And welcome to another edition of The Movie Crypt. I'm Adam Green. I'm Joe Lynch. We recorded this episode on Wednesday, November 27th, 2024. It's the night before Thanksgiving, even though... Next week's episode that you're going to hear was recorded a day before this one. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, it's how things work. But we are so excited to have Gil Kennan on. If you recognize the voice or sorry, the name, it's from someone who's been working in the business, both as a screenwriter and as a director. And he had.
One hell of a fucking year this year with both working on a Ghostbusters movie and Saturday Night Live. We talk about all this. This is a fantastic conversation that went a little longer than usual, but we just had so much to talk about. And I think we only got to crest the surface.
of some of it too. This conversation's about, I think it's like at least two hours, right? Yeah. Obviously, we haven't edited it yet, but it's probably about two hours. If you're not yet... a patreon subscriber just it's a dollar a month that's it and then you get the full version of every episode including
The full versions of all the other episodes that you missed ever since we started doing things this way, which was like almost five years ago at this point. But this conversation is fantastic. Most of the Saturday night stuff is in the second hour because... like anything we started at the beginning, but what a great conversation. Also, we should point out this episode and next week's episode. We had to, you're not going to be able to tell listening at home, but we had to record this.
in a slightly different way. Thankfully, the Aeroscope studio is very big so we can stay separate, but I got COVID. at the Sebastian Bach show that I went to last week, which was fucking great, dude. Savage. Almost made it. Five years without catching it, but finally caught up with me. I'm feeling fine. It was like, you know what it felt like? For me, at least. It was like 48 hours of what it felt like when I got the first vaccination. Just tired and a little achy.
that bad so uh thankfully because i know so many other people have caught it and had it so much worse so i'm very grateful for that and uh thank you um Dr. Fauci and your cabal of evil people for making that vaccine because it worked for me. So at least there's that. But yeah, so we had to record this one separated and socially distant until I'm... Testing negative and free and clear. Still positive, right? Still positive as of today, yes. But I'm a positive person. Yeah, sure.
Yeah. So next week's episode, again, that you're going to hear, which is another fantastic one. That one was actually recorded before this one. And then I'm sure the one year after that, we'll be back to normal and I'll be able to breathe on Joe again. Thank God. Okay, so our next guest is someone that before we started recording, we told we were both incredibly jealous of because look, how many filmmakers in one year can say that they worked with both the Ghostbusters and...
in the world of Saturday Night Fucking Live. If I had gone back to my early days, way back when in the 80s and said, holy shit, would you ever get a chance to work on a Ghostbusters movie and a movie about Saturday Night Live? I would have punched that person in the dick. But we have the filmmaker who is responsible not just for...
Ghostbusters Frozen Empire and Saturday Night, Saturday Night, which I can definitely boast is one of our both of our favorite movies of the year, if not my favorite movie of the year. Sorry, Enora. But he's also the director of Monster House, City of Ember, The Pul- guys remake scream the series and one of my new favorite christmas staples a boy called christmas please welcome to the movie crypt gil kennan yeah thanks guys thank you for the virtual dick punch
And I am really happy to be joining both of you and talking about one of my favorite subjects. Which one? Where the fuck do we begin, dude? Seriously, like going through your... filmography right now is again, again, everything that I wish I could go back into the DeLorean and say, Hey, guess what? You're going to work with Robert Zemeckis and Bill Murray, and you're going to do a fucking, you know, a poltergeist remake, and you're going to work with ghost face. You're going to do a Chris.
movie you're gonna work with bill murray again on fucking ghostbusters oh by the way you're also gonna do a saturday night live movie holy shit like i know listen anytime that you feel low over all the way over there in london you're in london now currently right yeah it's like zero degrees Well, anytime you need a little bit of like, you know, ego warmth, just give us a call.
I mean, we're off to a really great start. And thank you for that very generous and warm introduction. I mean, we'll get into it in the conversation, but the truth is that it's been... In a... an amazing year and a couple of years. It's also been like a real journey. And I'm sure we'll, we'll talk about that too. I was really lucky at the start and, and I've had little bursts of luck throughout it, but there's also been like really.
really shitty years in the middle. And so I think that if we're going to be talking about sort of how nice it is right now, I think we also have to just talk about, you know, the road to getting here. Absolutely. Which is the whole point. of this show because so many people who want to do this if they know somebody's work or see somebody has a hit they assume well they're set they just do whatever they want now they never need to worry again
And it's definitely not like that. I wish my mom would listen to this podcast more because it's always just, oh my God, you're working with Heather Graham and you're doing a movie with Salma Hayek. You must be fucking set for life. I'm like. Mom, can you send 100 bucks? Possibly. I have a really healthy text stream with her. She's asking me lots of questions all the time. My mom?
i would be surprised to be honest his mom is she just dms all the time shut up like both of you look you know what fine she is also a big poltergeist fan all right you know like there i said it I'm just going to put it out there. She's like, it's better than the original. That Toby guy, he's got nothing on. He's got nothing on Gillen. I'm a huge fan of your moms.
