Taking Shape

by Dustin McNeill

  Could you relay the events that lead you to Halloween 5?

  At the Sundance Film Festival, I met Debra Hill. In an evening talk or so, there was a conference and then we chatted. I was sitting next to her and we continued a relationship of exchange. And then she saw the second feature film I did in Switzerland called Cop Trap – a sort of noir thriller action movie and she was rather taken by it. And she introduced me to Moustapha [Akkad] because she knew Moustapha was looking for a director. It was that simple.

  One day, my agent received a call from Moustapha asking, ‘Are you interested? I have a script. We could have a meeting on Monday.’ I said, ‘Yes, sure.’ I read the script but I didn’t understand anything of the story, to tell you the truth. (laughs) And I went to Blockbuster to rent the three major serial horror movies at the time – A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and Halloween – and I started to watch during the weekend. I watched those three classics of the time and I took the meeting. I went to the office. First, I called Robert Harders on Sunday night – my friend, a great script writer – and said, ‘Would you come if I call you tomorrow to the meeting of Halloween 5? Can you read the script?’ and he said, ‘Sure.’ He read the script and did not like it. I said, ‘That’s okay, no problem.’

  I went to the meeting and to my right, there were three characters. There was [writer] Shem Bitterman, the story developer and [producer] Ramsey Thomas… and in front of me there was Moustapha Akkad. Moustapha asks me, ‘Did you read the script?’ I said yes. ‘What do you think of it?’ And I looked at him and I looked at the people on my right. I said, ‘Can I ask you a question?’ He said yes. I asked, ‘Would you like to do Halloween 6 one day?’ And he slammed his fists on the table and said, ‘How the hell do you ask such a question? Who are you to ask such a question?’ (laughs) I asked, ‘May I?’ He said yes. And I picked up the script politely with my two hands. I went around his desk and dropped it into the trash can.

  And I went back around. Now, to the right of my space, I have this burning – so much, I am hated by the three characters that are on my right. Moustapha says, ‘So?’ I said, ‘Well, on the market, you’ve got three horror film series that are not doing well at the box office. You have Halloween – a suspenseful Hitchcock film where there’s little gore, but where you like the characters. There’s few characters – and you kill them because they enter into their own consciousness of their sexual powers. You have A Nightmare on Elm Street where the kill happens inside the dream – inside the realm of the unknown space where Freddy comes in with his hand – and then you have Friday the 13th which is simply the body count and the how to kill and how to be more inventive with the gore.’

  ‘Moustapha, I asked you if you want to do Halloween 6 because you’ve got to keep your market. You can’t mix the three of them – and the script you gave me mixes the three. You have busloads of people that are killed. You have Jamie killing people through their dreams. You have more than fifty-seven deaths. That is about one death every minute. You don’t build character. You don’t build suspense. That’s why you can’t do this script.’ And he says, ‘Okay. Do you have something else to say?’ I say, ‘Yes, can I?’ And I go to the door – I get Bob to come in – Moustapha says, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ (laughs) Bob says, ‘Well, he asked me.’ And I sit down with Bob and I speak to Bob – and now I’ve turned my back to the three guys who on my right – I said, ‘Bob, we’ve got this child who now seems to have turned evil. She’s there in the bathtub trying to kill her mother. How do we take it from there? Where are we going to go with this?’ And for fifteen minutes, Moustapha listens to us talking, sort of brainstorming. He says, ‘Okay, now, everyone get out the room. The producer needs to take decisions by himself sometimes.’

  Then two hours later, my agent calls me and says, ‘You’ve got it, Dominique. He wants to see you tomorrow morning.’ And in the afternoon, Bob says, ‘No way, I’m not eating dust to make a commercial movie,’ – because the money was so poor that they offered. It’s still the same, I imagine. The next day, Moustapha says, ‘Okay, you’re going to work with Shem Bitterman. You’re going to explain your ideas to him.’ Shem was there and I said, ‘No way.’ He says, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Excuse me,’ and I go to the door to make way for Michael Jacobs to come in.

