Before he agreed to resurrect a dormant horror icon in Michael Myers, writer-director David Gordon Green was busy directing Jake Gyllenhaal in Stronger, the true-life Boston Marathon drama in which Gyllenhaal takes on the role of Jeff Bauman.
It proved to be a raw and deeply nuanced performance for which the actor drew near-unanimous praise, but it was his legwork behind the scenes that helped alert Jamie Lee Curtis to the long-rumored Halloween sequel that had just set up shop over at Blumhouse.
At the time, David Gordon Green was in the process of drafting up a script alongside Vice Principals duo Jeff Fradley and Danny McBride, but it was Gyllenhaal, the actor currently linked to the role of Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home, who set up a meeting between Curtis and David Gordon Green.
Here’s how the actress explains it:
Jake and I have been friends since he was a young boy. I think I’ve referred him as his ‘celebrity godmother.’… and he’s just been a friend for years. David made the wonderful movie Stronger, that Jake starred in and his company produced, and Jake called me out of the blue — it was June of last year, I remember exactly where I was — and Jake basically said, ‘My friend David would like to talk to you about something regarding Halloween’. And we spoke on the phone and he started to explain it, and I said, ‘You know what, just send it to me, and I will promise you I’ll read it.’
Bet you didn’t think Jake Gyllenhaal would have anything to do with a Halloween movie, eh? And yet, here we are. Further in the interview, Jamie Lee Curtis went on to discuss how the sequel’s opening moments harken back to the John Carpenter classic from yesteryear, when Laurie Strode was just a 17-year-old babysitter in the wrong place at the wrong time.
From the opening scenes, from the first couple scenes, there’s a scene where my granddaughter is in Haddonfield, in the house where she lives with my daughter, and she’s in her bedroom, and she opens the closet door… and she pulls a bulb to illuminate what’s in the closet. And right away, I understand exactly in that moment where David was going, what they were trying to do, and really, at that moment I should have just called him at that point and said, ‘I’m on page three, yes.’ But it was very quick.
Halloween officially returns home on October 19th.