So am I. Shut up. Okay, fuck you both. We're going back. We're going all the way back. So Gil, you grew up in LA itself, but you were born in London, correct? Yeah. Yeah, so I was born in London. I moved to LA when I was a little kid. So I was I was like seven. It was LA for the yeah, for all the all the sort of formative years.
And with those formative years, how long were you in L.A.? You know, obviously you were working like living there all the way up to the point when you were starting to, I guess, professionally call yourself a filmmaker. Yeah. So I was pretty I mean.
It wasn't until I was in high school that I sort of realized that actually... all the things that i loved or a lot of the things that i loved both in television and and especially film were made in in the city because i grew up mostly in recita and in the san fernando valley and um uh you know it was like a decidedly below the line sort of neighborhood. Still is. Yeah. And I mean, my family is still out in the valley, so it's still a part of my ecosystem.
The first real inkling that I had, if we're actually going back to sort of roots of the kind of discovery of the career of filmmaking that I sort of set out to get. into was that when I was 12 I was in junior high I entered a competition at the local special effects makeup store There was one on Parthenia in Northridge.
And it was in a sort of mini mall, but it was kind of a cool store. And I could tell when it opened that it was that it was special. And they had a sort of pre-Halloween junior special effects makeup company. And so I entered that and I remember that the prize for winning was to meet. some industry professionals. And I came in second place in the junior category. I made my best friend at the time, Jimmy Jambahan's I hang out of its socket. Oh, wow. And and so I got to meet.
some folks who worked professionally in the business. And it was kind of the first time I was like, oh, there are human beings who are responsible for the things that make me happy in a dark room. um it's those those were our magicians and our rock stars at that time this i'm guessing this is like what 88 so this was yeah like 89 89 yeah so this is in the advent of like where guys like savini and rob
Boteen and Rick Baker and Greg Canham and the KNB guys were forming at the time. Exactly. They were our. They were our rock stars. Like you look in Fangoria and Cinefantastique back then and you know, you would get all these amazing werewolf shots and creature shots and gore effects and everything. And then they would have like a little bit smaller. They'd have a dude in a mullet that usually had a. black t-shirt with you know probably skid row on it and they're they're making up
They're making up Ron Perlman or they're, you know, like they're putting effects on a various actor or whatever, or Jeffrey Combs is getting made up by screaming Med George. And like that's for so many of us, especially, you know, those who listen to the show.
makeup effects was our way station. Like I was, I was the same way where, you know, my first movie was Dawn of the dead and I was fascinated with Tom Savini because they did that scream greats volume one thing. And up until the point in 1988, when I, saw the blob cause that was the movie that made me want to make movies. Um,
Up until that point, I watched everything just to break down effects. Because for us, that was like looking behind the curtain and seeing like how the, you know, the magic was made. And then, but by doing that, like Savini. was one of those first guys that also taught me like it's not just about the cool latex it's about where you place the camera and where you make the edit because those are the things that are going to really like make the illusion come alive if you just stick on a one take
It's not going to like the effect is going to die after five seconds, you know, so to have. It's totally true. And I mean, I had a slightly like. Slightly later awakening of that kind of magic power of the control that you have by placing the camera and lights in specific places. But it was a couple of years later where I was starting to experiment with home stop motion.
work um and uh and it was sort of the first time i was really uh responsible for storytelling like because i like a lot of us i goofed around with my friends with like school vhs cameras and we would we would sort of make group films most of them parodies or you know schlock but um it uh
it was the first time i was making something totally on my own and i i do remember having a a kind of personal light bulb moment of oh wow the audience only knows what they see like everything that's outside of the boundary of the frame is... is manipulation um and you can you can hold anything in place with paper clips or string or you can you can you can have a whole world that breaks the story universe just outside of the frame
And I think that it's similar to that to that same spark you were talking about of like, OK, this is going to be the combination of the sort of practical hands, hands on artistry with the like. magical, erasing properties of a camera that render all the work that goes into something invisible to the audience. Now that you're deep into your career, can you...
Can you separate those things? Because we've both found it takes at least like seven years to be able to watch something you made and see what the audience sees and only what the audience sees, not... what you wanted it to be, what that shot was intended to be. But then, you know, or see the seams. Yeah. Whatever it might be. But it's funny. I mean, I guess it. I'm a sucker for I'm a sucker for stories. And I I do feel like even though I got started practically because it's really I was pretty.
I was pretty sure that the work I was going to be doing was going to be exactly the kind of artistry that we've been talking about either. special effects makeup or special effects or or later in animation and i sort of had this kind of parallel track of uh of fascination, which was story and storytelling. And I kind of didn't really think that I could combine the two until a little bit later. And that sort of came kind of later in high school when I was starting to mess around with theater.