  And Moustapha is upset – so upset – that I’ve prepared it better with Michael than I had with Bob. Michael and I jazzed in front of Moustapha and we immediately suggested the idea that the little girl was connected to Michael Myers in a telepathic way. That she could see when he is in heat – when he is charged, ready to kill – she can see through his eyes what he sees. And it was one of the premises that we talked about with Debra. She knows the genre and was our mentor in a way. We had two afternoon talks about the script with her where we pitched our ideas and she was so generous with guiding us into the right track, cutting the trees off where she thought it would not work and so on. She was also careful not to go into the supernatural too much. She was really great. And that’s how we started to write with Michael Jacobs.

  Do you remember any of Robert Harders’ ideas for the film?

  No, I do not remember, to tell you the truth. It was a little too far out for Debra and for Moustapha, I remember that. I don’t know if he was really pitching at the time we were together. He’s a great guy. He’s a fantastic writer – always matures his stories; very long. Bob is wonderful at that. I wanted to do his script Burnt Hills for many years. We tried to set it up. I even wanted to do it three years ago, setting it up in China. It’s censorship in China. You can’t distribute it. The content can’t pass censorship and I didn’t realize this when I tried to do it.

  Did you feel any hesitation coming aboard the fifth entry in a continuing series?

  Of course. (laughs) Of course, hesitation. I told my agent, ‘I want to work.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but hold on a second, this is a sequel. (laughs) This is a number five.’ I said, ‘Okay, okay, that’s okay. It’s a film to do, isn’t it?’ I was hungry. I wanted to work. I wanted to go into Americana. I had done Night Angel, a very low-budget horror movie. It was a great experience to do Night Angel with this young team of producers. I had a lot of freedom. I got along really well with the writer Joe Augustyn and we really tried stuff that is not the market – meaning sensuality; seduction right before killing. Sexiness and stuff.

  On Halloween 5, I wanted to work. I was young, maybe twenty-seven-years-old. I just agreed to go through the mill – through the discipline of delivering a film written in six weeks with the prep six weeks with the shoot six weeks and the editing six weeks. It was like totally, totally, totally amazing. It was the challenge of making a film, telling a story – and I got along well with Moustapha Akkad. With the provocative attitude I had in his office – he liked it. He saw I was not afraid to lose the film – that I was gutsy and that I was clear – that my actions were backed up with thoughts.

  Why do I dare put the screenplay into the trash can? Do I want to be fired? Do I want to be kicked out of the room immediately? That was the risk I took. He listened – he understood my manifest of the market. So I made a choice for him because I wanted him to say, ‘Yes, I want to do Halloween 6.’ And if you want to do a Halloween 6, you’ve got to keep on the good assets of what John Carpenter set up with the original Halloween. That was my reference. The suspense – the Hitchcock suspense – and the kids who are loving each other for the first time. Innocent but with sexual desires. And then the feeling of guilty and if you feel guilty, you die. You’re punished. The Shape is going to get to you. That’s Samantha in the barn. That’s why I kept that scene [from Shem Bitterman’s original draft]. It’s a very typical scene where you do kinky stuff and you get killed. That’s Halloween. That’s the premise.

  What were your thoughts on following up to Halloween 4?

  You don’t want to hear it.

  Oh, please tell me. I do like Halloween 4, but I can also see how it’s somewhat cookie-cutter in certain aspects
. It definitely plays it safe.

  (laughs) You know, I thought Halloween 4 was weak. I thought it was in line with the original, but I thought the directing was not very strong. I thought it was predictable and it bored me. It left me not scared. I said to myself, ‘You’ve got to scare the audience, Dominique.’ That was my aim. The premise of Halloween 4 – you have Michael being shot. You have her – Jamie – becoming evil. What do I do? The audience is going to suspect that she’s going to become the evil. I don’t want the little girl to become a killer. It’s not in line with this type of series.

