared me. It was really my first experience with a horror film.
I was at a Directors Guild meeting and I happened to be sitting next to Steven Spielberg — when I told him I was working on Ghostbusters, he out of nowhere said, ‘Library Ghost — top ten scares of all time.’ And it’s true.”
He’s keeping schtum for now on the movie’s roster of nightmare-inducing monsters. But one thing he’s more than happy to talk about is the joy he’s experienced working alongside his old man. One memorable day was when Ivan visited the set, dipped his finger in a tub of slime and nodded his approval at the consistency. Another was more recent, at the start of December, when the virtually finished film was finally screened.
“My father hasn’t been leaving the house much because of Covid,” Reitman says. “But he took a test, put on a mask and drove down to the Sony lot to watch the movie with the studio. And after, he cried, and he said, ‘I’m so proud to be your father.’ And it was one of the great moments of my life.”
They say bustin’ makes you feel good. Here’s the proof. GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE IS DUE IN CINEMAS ON 11 JUNE