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My earliest memories of watching the original Ghostbusters movie were with my father. His affinity for comedic entertainment rubbed off on me and the film became a favorite in our house, often on repeat to fill in where weekday sitcoms fell short.
While a remake of the film has been in discussion for many years, it wasn’t until 2014 that the new Ghostbusters directed by Paul Feig was officially announced. The original, released in 1984, starred Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis as 3 eccentric parapsychologists who launch a ghost-catching business in New York City.
In the 2016 reboot, Feig brings together some of the funniest actors working today including Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones and Chris Hemsworth, in an original story about an unlikely team who band together to save New York City from the supernatural. Filled with side-splitting paranormal humor and exciting, slimetastic action, Ghostbusters is a fresh take on the original with enough nostalgia to appeal to superfans.
Late last week, the creative talent behind Ghostbusters sat down to talk about the film. Here are 10 you didn’t know about Ghostbusters:
- The original Ghostbusters, which was produced and directed by Ivan Reitman, was a first of its kind in the industry. Reitman recalls the first time he screened the film to audiences, 3 weeks after shooting had wrapped. “I was really worried about the marshmallow man. I believed in a kind of domino theory of extended reality to tell that story. No one had ever made that kind of film before and I didn’t know what the audience would allow.” Reitman recalls the audience’s best response when they are introduced to the “librarian.” “When she suddenly gets really scary, the audience screamed in fear, then they laughed, and then they applauded and all 3 things happened in 4-5 seconds.” Feig was in film school when the film was released and recalled that he had “never seen a comedy like that before, that had that kind of scope and special effects and was still so funny and so big.” “I don’t think I could fully grasp, like what I was really seeing,” recalls McCarthy. “It made everything possible and cool.” While McKinnon was born the same year as Ghostbusters debuted in theaters, she commented that “scope is a word I haven’t heard in conjunction with it before but that’s exactly what it is. It’s so many genres and so many disparate elements of incredible things jumbled into one and feels like such a whole world that you just want to be a part of so badly.”
- Feig assembled a comedy dream team. In putting together this ensemble, Feig asked himself why the first movie worked so well. “It’s an amazing story executed so well. But [it worked] because those people in that movie were so amazing.” The decision was easy. “These are four of the funniest, most talented people working today and I can’t imagine not having any of them in this movie.”
- Many of the scenes in Ghostbusters were improvised. “We put the script together, which a nice road map. We know what we need out of each scene, but then how we get there, that’s the fun we have in letting these four ladies just go for it. We don’t go bananas, we don’t throw away the script. At the same time they are just such masters of making it their own. That’s why you get that feeling that you’re there in the room with them and these are your friends and you’re watching it happen for the first time. A lot of times you are watching it for the first time. As was I (Feig).” In one particular scene, the team interview Hemsworth for a secretarial position. Entirely improvised, it is one of the most uproarious segments in the entire film. “The wheels came off the bus, the bus broke in half. Paul has 72 eighteen-minute takes of that scene. At one point it was like, ‘have we all gone crazy? We’re not really making a movie (McCarthy).'”
- Chris Hemsworth is apparently good at everything. Since we’re talking about the Avengers superhero, I would be remiss not to encourage you to stay through the credits for proof of Hemsworth’s all-encompassing talents. According to McCarthy, “Chris did everything bizarrely well. At one point he was trying to describe a song to me. And I was like what song is it? And he started to sing it. I literally was like shut up Chris. Can you sing too? It’s too much. Just don’t. I can’t hear it. You can’t do everything that well. Just play it for me, don’t sing it. Because if you also sing, my head is going to explode. It’s too much for one person.”
- And Kate McKinnon boasts mad “scientist” skills. McKinnon spent a lot of hours looking up the nouns she was supposed to say in the film. “Most of them are real nouns, not really related to one another in real life. It was a mental leap to connect all that stuff. I love science and junk like that, so it was fun.” According to Katie Dippold, she is “a scientist in secret.” There was a line in the script, and Kate was like hey what if I said something like this? Her joke was like another crazy scientific one full of ridiculous language I didn’t understand.” Jones also made it known that McKinnon brought in a soldering kit during shoots and made an alarm system. “I soldered when I was a kid and I wanted a refresher (McKinnon).”
- The slime used in the film took 2 days to remove. McCarthy recalls that the slime would go on and not want to come off. “You can’t use water because it reconstitutes and doubles. It really is an entity on you.”
- The cast has thought about who they would haunt if they were ghosts. Apparently, talk of the paranormal, was, well normal amongst the Ghostbusters cast and creative team. Dippold would haunt other ghosts, sneaking up behind them to see what happens. Feig would haunt “every troll on the internet.” McKinnon would use her invisibility “to audit a bunch of adult education courses to learn new skills.” Reitman can think of a few studio heads he’d like to haunt while Jones would start with The Rock.
- The cast looks to their own personal heroes for inspiration. For McKinnon, her hero was “any woman comedian who has dared to wear pants or not care about how she looks or what we think of as feminine.” For Jones, it was comedians like Moms Mabley, Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett who would “just go for it [the joke]” that really inspired her work as a comedian and an actress. McCarthy attributes her success to her mother and everyone who ignores the shoulds and shouldn’ts. Women like Gilda Radner and Madeline Kahn.
- The cast is honored to be role models and part of a movement that empowers young girls. “It means the world to me, [especially] every time we put something out into the world where they can see themselves. They won’t even have the realization of why wouldn’t it be me? why wouldn’t I be the hero? why wouldn’t I be the ghostbuster? I think that does such incredibly important things, not only to little girls but to little boys to go maybe she’s my hero. Paul and Katie wrote these four incredible characters, and them being women is of no consequence to the movie, and that’s the biggest statement we could make (McCarthy).” When Jones was beginning to act, she saw Whoopie Goldberg on TV and remembers “crying and telling my dad, I can’t believe there is someone on TV that looks like me. I can now do this. For some little black girl to see me doing this, I’m pretty much very proud of that.”
- Fans can expect a sequel “soon” according to Reitman.
You can watch the entire press conference on Facebook, which was broadcast live by E! News. Later this week I’ll share my full review of the new Ghostbusters film. To keep up to date with the film, visit Ghostbusters on Facebook and Twitter. See the film this Friday, July 15th, 2016 in theaters nationwide.
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