  What is the killer? What is the Shape? What is the boogeyman? The boogeyman is the danger in the dark. When you’re in darkness, you see nothing. You hear little breaths. And you get scared because he is there. There is a little shade – a shadow – coming. And that is the symbol of scared – of evilness. I worked on it later on Omen IV with the little girl being the devil – although I didn’t finish the movie. I didn’t edit the movie. Halloween 5 was not the right tale for that. I wanted to go against the expectations of the audience. And the expectation of the audience would be, ‘Ah, the little girl is now going to be evil.’ No, I don’t want to do that. I make her innocent. I make her the victim, basically. The one who is going to be the target again.

  To destabilize the audience was one of the rules I applied in the concept of making the film. If she sees through the eyes of Michael, could she become evil like Michael? Or why does she protect him? Why does Loomis go crazy thinking she is protecting Michael? She’s not. We don’t know for a long time what is happening to Jamie – where she is at. How does she deal with it? The more she grows in the film, the more she realizes that her visions are the ones of Michael who is ready for a kill – who’s charged up for a kill – and now she can help finding him. That is why Loomis uses her to trap him at the end.

  Did Moustapha offer any mandates on what you could or could not do with the film?

  Not really. He came late with the mandate. He had two mandates that came late after the writing. But during the process of the writing, I have to say that he left us pretty free. He knew Debra was sort of supervising what the young, ignorant guys were doing. (laughs) So he relied on her checking it out. He left us a lot of freedom. He watched us work. I do not remember a specific mandate from Moustapha at all. I think he sort of had a big trust in me due to how we met and how he felt I was trying to build the story for him – how I was respecting the initial values and formula of Halloween.

  What was the writing process like for you and Michael Jacobs?

  It was wonderful. I am coming from the outside. I am a foreigner in the States. I was there only a year and a half or so before Halloween 5, and Michael Jacobs is Americana. I relied on him for all the dialogue of the young people and the set up and stuff. He was bringing me down to Earth. I was going out with provocative thoughts and ideas and juggling things – and he was calming me down and pulling me down. It was a very good collaboration. We really hit it off so well. We’re still friends to this day.

  We hammered every scene together. We changed and we evolved. It becomes a collaborative work. On the set, I would adapt a lot of stuff – and from time to time, I would call on him and say, ‘Hey, I need new dialogue for this scene because now I would like to go this way.’ And he would, without hesitation, go the way I was pointing out because he knew I was in the motions of maturing the baby that was in my belly and ready to come out, you know, basically. I was like a mother carrying – the gestations. I was immersed into the story, into the film and so on. So there, he accompanied me. But before, in the script writing, we were really bouncing the ball into each other. We were really sort of relying on each other’s skills.

  It seems the Shape is more humanized in this telling, developing a connection with his niece and even shedding a tear. Tell me about that.

  I wanted to humanize him. I wanted to show his face – and Moustapha agreed. I thought he should kill Dr. Loomis – and he agreed as well, at the time. And actually, Donald Pleasence didn’t want to continue doing the series. He was a little sick of it. He had enough and so on. So, he says, ‘Yes, I’m very happy this is the last one.’ And he negotiated a nice price with Moustapha and that was it. I was looking at all of these ingredients and I thought, ‘Okay, I would like to never tell who is Michael Myers or the Shape or the boogeyman, but I would like to make him more human.’ So, with Greg Nicotero and his team, we did a fantastic mask that had nothing to do with the Halloween 4 mask. Ours was more shaped with more details and handicaps and flaws inside the mask to make him more human.

  It’s almost demonic looking. It seems angrier in a way.

  Exactly. More frightening. More human, too. Less just a plastic white mask which is unrelatable. There, you relate because you fear – because you see that he is angrier. On all aspects, I worked with Don Shanks a lot in his body movement; in the slow pace of his work, the no-movement in his shoulders… the balance. I didn’t want the robot, but I didn’t want the human aspect. I wanted a big surprise when he is in front of Jamie. He’s screaming out to tell her who he is in order to be absolved of his crimes. That was my idea. That was like the confessional of the church or so. Because she’s there. She’s in his coffin. She should die, you know. All this lead me to making him more human. Make him closer to us. I felt that, sometimes, I was Michael Myers in my life, and I could feel how he is and so on, you know.