And then we'll talk about the disaster that led me into filmmaking. But the yeah, so I guess. The answer to your question is that the first time that I show a movie to an audience, even if it's like a work print and it's still a cut in progress. I do somehow disassociate the technical. even if i still have more technical work to to go um that's not to say that i don't see all the things that i want to fix like i i do i'm still aware of them but i think that we all have the ability that
tap into this kind of audience eyeball projection where you... And I actually think that's like an important... tool to hone and I've definitely honed it by forcing screenings to unsuspecting regular people way earlier in the process than is healthy for me. to just keep getting out of that place where I have to think about something technically or mechanically and I think about it in terms of like the emotional experience.
it's because it's like that objectivity is so hard to reclaim like we joke all the time like i wish we had one of those um the uh those memory wipers from men in black where you can just like why at least at least wipe out enough where you can sit there and go,
okay that doesn't work and that doesn't work not like but that shot was so precious and it took us 15 hours to get like we we put too much onus sometimes on the process itself and thinking that in most cases the audience is gonna appreciate it when in And you're right. It's all about the story. And if the style gets in the way of story, then you're not servicing anything. All you're doing is you're just kind of...
just gesticulating wildly going like, look at my cool shot, you know, like, and it doesn't really matter if it's not affecting the audience in a way. Totally. Yeah. And before we get back on track, I'll just say that it also happens that a lot of my favorite movies are. are filled with moments that are purely about, or, you know, you can't really defend a shot or how long a scene plays.
Other than to say that it's a really cool fucking piece of cinema. And a lot of times that's what I come back to and lap up like a hungry puppy. So, you know, it's all it's it's it's a it's a it's a. conversation what i just before we jump ahead what is what is one of those movies just what's off the top of your head
that that where the craft is not separate from the store i mean the first one that comes to mind is a really fucked up example but you know that that it's it's a it's a horror film called angst angst it's the it's the film where um If you haven't seen it, I would put it high on the list of things to check out. One of my favorite animators. Wait, the one from 83? yeah yeah so it's big wow first time i think i've ever heard anyone reference yeah i've never heard holy
Oh, rad. OK, so Zbigniew Brzezinski, who's one of my favorite filmmakers, he made this this amazing animated film, the one won an Oscar later in the 80s called Tango. He shot. this film and they attached a motion picture film camera to a metal hoop that was that was fixed to the main.
character who's an escaped, not escaped, he's a recently released convict who goes on a murder spree. And the camera is fixed, so the point of view is... is is locked within the orbit of the main character sometimes the camera rotates to see him other times it rotates to become a pure pov and then every sort of variation within that because it's constantly in motion and you're Very aware of the mechanical.
interaction between story and camera. And so the process is never removed. You can't delete the process while you're watching it, but it's a totally thrilling spectacle. It's almost like as sadistic to the audience as what's happening to the victims in the film, because you're totally aware of the how hard it was to film. And I find that kind of thing like.
super entertaining to see i i eat that shit up i love the the process like i i gotta admit i loved here i love zemeckis is here i thought like i'm dying to see it i i haven't i haven't caught it yet i'm not gonna spoil anything but there's not really much this It's a fixed angle in the life of many families in this one space. But it also reminded, like, what I remember seeing Angst.
but i didn't nearly appreciate that because i remember i got it for the box back in the 80s when like the vhs box was everything and it had a great box and i remember like when you just mentioned i go oh man i remember that i remember like those outside shots where it felt like a security camera and it reminds me of like if you took here and And there's this amazing...
I don't, it's not as found footage movie. It's a, it's, it's called kidnapped. It's a Spanish film that's told in eight shots and it's about a home invasion and the, like, it's exactly what you're describing where, when you almost. both take out the process, but also make the minimalism of the process, like the storytelling, like the more that these shots keep going on as these guys break into this family's house and do horrible things to them, the more.
that you both forget that there's a long take it's not like someone's going like look at me and my cool like one take that's going through the whole house but it draws you in because you're like there's a lack of process and by doing that it like like when you watch here they're like zemeckis is has always been great at balancing that where it's like i can tell that there's something cool going on but at the same time i'm in
entranced by the characters and the story and everything but at the same time with like kidnapped and same thing with angst where it's almost like you slowly realize the dread of they're not cutting or they're not like, they're not using other angles and stuff. So very good choice. I, I, I, man, I hope more people like watch that movie now that you've recommended it. Great call. So moving ahead just a little bit. Sorry.
go i told you how did you ultimately break in like what was the when was the first time you you got paid for it um so i Went to film school. So first, OK, I'll quickly jump through the years between eyeball dangling out of Jimmy John Bond's face and getting paid for it. So I went to.
I went to high school and studied theater. I'm moving rooms because my dog... uh god bless him was snoring he was fully asleep next to my computer and um uh so because this is a audio only conversation um let him snore away it's fine we're doing snoring dogs all the time snoring right now ah um so um i i when i got out of high school i had gotten into uh this program called inner city filmmakers i was i was
still in the sort of final weeks of high school when I got into this program. And it was a kind of summer school program where it was kind of giving a window into the film industry to kids who were growing up in neighborhoods that weren't natural. feeding into positions of employment in movies. And it was the first time I ever went on a working film set. A bunch of folks who were either breaking in the industry or were established came to give.
lectures. It was based out of USC, although it had nothing to do with that school. It was just the guy who ran it. Fred Heinrich was a former pupil there, and he got them to give some office space. Anyway, at the end of that summer... There was an opportunity for any kids who still felt like they wanted to try this thing out to put their hat into the ring and try to get some sort of internship that would start up.
in the following uh the following school year because most of us were starting in college and i was going to school locally at that csun in northridge and so I got a job. It was a paid internship. And my very first movie set that I was getting paid for was kind of a crazy movie. as an editorial intern on Crimson Tide. Oh, no fucking way. Yeah, it was wild. And so I went from basically zero to 10,000. It was like, it was a really intense experience. And it wasn't entirely pleasant.
