Mtv: There are a few people who haven't seen the original Halloween, so could you give us a plot synopsis?
Rob One of the people who haven't seen the first movie in fact is Malcolm McDowell who plays Dr. Loomis which is nice. When he signed up for the film he said, "Rob, should I see the movie? I'm one of the few people who has never seen the movie." I told him not to watch it, I thought it would be better because the movie is pretty specific. It's hard not to be influenced by it. I had seen the movie so many times I had to stop watching it because the plot it so simple this young kid Michael Meyers, we are changing it, originally he kills his sister and he's sent away to Smithgrove Sanitarium which he later escapes from as an adult, comes home and starts randomly killing babysitters. Later in the sequels it's more significant, in the first one it's pretty random. That's not what we're doing, I've added a lot more to it, I've tried to make everything he's done more justified. so it's never random killing for no reason. There's a reason for everything.
Mtv: In the original Michael didn't speak for 15 years, does that give you more leeway?
Rob: I have total leeway to do whatever. Michael as a child in the first movie in s child for 10 seconds. The original move works great, it's obviously an awesome move and I loved it when I saw it when it came out. What's great about it is there's so much you can do when you have a lead character that doesn't speak, it's open to interpretation. He doesn't speak now either, but by having young Michael speak you get more of a personality so whenever you see adult Michael you see a young Michael projected into him. It gives it a wider range of emotion. He's scarier, but sympathetic in certain way. It gives emotional conflict to the audience, not a stunt man in a mask walking around killing people.
Mtv: When you say "Rob Zombie's Halloween" you assume it'll be the classic movie with tons more blood, a hard R. Is this accurate at all?
Rob: I'm not a fan of '80s slasher bloody movies. It's always bored me. It bored me then, it bores me now. I like character-driven movies. It's really violent and it's really intense, but it's because you get swept up in the characters, real characters see things happen to them. It's more terrifying than anonymous people in some boring bloodbath.
Mtv: The 1978 film has one of the all-time great opening shots...
Rob: You mean the opening shot of the pumpkin?
Mtv: The no-edit handheld shot, peeking in the windows at Michael's first killing.
Rob: Oh, I don't do any of that stuff. That doesn't make any sense in this movie, because by that point we already know everything. The original was like, 'Faceless killer? What happens? Oh my God, it's a little kid.' But since I've already spent a half-hour developing the little kid when he kills his sister, to do any kind of mysterious POV would be ridiculous because we already know who it is. It's a totally different thought process to how it unfolds; I'm not trying to trick the audience...we still have the original movie, so to just imitate it or copy it in any way is completely pointless.
Mtv: It was revolutionary at the time and it's been ripped off so many times since. How are you going to reinvent the thing and let other people rip it off?
Rob: The way to make it different is, it became a cliché because nothing was really added to it. It's just a guy with a knife and a mask. There's a creative personality and a thought process behind it. The mask sort of comes alive weird in a way, it doesn't seem like a faceless guy. Putting an actor in the suit makes a big difference. A lot of times it's played by a stunt man so you can light him on fire, throw him out a window, hit him with a car. It feels like that. It feels like a man waiting to be involved in a stunt. Nothing against stunts, but I don't have any interest in that. I'm looking for inventive wacky ways for destruction to take place.
Mtv: Do you keep that famous Halloween theme song?
Rob: I don't know…we'll see. (Laughs) I don't know, I mean I'm not sure about anything because we're not done yet, so you never know where things are going to go. The plan was at some point to do that, to sort of you know change it around, because the actual way it sounds now doesn't work with what we're doing, but who knows? I can't say it…
Mtv: I haven't see the station wagon around here. Does Michael know how to drive I this movie?
Rob: Michael Myers does not know how to drive in this movie, because that always bothered me. They would play that off like someone must have given him lessons, but you know no one gave him lessons, he's in a maximum-security prison! So he doesn't drive.
Mtv: How does he get the 150 miles? (from Smith's Grove)
Rob: Who said it was 150 miles? See, you can't get the original movie out of your head, can you? (Laughs) He did like Robert De Niro in "Cape Fear", he strapped himself to the bottom of a truck. Nothing what we do is in the original. Basically it veers off on a tangent, then it'll hit a familiar beat, go off somewhere else, then hit familiar things.
Mtv: Tell me a little about what Malcolm McDowell is doing with Dr. Loomis. A little bit different or the same to Donald?