  You mentioned Dr. Loomis. In this film, he is much more manic, almost to the point of becoming a secondary villain. Halloween 5 was my first Halloween, so I was terrified of him. I was thinking to myself, ‘Why is this man holding this little girl in front of Michael?’ What were your thoughts on his characterization?

  I wanted you to be terrified, that’s all! (laughs) Of course. You said it. You got all the answer in your story. I wanted him to be at the end of his rope. Anything – anything to reach his goal which is to capture, annihilate, kill – to stop this Michael Myers. He went around the bend so many times before Halloween 5 and I had to raise the stakes. That’s a simple way of telling the story. I made him not gentle at the beginning in the clinic. He’s harsh with that poor girl.

  Harsh? He’s downright terrorizing. And Donald Pleasence plays it so great.

  He liked it. He absolutely liked it. He was fed up with the good doctor whose like, ‘La la la, where’s Michael, where’s Michael?’ for three movies, c’mon. (laughs) Donald Pleasence was not an easy one for me. To tell you the truth, he scared me at first. We met just prior to the shoot and our first meeting was a little awkward as he was ill. I remember him being in a bad mood and telling me that he knew the character more than I do. I said, ‘Yes, certainly, I’m sure.’ I had to take a step back with him, but I had a trajectory for the character lined up. Because I was a young director and he was an older gentleman, it took a while before he came into my realm – my way of seeing the character and the film. The forest monologue where he is calling out to Michael was one of the key scenes where we met, clicked and we said to each other, ‘Right on. We’re in.’

  The scenes we shot before – inside the police station with Beau Starr – were awkward for me because of his make-up. He didn’t like it. He thought it was exaggerated. He preferred to undo some of it, and we – KNB and Greg Nicotero – wanted to show the harshness of the man’s pain. I wanted to have his bad mood and him being harsh with the little girl. These are unpleasant things to play for an actor. An actor wants to be liked. Somehow, he went for it, step-for-step, but never giving me the high-five. It’s like we never became friends. We were two bulls inside a field, taming and watching each other. Finally, when he did the forest scene, he felt, ‘No! I’m not screaming this text to Michael!’ I said, ‘But he won’t hear you if you whisper or murmur.’ We had a little clash there. But he tried it twice and it was so great. He was so fantastic. He knew that I liked it and that he gave me tears. And we clicked. The rest of the movie was just butter. The killing of Michael at the very end? We were just pals
– but never friends. Just a little distance. You know, the British distance. (laughs)

  In order to make your ground unstable – when you are in a room when there is an earthquake, you don’t know if your next step is up or down. Like a staircase that moves. I wanted to have that feeling coming across on Halloween 5. In order to make the ground move for the audience that knows the series well and the codes, I said, ‘Okay, let me play with the codes. Let me make the film with three movements.’ The first movement is the introduction and the birth of the evil. Then, it is daytime. It is pastel colors. It is soft contrast. It is just like the girls, the clinic, the house. It’s simple, beautiful with little scares. Just tick, tick, tick little scares. Not big ones. Scares that you laugh about. Things that go against your hair.

  Loomis – you’re not supposed to be scared by Loomis. But he’s shaking her on her bed. Grabs her feet on her bed! You don’t expect this. Or the laundry scene when Jamie believes she is chased by Michael because she has a vision that he is in the garden – and we know that Michael is in the garden of the clinic, so she goes downstairs. She sees the Shape coming through the glass of the door that gives to the outside. She goes to the laundry where its hanging there... to finish into the boiler room, alright? These scenes... I’m writing them as I go along. I understand that it is important to give false scares to the audience because it is an entertainment film. I just went down into the building and saw some sheets being hanged. I said, ‘Oh, we have to create a scene there!’ I created these scenes as I went along to have daylight. Soft contrast; nice colors. Not florescent colors; pastel colors, which turns into black and gold. Hard contrast - all of the end of the movie.

  It’s so beautifully shot.

  That was the concept from the very beginning. Raising the stakes as the movie goes along and raising the contrast and getting rid of all the colors; just like a simple gold and black.