A lot of folks working on that movie were like super intense. And it was like lots of alpha bros, like a lot, a lot of testosterone. Wait, that was Chris Lemonson. Exactly. Yeah. Chris Lemonson was, was cutting. It was a Simpson Bruckheimer film. Oh, yeah. The first of two Simpson Bruckheimer films that I worked on as an intern, actually. And because it was the editing room, I sort of had.
interaction with them uh you know like showing them the way into the editing room and then bringing them coffee essentially but it was super It was super exciting. And it was also like a weird moment. I mean, just not to make it a long story, but I was really miserable because I was driving a shitty Honda Civic hatchback and it didn't have air conditioning. And I.
It was a it was shooting, started shooting in September and it was like a thousand degrees. And and I had this moment where I realized I was only going to be I know this sounds like extremely entitled and I had no right to be entitled. I was coming from absolutely.
nowhere but I had this moment where I was like oh fuck like I'm only gonna be in this car like there is not gonna be a chance for me to actually watch this movie get put together and that's the whole reason I'm doing this so I did something really stupid that ended up kind of changing my life, which is I asked for a meeting with the head of post-production at Disney. I was 17 years old. I was like two and a half months out of high school.
And he went in. I think he was kind of like, what the hell are you doing sitting across from me? And I said some version of like, hi, my name is Gil. I'm working on Crimson Tide and I'm starting to worry that I'm not going to learn anything on this movie. The grass balls on this kid. Do you know J.D. Lifshitz by any chance? Who? J.D. Lifshitz, Boulder Light. They did Barbarian. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he was like 12 doing that.
And now the dude is like running Hollywood. It's great. I don't know what I had seen in my life that made me think that this would go my way. But I basically was like, I'll work harder for you than anyone you have on your payroll. But I'm doing this as a student. I just want to learn. And he kind of like... turned his head like a
you know, like, like what the fuck do you think you are? And then said, go wait outside. It wasn't, he didn't smile or anything. So I went outside and sat and it was only then that I realized I may have just blown the whole thing. Like I could have just really fucked it up. And then he called me back in a few minutes.
later and he said i'm taking you off my biggest movie and i'm putting you on my smallest movie um and it was the best thing anyone's ever done for me it was uh with uh an editor named harry karamidas um who had cut back to the future actually yeah But it had taken a few years off and was coming back and was doing this really terrible Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Chevy Chase Farrah, Fawcett movie called Man of the House. I remember that movie. Jesus Christ. I rented the shit out of that one.
And that Harry, the editor, totally took me under his wing, gave me a bench. gave me access to all the dailies. He knew I wanted to make movies. And he said, just watch every daily. Watch what works and watch what doesn't. And I did. And I did my homework. I watched every single take. I watched that movie.
come together it was still being it was it was being cut digitally but it was the very end of film editing so i got to touch film and see that part of the process sort of fade into the into the corners anyway so that's that was me
the start of me getting paid and then a few years later i realized um if i was going to do this seriously i needed time to hone my voice and so i applied to graduate film school i went to ucla i was there for three years and my thesis film the lark screened at the directors guild and it was
from that screening that i got the first bite from the from the industry it was a uh there was a guy named jordan who was an assistant to an agent at caa and he asked for a copy of the film and sort of rest kind of was... the way I got into this industry. And that kind of leads us to Monster House, which was, you know, funny that you were talking about going to screenings and stuff. I went to an early test screening of Monster House.
years away yeah it was like a year before the movie came out i had just moved out to la and everything and i i took any opportunity i can get to go to a test screening because i wanted to see what that process was like and to watch, I believe you were there. I believe, uh, um, Zemeckis was there. There was a, the image movers, people that were there. And, um, and it was, it was interesting because it was, you know, an unfinished film, but what.
And we're really good friends with Rob Schraub, who is one of the screenwriters on that. So we've had him on the show and he's kind of discussed the. you know, the path that that movie took from the, you know, the original idea that they were coming up with, with the, you know, eating of the house or the house eating, you know, people to where it landed today. And I want to mention this movie is still a film. Like, do you have kids?
i do i've got a 16 year old daughter okay so i have a i have a 16 year old son And I showed him thinking that this was the perfect gateway movie. There are those movies that we have as kids that we go like, oh, you know, Monster Squad, you know, or any of the Spielberg.
Yeah, any of the Spielberg Amblin movies from the 80s, you go like, those are perfect gateway movies for someone to go like, you know what? It's safe enough, but it's got a little bit of danger. There's some stakes, maybe some monsters, maybe a little bit of blood. And my, like...
