By Gill Pringle
You have so many funny ladies at your fingertips, how did you decide on this four? You know, why not Rose Byrne? “I know. That’s the problem! This is why I want to do so many movies with funny women. There are so many funny women that there aren’t enough roles to hold them all. And for this one, I needed four people who had completely different energies, and completely different styles of comedy. I needed really different personalities just so we wouldn’t have any repeats. It took me a long time to figure it out. I didn’t even do any through any auditions or anything. When Katie Dippold and I wrote the script, we didn’t really have anybody in mind. It wasn’t a done deal that Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy were going to be in it. I actually had lists of really dramatic actresses…I was really mixing and matching in my head.”
Who came on first? “Kate McKinnon was the first one that I settled on, because right after we had announced it, she had done an interview where she said that one of her life’s dreams was to be a Ghostbuster. I’m such a fan of hers, and I know her because I hang around Saturday Night Live a lot, and I got to hang out with her a bunch. I just really liked her, so we had her come in for a meeting and were talking to her about different characters, and she was saying versions of what she wanted to do. She had such a weirdo energy to her that it was like, ‘Okay, that’s our weirdo!’ We don’t copy the characters in the original movie at all, but that’s a great base energy to start from. Then I was able to build the cast out from her. We had that energy taken care of, and then pretty quickly, we decided that Melissa would be great as the leader of the group. Then Leslie Jones came along next. I was watching Saturday Night Live and she came up on ‘Weekend Update’, and it was like she had dropped out of the heavens. She hadn’t even finished her routine, and I looked at my wife and said, ‘Okay, she’s in the movie!’ It was just a done deal. I called my casting director, Allison Jones, and said, ‘Can Leslie act?’ She said yes, so I went and had drinks with Leslie and we hit it off. She’s just this big presence, so we got her. And then Kristen was the last one we decided on. I’ve always loved Kristen, and felt like she could be the character who has the most things to work on through this whole adventure. We never auditioned anybody! I’ve been working long enough now. I know their energies so well, and Kristen and Melissa are already friends and have worked together before. I wanted that dynamic of these old friends. There was a natural dynamic. Neither Kate nor Leslie had had a large role in a movie, so it was really exciting to have two veterans there and two wildcards. I always like to create a real situation and then play it out.”
How much is improvised? “It’s hard to say really, because improv is a slippery term. Sometimes it’s just how you manipulate the lines that are there, but it’s a lot, because that’s that freshness you get where you surprise the audience and it doesn’t sound stilted, it doesn’t sound written, and even the lines that aren’t drop dead hilarious still have a looseness about them that I think makes you bond with those people. They’re more like real people talking in real time.”
How happy are you with your cut so far? “I’m very happy. I’ve never made a movie that was this complicated technically. I’m used to doing these interviews when the movie is all finished, and you’re like, ‘Yay!’ But we’re still working and doing all this stuff, but I’m thrilled. I’m really happy, and the biggest thing has been wrangling it down to size. My movies tend to be in the two-hour zone, but because this one is a big tent pole pic, I really want to get it down to 1.45. My first cut of the movie was four hours and fifteen minutes long! [Laughs] When you do all this improv and stuff, you just have massive amounts of stuff. It’s been a battle to get it down. We had a great three-and-a-half-hour version of it that I actually thought was great, but obviously we can’t do that! Getting it down to a tight hour and forty-five-minute version is the next challenge. But I’m really happy with where we’re at, and now we’re just augmenting.”
In editing, do you think about the audience or yourself and your instinct? “I do a lot of test screenings with an audience. We’ve done at least five over the course of the last four months. I need that. I can sit around with my team and executives of the studio all day and go, ‘That’s funny, but that’s not funny.’ None of that matters until you put it in front of an audience.”
Do you still get surprised by the reaction of people? “Constantly. That’s why you can’t not do that. The studio is very, very nervous about me doing test screenings because they think that it’s just going to go everywhere. But I was like, ‘I’d rather have it go everywhere than have my first test screening be the premiere! [Laughs] None of those jokes worked that we all thought were so hilarious in our little room in the studio.’ You really have to pay attention to it.”
Were you daunted by taking on something that is kind of like a holy cow? “Yeah, I was! I turned it down the first couple of times because originally they had a sequel script that was written by somebody else. It was a very funny script, but Harold Ramis had just passed away, and Bill Murray didn’t want to do it. And then I was like, ‘Is it weird to do it with two Ghostbusters?’ Then I didn’t like the idea of a new team being given the old technology because then you’re just going to do another ghost story. So I kept turning it down. And then [producer] Amy Pascal called me to lunch one day months later and was like, ‘It’s a great franchise. Why do none of you comedy guys want to do it?’ I was like, ‘Because we’re terrified! Because it is canon…it’s like the comedy Godfather.’ But she did plant in my head the seed of, ‘This is a great idea.’ I saw the original on opening weekend the day that it opened back in 1984, and I was blown away by it. I walked out going, ‘What a great idea! Funny people fighting the paranormal with technology.’ That’s comic gold because you have this high concept idea, but then it can just go funny. It goes back to Abbott & Costello Meet The Wolfman. Funny people in peril: that’s funny, because comedy is about emotions at the extremes. So when she planted that seed in my head, I just went home and talked to my wife, and thought, ‘If I had to do it, what would I do?’ Then I had the idea of casting women, and I thought, ‘Should they be their daughters?’ [Inaudible] But then I thought that I could reboot it and just make a whole new origin story. I called Amy that morning and she immediately said, ‘I love it. Let’s do it.’ And it’s been a runaway freight train since then!”
Ghostbusters is released in cinemas on July 14.
