Taking Shape

by Dustin McNeill

  It’s still so strange to think of Dimension and Miramax as being separate entities. The more I read about the intricate terms of their split, the less I seem to understand it.

  Like I said, it was a really complicated deal. I came in having had experience on both sides. Prior to working at Miramax, I had a producing deal with Harvey Weinstein, so I had seen it from both sides. I think I had the benefit of insight that others probably didn’t have.

  So you manage to take back the rights from Dimension. Where do you go from there?

  I had one thought from the get-go. It’s one of the rare occasions where the original idea I had actually played out as I’d first envisioned it. Most of the time when you’re developing films, the best laid plans don’t necessarily materialize in the way you’d hope. You end up deviating from your plan in order to keep the project moving forward. I don’t think I’ve ever had another situation where the final film turned out exactly as I’d first planned it. It never works that way.

  My initial idea on the new Halloween was to ignore all the sequels and sort of take back the franchise. I thought we should make a direct sequel to the first film and ignore everything else. I also felt we had to get John Carpenter back. That was all my initial idea. I told my bosses and, to their credit, they were like, ‘... okay. Let’s see if we can do that.’

  I also came into Halloween feeling that we had to get the permission of the audience to make the film. That was vital if we were going to be accepted by the fans. What did that mean, exactly? For me, it meant having John Carpenter back. We could’ve made the film without him, but would it really have been accepted? I felt it was crucial to give our film that authenticity. I also felt like we needed to pay respect and homage to his original Halloween. Those things were forefront in my mind as we approached the project.

  As I understand it, you first reached out to Malek Akkad about the new film. I kind of feel bad for the guy considering how much he’d been strung along by Dimension over the years.

  Sure, he had been, but I think he’s doing okay now, right? (laughs) But yes, my first call on the project was to Malek. He was initially skeptical when we reached out to him and understandably so. Zanne and I had lunch with him to talk about what we wanted to do. It turned out to be a real process getting him to believe we were serious about it. We needed him to know that we planned on approaching the film properly and in a respectful way. We wanted to do something great and not just rush it into production. Our approach was a very conscientious one and he eventually came to see that.

  And yes, he had been bounced around a lot by Dimension over the years. He had gone through a lot of starts and stops with them over different scripts. They were always telling him, ‘We’re gonna make a new movie soon. We’re gonna rush it into production.’ There was a lot of effort to try and retain those rights at Dimension, often with scripts that just weren’t ready. I know there were numerous writers who were really excited about being a part of it and put in a lot of hard work. We never engaged with any of them on our Halloween. Those scripts had originated at Dimension and we needed a completely clean copyright on our film.

  After Malek, you turned to Jason Blum of Blumhouse. Given his track record, I know it’s kind of obvious, but why him and why Blumhouse?

  I’d known Jason for a while. We’d been talking to him about some other titles to see if he had any interest in them. Whenever we’d talk, Jason would always ask me, ‘What’s happening with Halloween?’ At that point, we didn’t control the rights. So I always knew he had an interest in the series. I eventually called him up and said, ‘Jason, we’ve got Halloween back. Do you want to do it?’ and he said, ‘Absolutely!’

  Part of my pitch was that we needed to differentiate ourselves from the sequels that had already been made. Most importantly, we needed to differentiate ourselves from Dimension. One way of doing that was to ignore all the sequels. Another part of that was to take Jason’s name and brand, which was obviously terrific and had this great contemporary feel to it, and use that to make the new film stand apart. Again, the most important thing was John Carpenter. We needed him to give it his stamp of approval and we had no idea whether or not that was even possible. That was our intention.

  Incredibly, you managed to get both John Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis back onboard. But let’s say neither had returned. Would you still have tried for a direct sequel to the original?

  That’s a really good question and... I don’t know. It’s really hard to tell. Obviously, it was never a guarantee that Jamie or John were going to come back to the series. John came aboard very early in the process, even before David and Danny. Jason was instrumental in getting John to the table, which was so crucial. I don’t know that Jamie would’ve even come back without John. Honestly, I think the franchise and its potential are so valuable that we would’ve figured out a way to do something. We wouldn’t have abandoned the project without John or Jamie, but getting them back was our Plan A. I don’t know what our Plan B would’ve looked like.

  The new Halloween turned out to be a mega-hit, the highest grossing slasher film of all time. Did the film’s performance come as a surprise to you?

  Of course! You always dream of having films that are hits, but nothing’s assured. The tracking indicated that there was a lot of interest in the film very early on. Everybody was hopeful from that, but the results were still a pleasant surprise.

  You didn’t write the film, but the project was born from your ideas. You must be proud of how it turned out, but do you feel a kind of creative ownership over the project?