It's ironic that I make horror movies for the most part, and I have a kid who fucking hates horror movies. I have two. One who fucking hates horror movies would never in a million years after I showed them two movies. I showed Remy Monster House.
thinking that's a that's a that's an all-win situation it's animated and the second that steve buscemi has the heart attack of all scenes he's like i'm out i'm out that's terrifying and then it was the pink slime in ghostbusters 2. that fucking killed him it was that scene with the tub where the tub comes alive he wouldn't take a bath for a week
it was awful sorry remy no no you know what on the flip side my other uh my other kid ferris is like you know asking about like can chucky hold a chainsaw and does you know does ghost face can can he shoot guns i'm like oh my god God, this fucking kid. Anyway, Monster House was at the time where Zemeckis was playing with that new technology that he was cultivating through Polar Express and Beowulf, and this was one of the in-between movies. Sorry, where it's just...
I feel like we're skipping a very important thing here because how did you wind up making an animated move? Like what else? I was getting to that. Okay. But like, Because usually it's like, oh, I came up through animation. That's what I was so fascinated with was usually when you see a lot of the credits for, you know, these when it's especially like when it's a first time feature film and.
you know like a cgi film most of the time when you saw a new filmmaker it was someone who came up through the ranks or it was someone who had you know worked at pixar for years as you know story editor and then they became part of like head of story and then be blah blah blah blah blah and
they eventually get to it how did g i mean considering that you were probably at this point you know because the lark was live action what led you to that part yeah the hark the the lark is a hybrid live action animated film um and uh and i i guess uh the The relevant piece of information about my film school education was that I was studying at UCLA film school, but it was an animation emphasis. And so I was at the animation workshop.
at UCLA and animation from the days that I was sort of goofing around in my bedroom in Reseda doing tabletop stop motion stuff. It was my go-to for being able to tell stories that I couldn't sort of realize. head around or realize in live action because if i knew that i could draw or sculpt something much more readily than I could, like, actually procure an 18-wheeler as a vehicle for a set scene or, you know, a bird that I would train for a scene or something.
So it was always kind of the thing that I would employ when my stories were bigger than my pockets could allow. And so I guess when I sat down with Zemecki... the first time.
And Rob and Dan had written an incredible draft. I'm not sure how many years they had been developing it by the time I was sent the draft, but it was already like... a fucking great script i knew it was special i knew this was a treasure and i also understood that because of um my age because i was really young right i was like 25 and i understood the the vibes that they were going for with the script in a way that i i thought like
older filmmakers might not because for me it was like it was my filmic awakening that those were the like i'm sure we have a lot of the same reference points um This was sort of the language that I understood. I knew how it felt to be a kid in a movie theater watching Gremlins for the first time.
I knew that mixture of terror and joy that you can have experiencing that. And I also felt like I could create that environment for... a modern audience and so i guess when i when i sat down the first time i was more confident about tone than almost anything else. Like I wasn't really worrying about the technical side of it because the truth was so much of it had to get figured out that it wasn't ever going to be a technical conversation. It was going to be a conversation.
about tone. And what actually got me the job, I think the thing that really connected me and Zemeckis in that first conversation is that... I understood the characters, but I also felt like there was a way to add a sort of layer of emotionality to the story that wasn't there yet. And so that was the whole idea of Nevercracker's wife and the idea that there was this sort of tragic emotional subtext to the narrative.
When you get to the realization, that's kind of the twist that she's the house. I remember being in that, because that was a section that wasn't completed yet. And when they were doing the exit polls, people were saying, what was your favorite part? And it was, Oh, the realization that, you know, that never crackers wife was the house. Like everybody was talking about that. And it's like, even when you're dealing with.
you know, animatics or stills, and you can elicit that response from the audience. I like, I was kind of blown away by that. Like, I didn't expect that I would have felt that kind of affection.
for a house but at the same time but at the same time it's and i'm glad that you brought up the tone because there have been attempts by other films you know animated films to be scary to have atmosphere and you know like i remember the first time watching that movie and then seeing it again in theater when it was finished and you know even
the beginning it feels a little bit like a zemeckis type film like even doug pipe's like score sounds of kind of sylvester-esque and you're you know the beginning with you're dealing with the little girl going through the uh the um the sidewalk, and again, watching it with my kid.
it reminded me like fuck man this movie is really like genuinely the same kind of scary that we had when you watched like gremlins or even explorers when like they got a little bit intense and the kids were in peril and holy shit the house could fucking eat the kids one of the things that I admire about the movie though too having watched it again recently
Is that you could there again, there are some even like Polar Express, which has now because my wife loves it so much has become a staple of my Christmas viewing. Even that.
feels like zemeckis is using the virtual camera in ways that like he would never be able to get those kind of shots otherwise now you know like this is from the guy that made that amazing mirror shot in contact it's like he doesn't give a shit you know dolly track work will the techno crane work i don't give a fuck i'm going to get this shot anyway but i think one of the hidden strengths of monster house is how there are very few shots in the movie that could not have been achieved without
only with animation. It felt like you were still shooting... live action and i think that kind of grounded sensibility including keeping the eye the um the camera the virtual camera if anything at eye level with the kids was a master stroke you could have shot that in a much different way that might have satisfied like animation heads. But I think one of the reasons why that movie still endures to this day is the fact that you keep it.
feeling like an Amblin live action film at all times. I mean, considering that you had, you know, Mitchell and fucking Sam Lerner as, you know, Maggie Gyllenhaal and like the cast is insane. What was like, did you, did you. use the same techniques that he had? Cause I remember seeing some behind the scenes stuff, but were you directing them on a virtual sets? Yeah. So, um, Like I said, when I first started those conversations, this was the Wild West in terms of methodology.
