by Gill Pringle
Like her Halloween character, Laurie Strode – the teenage babysitter who survived Michael Myers’ first killing spree more than four decades ago – Curtis is likewise a survivor; one of the most respected actresses in Hollywood.
Chatting with Curtis today, she doesn’t put on any airs and graces, confident of herself as, variously, an acclaimed actress, blogger, activist, author, mother and wife, married 37 years to Spinal Tap star, Christopher Guest.
While she gained initial acclaim as a Scream Queen, Curtis’ many memorable movie moments include starring roles in Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda, True Lies and Freaky Friday.
To quote the corny adage, “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”, the same could be said of Curtis, her fierce Laurie Strode refusing to let Michael Myers destroy her, hellbent on vengeance.
As an executive producer on Halloween Kills – the second in writer-director David Gordon Green’s current trilogy – Curtis, 62, gets spooky with FilmInk.
Your Halloween character Laurie Strode is both a mother and a grandmother and yet we don’t know the identity of the father of Laurie’s daughter. Any theories?
“I don’t think Laurie has a Baby Daddy. I don’t think she even knows who the Baby Daddy is. I think Laurie was a very troubled young woman, who banged around the world like a pinball machine, banging into people without any support. In Halloween Kills, Laurie has a very tender scene with Will Patton’s Officer Hawkins, and I think the reason that scene exists is because in the 2018 movie, there was a moment where I had never met Will and we were on the set doing a scene where he’s standing outside the Strode house and I tell him how, every night I dream Michael Myers would live so I could kill him myself. I had this thought that maybe Officer Hawkins was Karen’s father. We talked it through and then David wrote this connection between Laurie and Hawkins, so I think Officer Hawkins is the closest thing to a male contact that she has had.”
So Will Patton is your main man?
“No, for me, it’s Dan Aykroyd. I’ve been in three movies with Dan Aykroyd and I love him. He was my favourite on-screen lover.”
What does it mean for you to still be a part of Halloween?
“I’ve been a part of these stories for 43 years, so it feels good. It feels like family. What I loved about the 2018 movie is that it was about a family, an estranged family but a family nonetheless.”
While it took the majority of 2018’s Halloween for anyone to believe Laurie that Michael Myers had returned and was coming for her, Laurie’s decades of preparation for that night allowed her and her family to trap him in a basement prison and burn him alive. Unfortunately, at the beginning of Halloween Kills, Haddonfield’s well-meaning fire-and-rescue force arrive on scene just a little too early for the job to be finished and Laurie’s carefully-laid plans are thwarted. Having lived with Laurie Strode for so long, was that frustrating for you?
“Yes, for Laurie, her journey was complete. She gave it all in the first movie. Her heart, soul, blood, courage, strength, wisdom: her everything. She was a warrior. Audiences got to feel that sense of satisfaction that Laurie had won at the end of Halloween. But in order to continue the story, that satisfaction has to be defeated and that bubble has to be burst – because Michael survived.”
The 2018 Halloween reboot marked the highest grossing film in the entire Halloween franchise, and you made history by scoring the biggest opening weekend for a movie starring a lead actress over 55 years old. But, this time around, we see you stuck in a hospital bed. Was that frustrating?
“The last movie was Laurie’s story, but this movie is the town’s story with Laurie in the centre of it wondering what the fuck happened. It’s a refrain that she uses over and over again. ‘How did this happen? How did this happen?’”
So, now confined to her hospital bed, Laurie passes all her strength and survival skills to daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). Was that fun to pass along the torch?
“Yes. Laurie has transmuted, transferred the passion, the advocacy, the fierceness into the last minute of the first movie. She’s turned her daughter and her granddaughter into warriors. They now believe her. They now are on the same path that she is. The torch is being passed. Laurie is now going to recover and be in the centre of the maelstrom, rather than being the force that’s running it all. The whole last movie was a study in trauma. What happens to somebody 40 years later? But Laurie was not the only victim in 1978. There were many other people in Haddonfield who suffered the trauma of Michael Myers.”
How did you react upon being approached, a few years ago, by director David Gordon Green with this Halloween trilogy proposal – Halloween Kills being the second film with Halloween Ends scheduled for release around Halloween 2022?
“The last thing in the world I thought I would do is another Halloween movie. I was perfectly happy doing the work I was doing. I was in the mountains where I live and the phone rang and it was Jake Gyllenhaal who is my godson and the said, ‘My friend David would like to talk to you about a Halloween movie’. The last thing in the world I thought I would do was another Halloween movie – let alone three. And I didn’t know it was three when I signed up for the first one; I had no idea. But I immediately liked David’s take on the material. I mean, honestly, it was his take, and his introduction of Karen and Alison and her isolation and the loneliness and the trauma and being able to make a movie about female trauma felt empowering and appropriate as a beginning movement of this three-part piece of music that he’s made. I read the script and after an hour-and-a-half, I called him and said, ‘Let’s go. Great’. And now, here we are four years later and two movies under our belt and one to go. It’s been extraordinary and I’m a very proud grandma. I’m not a grandma in real life so it was lovely to have an actual granddaughter in this.”
How relevant are the Halloween movies four decades later, highlighting the plight of women in trauma rather than just good vs evil? Especially now that society is paying more attention to the world that we’re living in?
“I agree. I think David and Danny [McBride, co-writer, exec producer] are prescient in that they understood that female trauma was going to be an issue in the future. They must have intuited this somehow, in the same way that they intuited that the collateral damage of a town and the mob violence that that creates was going to become a thing. So I feel like it’s life imitating life, life imitating art, it is the natural progression and I truly believe that when these three films are looked at – and I’m not a film historian or an intellectual who waxes poetic about film theory – but I promise you that in 20 years when a film class looks back at this David Gordon Green trilogy and then looks at what happened in the world at the same time – it’s going to be a social statement even though it’s a slasher trilogy. It’s gonna really be a statement about who we are as human beings at this moment in our lives.”
What was the inspiration for having three generations of female leads in the Halloween series?
“I think that Debra Hill who was the co-writer of Halloween with John Carpenter – she was his lover at the time and was one of my best friends – she and I became close, close friends. And she’s gone. And I think her legacy is the Strode family. Not that she predetermined that, some 40 years later, somebody would write a movie about Laure Strode and her daughter and granddaughter, but I think what David intuited from the original text which gave birth to this relationship between Laurie and Alison and Karen, is all due to Debra Hill and her contribution and I’m really sad that she’s not here. It makes me cry because she was political, she was a feminist and I think she would have loved these movies.”
Do you have a message for your Halloween fans?
“To all of the people that love these movies, I say, ‘Happy Halloween’. I hope you don’t come to my house, because I won’t open the door. I leave a bag of candy out front, and usually it’s all there at the end of the night. I think that means nobody knows where I live, which is good. I wish you a happy one and a safe one, and I thank you for my life.”
Halloween Kills is in cinemas now.