  I’m very proud of it and happy to have been involved. It’s so gratifying to have a plan that comes together like this because most of the time it doesn’t. It’s also nice to have a thought that’s outside of the box that works. I do feel a partial creative ownership over the film, but I would say that I’m a minority stakeholder. There were a lot of people who did a tremendous amount of work to make the new Halloween what it is, people like Jason Blum, John Carpenter, David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, Jeff Fradley, Jamie Lee Curtis, Bill Block, Ryan Turek, Couper Samuelson, and everybody else involved as well.

  INTERVIEW: John Passarella

  (John Passarella: Author - The H40 Novelization)

  How did you land the job of novelizing the new Halloween?

  It was mainly due to my relationship with Titan Books. When I was offered Halloween, I’d already done three Supernatural tie-in novels for them and was finishing my fourth. I’d also done a Grimm tie-in for them. So the people at Titan were familiar with me and my work. They e-mailed asking about my schedule, which was fairly clear at the time. Then they asked if I was a fan of Halloween and if I’d be interested in doing the novelization. I said yes to both questions.

  You’ve written tie-ins for several major franchises. You mentioned Supernatural and Grimm, but you also did books for Buffy and Angel before that. What’s more difficult – writing an original story within an established continuity or adapting a movie you haven’t seen yet?

  They both come with their own challenges. With a franchise, you have to be able to tell your story within that world as it already exists. You can’t change it too much or move the characters past where they are emotionally and psychologically. With shows, we usually note that a particular story takes place between this episode and that episode.

  With a novel adaptation, you’re trying to take a 110-page screenplay and transform it into a 350-page novel. That means expanding each page of script into three pages of manuscript. The challenge is that you can’t really deviate much from what the movie is. Halloween was my first novelization like this, by the way. The first thing I did was ask the advice of authors I knew from a media tie-in group. One tip I got was to write the novel as if the movie was based on the book. What does that mean? Well, when you’re adapting a movie from a book, you start cutting things right away. You trim dialogue and scenes, maybe combine characters. I kind of reverse engineered that concept by expanding on sc
enes that were already in the script.

  My goal was to write a novel that, if someone were to watch the movie and read the book, they wouldn’t feel like different experiences. I wanted the novel to feel like a complement to the film because I’m able to include more details, more dialogue, and more scenes.

  So you were already a fan of the franchise?

  For sure! It’s my wife’s favorite movie. She watches it with her sister every year on Halloween. When Titan first e-mailed me about doing it, I got the biggest smile on my face because I knew she’d be as thrilled as I was. But even going back to when it first came out, I’ve always liked it. That was also the first thing I did once they hired me. I went back and re-watched the original movie because I was still waiting for them to send me the screenplay.

  What was your timeframe like in writing the novelization?

  They contacted me in late March. I didn’t get the script until early April and it was due by the end of May. So that wasn’t a lot of time to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. I think I finished writing the entire thing in like forty-five days. It had to be eighty-thousand words altogether. I know I did fifty-thousand of those words in the month of May alone. I couldn’t start writing until I had the script, but the one thing I could do was re-watch the original Halloween to make sure the story was fresh in my mind.

  The script doesn’t actually have that much detail in it. How did you pattern your writing after the film so closely?

  I asked them early on if there were any visual aids I could get. I knew who the actors were, but I didn’t know what they’d look like on set. Maybe they were blonde in real life, but they dyed their hair in the film. I wouldn’t have any idea about that. I was a few weeks into writing before they finally gave me access to the film’s digital archives. That was over thirty-thousand images from the set taken on each day of filming. They weren’t sorted or tagged at all, so I spent one whole weekend doing that. They also weren’t in order, which meant I’d have to go through ten or twenty thousand photos to find a certain scene. Remember the part where Michael gets on the transfer bus? That’s near the beginning of the film, but it wasn’t actually shot until late in production, which made finding it a little difficult.

  I had already written several scenes prior to gaining access to those archives. One of those was the opening courtyard scene at Smith’s Grove, which I’d imagined looking completely different than it does in the film. I envisioned the courtyard having lots of plants and trees and pathways for them to walk along. Then I watched the first trailer and saw where it looked more like a giant concrete checkerboard of red and white. So I had to go back and re-write that scene.

  The filmmakers often deviated from the script once on set. How did that affect your writing?

  That was tricky because they changed a lot of things during filming. The first time I saw the movie was opening night and it was a weird experience. I had the script in my head, the book in my head, and now the film was playing in front of me as this third entity, so everything was clashing in my brain. ‘Wait, what’s this scene? Where’s that other scene? They changed this dialogue. What’s happening right now?’ (laughs) I think my book is a little truer to the script than the final movie because there are scenes they kind of gloss over and also scenes they added in. For example, in the script they have a lot more material at the school dance, which I expand on even further. But in the movie, it all goes by in the blink of an eye. There’s a shot of a DJ, some dancers, the gymnasium, and it’s basically over.