I was already developing my take on the script for Monster House and started to do like exploratory artwork with Chris Applehans and Kang Lee and Simeon Wilkins. in a little bungalow in Studio City while Polar Express was filming or shooting capturing, I should say. And so I got to visit. the stage where Bob Zemeckis was working with Tom Hanks. And I got to sort of see this really alien process with the...
mocap suits and dots. And it was the first time I'd ever seen or heard of anything like that. And so I knew that... I wasn't going to be able to have the benefit of a completed process on that film before I was going to have to figure out how I was going to do it on Monster House. in so many ways especially with the time that's elapsed since i made this movie because i was i was
I started making it like 20 years ago, which is crazy because yes, 2020, how time flies like that, right? Yeah. 2003 is when I, when I started making that film. And, and. Zemeckis was incredibly generous with... the fact that I wanted to come at this in a different way than how he was using the technology on the film that he was still making. And down to wanting to work with actual kids for the cast instead of sort of shooting adults and then aging them down in post. And also like.
pushing stylization in the design and all of that stuff you know it took incredible like bravery from him as a producer to back me up and same with Spielberg who was like You know, both of them, I think... saw this a little bit as an experiment. Like, let's see what happens if we support this guy. And to trust you when you were so young.
and not just assume they know better it's wild i honestly i still don't i i don't know what like how i got so lucky but i i do have like these out of body memories of screening the animatic. uh of of the film when i was still it was like very by the way that movie died twice on the way to getting made so i had two complete and like formal shutdowns of that film within three years it took for me to to make
Was it a financial thing or a technological thing or politics? Both were sort of financial slash studio political version. things it was like partially because nobody really understood whether i was making an animated film or a or an effects film and i think that created some real confusion on the parts of studios and marketing departments and stuff
And I was really lucky that it ended up the way it did at Columbia and with the right people marketing it who totally understood what the movie was. But and also. like principally lucky that Zemeckis and Spielberg were the producers who were in my corner on that film because I don't think there was any chance that movie would have gotten made without the both of those guys at the height of their power.
as producers, like driving down to Culver City to sit on either side of me in the meetings with the studio just to make sure that everyone was behaving themselves and that they weren't like trying to push. pushed me around. And it was incredible. Like, I'll never forget the kind of support that those guys showed. But yeah, so it was wild. Like, I was sitting in these screenings at the Amblin screening room.
showing this like scrappy animatic it was i think it was like 83 minutes because that's all the story i had Yeah. So I was sitting in this ambulance screening room and the lights would come up and it was like me and two of my movie heroes and they were talking like.
you know, with real, with all of their collective wisdom, giving me notes about a bunch of black and white drawings I just screened for them. How long did it take before you could... sit with them and talk to them and out of your heart racing out of your chest being like oh my god oh my god oh my god I don't think I ever got there. I mean, I think that every single time it was like, oh, what the fuck is happening while it was happening and after. I think that's okay. Like, I love meeting...
I love meeting movie gods, you know, I'll never, it'll never get old. And I've been so lucky to meet so many people who like have shaped me as a, as a filmmaker who I look up to.
mean I I felt the same meeting Sam Raimi the first time and um uh and uh yeah uh obviously Ivan Reitman um people always say don't meet your heroes like I've never had a bad experience in most cases yeah the only and and i was unfair to carpenter because he was probably just having a bad day you know where like what can you do but you know what i did have one terrible hero meeting when i was at ucla i
I met Christopher Guest, who was a god for me, and he was a total jerk to me. Unnecessarily. He was just not nice. And that I don't mind. Fuck that guy. What did he ever do? Yeah, exactly. No one's even heard of him. Yeah. So good. That's the thing that sucks. I know. It kills me. The one guy I wanted to actually talk to. No, but yeah, it's the best. We're so lucky.
so um now god there's so many fucking things i want to ask you but i know that we don't we don't have before we go any further you had mentioned you had a theater a disastrous theater experience and that's what led you to film Thank you. I wouldn't have let this conversation end without my theater story. So basically, I didn't think I was going to be able to work in movies because it just didn't seem possible. And so I was I got really into theater.
in high school because you could put on a play with Very little. And my drama teacher, Sarah Rosenberg, had a pretty remarkable program. It was like one of the real highlights of a big... unwieldy dangerous high school in Reseda in the middle of the gang wars of the 90s. And in my senior year, she gave me a great honor, which is that she let me direct one of the two productions of the year.