Rob: He's not doing anything the same as Donald Pleasance because he's never seen Halloween, so he doesn't know what Donald Pleasance did. Malcolm was friends with Donald, so he didn't want to do anything that was imitating him and I thought it was important for that character to be very…it's funny, he's doing certain things similar without even knowing it, which is kind of funny, but we're playing him like he's got a different vibe. Loomis was some kind of crazy guy running around getting other people trying to help him. It wasn't too hard to believe that no one believed him, because he seemed like he was crazy and drunk and off his rocker (laughs). So Malcolm is playing him as more successful, and has profited off of all of this, and there is a conflict between Michael Myers being his greatest failed patient yet his meal ticket. So Brackett doesn't like him because he just thinks he's this exploitive guy who exploited this tragedy in Haddonfield. So I'm trying to add more interesting things to him because I wanted it to be a real relationship. There's three real relationships - Michael to Laurie and Loomis to Michael, tthis weird threesome that goes on throughout the movie, that's what it's really about.
Mtv: You said it was important that the Sherriff's role was bulked up a bit.
Rob: I thought it was significant that Sherriff Brackett, whose daughter Annie gets killed by Michael Myers, figures in more. I think what happened a lot before was that people would come in and disappear, and I wanted to make Brackett and the three girls - Linda, Laurie and Annie - and her dad's the Sherriff and Loomis who comes to find her dad, they are pretty interconnected, I wanted that to play out a little more. I didn't want anything coincidental. It bothered me…none of this stuff ever bothered me watching the original Halloween, of course. I've always loved the movie and I think it's awesome. But when making the movie different, I didn't want it to be: 'He happened to rob a hardware store and steal that mask.' Well, what if they didn't have that mask? Would he steal a Jimmy Carter mask? Or an Elmo mask if that was the only one available at the hardware store? And when did he rob the hardware store? In broad daylight? And the alarm is still ringing? Where is everybody? Those are the little things that bothered me. Thank god Loomis stopped to make that phone call, at exactly that phone booth where he dropped the car off and found the Rabbit in Red matchbook! That type of coincidence always bothered me, so we're trying to make things a little more connected.
Mtv: So we'll get to see him get the jumpsuit and the mask?
Rob: Those things were all perfect for the original because nothing had become iconic. That was big deal it's a jumpsuit, big deal it's a mask Almost 30 years later they are such iconic things that how they were acquired needed to be more important. It isn't just a mask anymore, it's an iconic world image. It was just a random choice that John Carpenter made.
Mtv: One thing you notice is that Tyler Mane is taller than Michael Myers, but not so wide, does that make things different?
Rob: Tyler was always my only choice, in fact he was the only reason, not the only reason, but one of the main reasons I wanted to do the movie. In order to tell things realistically you can't have a normal-sized guy lifting some one up guy off the floor. Then it becomes supernatural, and I didn't want to make a supernatural movie. Tyler who I thought was the perfect body type because he's so big, but he's really kinda slim, and for a guy that tall he's very in proportion. So when you don't see him against anyone, he's very in scale to himself, he looks like a normal size guy until you see him with someone you go f-k, this guy is f-king huge. A lot of people maybe were worried, 'He's gonna be like Hulk crashing through walls,' but he's not, he has a very sleek way of being. I found it terrifying when he goes against someone like Danielle Harris, who literally seems like she's 2 feet shorter than him. She's around 5'4", he's almost like 7 feet tall. It's crazy to watch it, I think it's scarier.
Mtv: So what are we watching here today?
Rob: We're just doing a scene where Laurie comes home from school, and she feels she's being followed. But she's not sure if she's being paranoid or being followed - and neither does the audience...this is the first time Michael sees where she lives, and sees her mom and the parents, and understands things a little better.
Mtv: In the backyard of your Myers house, there's a gross dried-up swimming pool. What goes on back there?
Rob: Well, back there is the beginning of our finale with Michael chasing Laurie. How much do you want me to tell you? (Laughs.)
Mtv: Would you ever want to do Halloween II?
Rob: I don't think so, no, because everything I've wanted to do, I've done with this movie. What really interested me about doing this movie was all the back-story and characters and stuff. I feel like the way I want to end this is the statement of what it is. If someone else wants to do it, that's cool, but I don't want to do that.
This transcription 2007-08 Alex D Thrawn. for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net