  What are some of the dialogue changes that stood out most to you?

  I remember the scenes with Vicky babysitting Julian having a lot of alternate dialogue, which was pretty funny stuff, but none of that was in the script. The scene with the father and son in the car was also different. In the movie, the kid is talking about being a dancer. In the original script, they were talking about a college football game, which is how it appears in the book. I did receive a revised script later on that included material from the reshoots, but it didn’t address any of the dialogue changes. There were also a lot of scenes they cut out of the movie that I left in the novel. None of it changed the plot, which makes me think they probably cut it for time.

  It seems like you had to work at a crazy pace to meet your deadline. Were you seeing pumpkins and white masks when you closed your eyes each night?

  (laughs) When I’m under a deadline like that, I tend to live the book while I’m writing it. If I’m writing something without a deadline, I tend to procrastinate more. Halloween sort of came alive in my head while I was adapting it. My writing suddenly became very real to me once I started seeing pictures of the actors in those scenes. That made it personal to me. I’d finish writing a death and then feel a bit of grief like someone had actually just died. It was strange.

  In my opinion, the first Halloween is much more of a straight horror movie. It focuses more on suspense and dread. The new Halloween, because of how its edited, feels more like a thriller with less hanging onto those suspenseful moments. You can’t really tell that from the script, which is all I had to go on, so I tried to write suspense into the book wherever I could. I think it made the book feel like a slightly different take on the material than in the film.

  I also added some kills in my book that weren’t onscreen in the film. Remember the scene where Michael kills the woman with the hammer? That’s off-screen in the movie and even off-page in the script, but I saw it as an opportunity and expanded on that moment. I did something similar with Dave’s kill, which also appears in the book but not in the movie. In the movie, they just find his dead body.

  Michael Myers is such a unique character, almost a non-character some would argue. Your entire book is in the past-tense – all except for Michael’s scenes. Tell me about that approach.

  I wanted to treat Michael as always being in the moment, not thinking too far ahead or about what’s just happened. So whenever I wrote scenes from his point-of-view, I wrote them in present-tense because I felt like he took each moment as it came to him. He’s not the kind of guy that has regrets or reviews his own work. He’s not a planner. You also don’t want to give away too much with a character like that. He is what he does. With any other killer, you might want to go into their motivations, but not with him. There is no inner-dialogue to be had there.

  The new Halloween erases the sibling connection between Laurie and Michael, which had been a significant plot point in the sequels. How did you view this revision?

  With Michael, I think the terror is stronger when it’s more nebulous and not connected to anything. When I watch the original, I just see it as Michael fixating on Laurie after she stops by his house. I don’t view it as he was trying to kill his little sister. I can see why John Carpenter would want to change it. Maybe he doesn’t want people to feel too safe, like ‘Oh, he’s only going after her because she’s related to him.’ I think John might’ve wanted Michael to be more of an existential threat where he could target anyone. He’s not just Laurie’s worst nightmare, he could be anyone’s worst nightmare. But in general, Hollywood wants to have an explanation for everything. They don’t like open-ended questions.

  Speaking of fixation, Laurie seems convinced in the new film that Michael is still obsessed with her. But he doesn’t seem to be, does he? He never makes any effort to track her down.

  I noticed that. It’s almost like the fixation is entirely Laurie’s in this story. The same is true of Sartain, which is why he tried to deliver Michael right to her doorstep. Perhaps it’s only their delusion that Michael was fixated on Laurie. I know the script underwent several rewrites, so I’d be curious to see if earlier drafts handled that any differently. It’s an interesting topic.

  If you started writing the novel in April, that meant you were working from the script that contained the film’s originally planned ending, which was shot and later removed. What was your impression of that first ending?

  It didn’t feel like a real ending. Not to me, anyway
s. They told me I would be working from the final shooting script, but I read what they sent me and immediately reached out to my editor to ask, ‘Is this really how they’re ending it? This is the final draft?’ It didn’t feel right, like maybe it was missing a page or two. Then I read online about the test screenings and reshoots. I was sent the revised script soon after that.

  I actually hadn’t gotten around to adapting the original ending when they told me they were changing it, so I didn’t have to rewrite anything. In my opinion, the revised ending was a big improvement because it felt more final. Michael isn’t exactly six feet under and buried, but it still feels like an ending. The first ending had Karen doing more and Allyson doing less. As I remember it, Karen shoots Michael with a crossbow on the front lawn. Then it ends with Michael wandering off into Laurie’s shooting range area where all the mannequins are. He’s just out in the woods when it ends. In revising that, they decided to transform Laurie’s home into this death trap, which gave her house more of a purpose in the story. It also gave Laurie a plan that she was lacking in the original script, which was to trap Michael in her house and then burn it down around him. I liked that a lot. Before it was just a battle on the front lawn, may the best psychopath win. And I’m not sure either really won it.