which were never handled by students. It was always faculty that directed and put on these shows. And not only did she let me direct it, but she let me actually produce it, like choose the material. get the rights edit it uh you know
design the sets, cast it, all of it. So it was a total Gilcannon production. And I did something really stupid. I imported a British sex farts from the West End that would have been... probably one of the worst theatrical calamities of the 20th century, if it had been allowed to go on, because the night of the last dress rehearsal... I went home and woke up at 4 a.m. or something because then Iron Hammer was...
punching under my bed and i ran out of the front door of the house and there was a 50-foot geyser of fire it was the northridge earthquake oh And as and I lived in a neighborhood where like actual buildings came down. It was like it was it was, you know.
pandemonium, like total chaos. There was National Guard and army helicopters were flying and the streets were cleared. And we were sitting outside on lawn chairs in my front yard. And the only cars that were coming by were police and fire department and then this gold ford aerostar drove up my street that was um that was my drama teacher's van and i could tell as she was driving up she used to wear a lot of mascara that that she was crying
because it was like Tammy Faye. It was like running down her cheeks. And she got out and she was shaking her head and she said, it's gone. It's all gone. And the entire theater, including my sets, the entire building. collapsed into the earth it was gone my my my school was totally devastated but like particularly the auditorium where we held our shows and I immediately was like, fuck theater. That's the last time I ever do a play ever again.
I'm going to find a different way to tell stories. And I wish that I was exaggerating, but I guess I'm a little bit dramatic. And so as a 17-year-old... hours after the great natural disaster of the first half of my life, I'm just leaving room open for future disasters. The first thought I had was this is all because of theater and I'm switching to film. That's the story. Wow. Jesus.
God, I want to be able to talk about your transition from Monster House to City of Embers. But I know we have a finite amount of time and we really definitely want to focus on this past year, which was Ghostbusters. But I mean, even like the Ghostbusters. of it all kind of, we could origin story a little bit into how did you start working and start kind of collaborating with Jason? So Jason and I actually became friends while I was making Monster House. I decided...
to pick up something that I hadn't done since I was a kid, which was ice hockey. Super sport for a Jew kid from the valley. I found there was like a pickup open league in Culver City. And I went one night while I was editing the film and I got there late. and there was one other guy in the locker room um who was late and he was lacing up and and we just started chatting and within like two sentences
It turned out that he was also editing his first movie at the time. And that movie was something called Thank You for Smoking. Oh, I love that movie. And so me too. And so we just kind of struck up a conversation that hasn't stopped. And it was later when we both had our daughters and we used to go on these sort of father-daughter camping trips, still just as like filmmaker friends. And on these drives, we would have long story conversations.
just pitching things we were having trouble with or, you know, scripts we were developing and any things that we couldn't crack. And we just kind of turned stories around.
It sort of turned out that we approached the problems of storytelling in very similar or complementary ways. And so at some point in the mid-20 teens, we just finally... bit the bullet and started writing together and we we wrote a uh an animated film for dreamworks uh that was a really fun experience for us like it was just fun to write together we were gonna co-direct that if it ever got made
And then we wrote another script, an adaptation of a novel. And again, we were just like really having fun writing and writing sucks. So it's like whenever you can actually enjoy the process, you cling to whatever that. is. And then at some point after that second script, when it sort of was clear that we were a writing team, Jason broached this idea of maybe picking up the Neutrona wand. And so we just...
kind of got into it. And it felt like a conversation we had been kind of circling for years as friends and as collaborators. And it was a pretty... It was a pretty extraordinary, like... world of storytelling to step into. Obviously, we were so privileged to have Ivan as a producer on that film who was so supportive of the approach. that Jason as a filmmaker wanted to take with the film and that he and I were bringing to the tone and to the way to sort of rekindle that.
that original flame of, of, of the films that Ivan had made. And it was it was kind of top to bottom, like a, a pretty special experience. And in my, in my. creative and professional life just because it felt so positive and and it was so emotionally gratifying to watch this bond strengthened between my best friend and his father uh that gap be bridged you know even in the fact that like when jason was in ghostbusters 2 and he's talking about he-man you know i was like i mean you're you're part
of fucking ghostbusters lore now dude you know but to be able to and i think the thing that makes both of the the movies because and and i please don't take this in the the wrong way but like when when ghostbusters was so much a part of our lives in the 80s because you know like when the first one came out it was in starlog and fangoria so like well it's got the vote of confidence there you know even it's a comedy but it also it felt like
There were still stakes that it was shot with complete reverence to cinema. It wasn't shot like a comedy at all. Was it Laszlo Kovacs, was it? Yeah, exactly. Laszlo was shot the first. so the you know the look of it um it felt like it felt like a horror film if it had scope you know it very much kind of treaded on the same water as like um abbott and costella meet frankenstein where it's like it just so happens that these funny guys are in what
is ostensibly a horror movie. It just so happens that whether it's Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray and Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson just happened to be in a serious ghost movie. And the same thing applies to what you guys did with Afterlife. The thing that people kind of forget about, though, is we then were treated to, as kids, the only other Ghostbusters IP we had was the cartoon.
