Interviews

Exclusive Interview: Rob Zombie

Posted by Brian C. Gibson (brian@filmschoolrejects.com) on September 1, 2007

It’s August, and you know what that means. It’s time for Halloween. No, not the holiday…you start getting ready for that September 1st. I mean you better get ready for Rob Zombie’s Halloween. Now I know that alot of people are tired of the slew of horror remakes that have been hitting the big screen lately. So I wanted to know why Rob thought his film would be different from the competition.

Ever heard of Daeg Faerch or Scout Taylor-Compton? Neither had I, but you will. Scout is the lucky girl who landed the task of living up to Jamie Lee Curtis, the scream queen, as Laurie Strode. Daeg is the lucky, or maybe unlucky, kid who landed the role of the young Michael Myers. I wanted to know how Rob planned on the two young actors living up to the hype and the iconic presence of the roles. “I wanted everyone to come in totally fresh. Scout, I didn’t want her to, in any way shape or form, to do a Jamie Lee Curtis thing. I wanted her to do her thing.” So my next question was obvious. Were the actors asked to watch, or stay away from the original like the plague? Rob answered quickly, “I think that maybe that’s one of the problems with some of the remakes, I don’t know. Malcom McDowell has never seen the original. Anyone who hasn’t seen it, I told them not to watch it because I didn’t want them to come in thinking that I wanted them to imitate what had been done before. What usually makes the original great, is that they had nothing to go on, they had to create a character.”

My next question had to do with the nature of the film and its title. With the film being a prequel/remake, was it always a decision to call it Halloween? “It was always my intention to call it Halloween. In fact, I wouldn’t do it if was called anything else. I thought any other title would confuse people. Any other title would seem like a sequel. I didn’t want people thinking ‘Part Nine’. When a movie gets to part nine, it just screams ‘Direct to Video’ piece of crap. So I was very definitive that it had to be called Halloween, because I thought that anything else would de-value the project.” I don’t know but I think Star Wars might be able to pull off a part nine. Weekend at Bernie’s, probably not.

The main thing that has always held Rob back, was that his films aren’t exactly accessible to the general public. So i wanted to know what he, or the studio, planned on doing about that with this film. “Everyone seems to think that the studio is somehow this big scary monster that controls what you do. I pretty much did what I wanted to do at all times. I cast who I wanted to cast and just did what I wanted to do. You can;t do anything except what you feel is the right thing to do. You can’t make a movie that you feel is more accessible. I don’t even know what that means, and I’ve been hearing that my whole life. Even when I’m doing music, people are like ‘Oh well if you just change that, it will be more accessible,’ and I don’t even know what that means. I’m just going to do whatever I fuckin’ do, and if it works then what else can I do?”

There you have it. Go see Halloween and find out if this is just another remake, or something new and different from the mind of Rob Zombie.