It was the real Ghostbusters. And every Saturday, it was like, all right, what's the latest skirmish that these guys are going to get into? So... To go from the, and again, please don't take this the wrong way, but like Afterlife was to me the most perfect nostalgia porn because it hit all the buttons that I wanted in a Ghostbusters movie.
like to the point where it was built up into such a fever pitch that when when i saw it at the burbank 16 and the moment that the proton packs get turned on everybody who was like over 25 or 30 went oh yes Afterlife, I saw that because that was still during the pandemic, right? I saw it at the drive-in. That's right. And the screen was too dark. You couldn't tell what was happening. You could only hear it.
And I still stayed to the end and loved it. And when it was over, I'm like, I really liked it. I need to see it now. That's the best audio. But I can only hear it and I still liked it. That's so cool to hear. Thank you so much. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. You know, I've now had a... I guess all of us have, and partly I think this is a generational, not affliction, but condition, is that the potency of nostalgia is something that we do have to grapple with as storytellers.
It's undeniable. It is emotional. It's as triggering as a parental relationship or what we call home. I mean, I think this stuff actually really matters when you're telling a story and you want to connect with an audience. a relationship that you cannot ignore. And there's a reason that we do clap when a proton pack is charged.
theater because it it does connect us to something that you know is either wistful or reminds you of of better times or times that you feel like are in the rearview mirror it connects us to each other yeah yeah and i think those things are really important. And I do think that we also have to be really careful with how we dole it out.
especially because a lot of the films that get made. And I think I don't want to go down the track of whether or not... these sort of stories should be continued because i think that uh obviously i come down on the side that if you've got characters with stories to tell um nothing is off the table or and if they do well then
Clearly the audience wants these stories to continue. But I still think that as filmmakers, all of us have a responsibility to be... to be thoughtful in how we dole out nostalgia and where we push in. different directions, even at the cost of this sort of easy feeling or maybe not easy feeling, but the sort of the feeling that's closest to access of the audience. And it's a living debate. I don't think that.
Is like the right or wrong answer No But the issue with sequels In general no matter What you're talking about whether it's a Big sci-fi epic or a horror sequel is that the audience that fell in love with the original They've changed since the original came out and they want to feel like they did again That's usually how they decide
at least initially if they really liked it or not and you never really know until the next sequel because usually it's always too much like the original or it wasn't enough like the original whatever it was but then it finds its place but You're right. It's that balance of giving people what they loved about it originally, but also trying to push it forward.
some some people don't want it to go forward and they reject that um and then usually hopefully they do come around to it but just looking at the slasher movies we grew up with usually whatever the newest one was it was uh i don't know but then two more have come out and you're like man you know friday the 13th five's great that's what i say i know i i want to before we move on from uh from afterlife i do want to mention um you know
It was funny, I just watched, and Adam can attest to this, I just watched Cobra Kai, finished it up, I finally finished it, and there's the moment when Miyagi shows up. And, you know, like, it's a... Clearly a moment that's supposed to like kind of touch you.
But at the same time... Did nothing. Did nothing for me. But I think part of that was that the technology kind of threw me out. There was that uncanny valley element of it. I'm just over the show. I just wish it would end. But that's nostalgia porn. I think that...
doesn't work as well anymore i think they've gotten well past the like the expiration date on that now it's just soap opera cobra kai should be studied Years from now because I can't it's so hard to explain the tone of that show every time it's gotten so soap opera disney and then they'll do something that just brings you right back in and you're like no no it's awesome it's awesome so i i'll say i'll admit that i haven't watched it even though i i have all the reasons
to watch it obviously having grown up first two seasons are fucking amazing oh that's good to hear um i i mean the first movie was like a really important film in my childhood yeah it gave me uh literally a local hometown hero to believe in. That's right. Yeah. LaRusso fucking made the beauty of Cobra Kai is that when it starts, it's basically the story of Johnny now. That's great.
is fucking great and hilarious and and the music cues and all like the only thing the only thing that you're going to probably chafe at is you know most of it does take place in recita so immediately after they have like the requisite second unit shots of like driving down immediately you're gonna go oh that's atlanta
you can't get around it but you just kind of accept it you know charm to it and man those kids work fucking hard man like i don't think they get enough credit for you know the average actor at that age you're expected to know your lines hit your mark and be good but the amount of physical work that those kids do especially in the big fight scene and they're doing the majority of it the reason why I brought that all up
was because you know one of the things that i'm sure could have made or broken afterlife was the inclusion of egon and the um you know the kind of cg representation of harold who was such a significant part of the first two films on both sides of the screen. When you guys were writing the film,
Because sometimes when this kind of element comes up, when you're dealing with like a character who isn't alive anymore, this recently happened on Alien Romulus with Ian Holmes' character. Was there ever a discussion of like, what do we do if it sucks? Like what if we do if it doesn't work because I can personally attest being in the theater and the moment when they all look at each other I
burst into tears because, and for me, it's like on an emotional level, it worked. I wasn't thinking about like, well, he's not fucking there. So it doesn't work out. But anyone who's lost their parent felt something in that. Yes. But what was the challenge for you? The challenge is always conceptual before it's technical. I mean, I think that the truth is...
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