The Shape returns to Haddonfield on October 19, 2018, and we sat down on set earlier this year to chat with the two men who’ve donned the iconic mask for this entry, which serves as a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s classic 1978 film Halloween: originator Nick Castle and actor James Jude Courtney.
Co-written by Jeff Fradley, Danny McBride and director David Gordon Green (see our interview with the latter two here), 2018’s Halloween is produced by Trancas International Films’ Malek Akkad, Blumhouse’s Jason Blum and Bill Block, with McBride, Green and star Jamie Lee Curtis serving as executive producers, along with Ryan Freimann and series originator Carpenter, who also serves as the film’s composer.
Green’s Halloween as reported boldly picks up directly forty years after the original (that’s right, subsequently ignoring all previous sequels), with a slight twist to the narrative: series’ boogeyman Michael Myers, as opposed to having disappeared into the suburban night as he so famously did in Carpenter’s classic, was apprehended by the authorities, and has been institutionalized ever since.
Institutionalized and waiting, in this case for traumatized survivor Laurie Strode (Curtis), who herself has spent the last four decades preparing for what she believes will be Myers’ inevitable return. Actresses Judy Greer and Andi Matichak join the fray as Laurie’s daughter and granddaughter, Karen and Allyson, respectively, as do actors Will Patton, Virginia Gardner, Miles Robbins and Dylan Arnold, among others.
‘What have you got all over you?, we asked Castle and Courtney upon their entrance, as each were attired in a pair of cinema’s most infamous dark blue, and decidedly unkempt, coveralls.
“Dirt and blood,” replied Courtney.
“Yeah, we’ve been at it,” added Castle of the demands of the role, of which out of his five acting credits, two reside in the Halloween series. (Outside of acting, Castle is primarily known as a screenwriter – he penned the script for Carpenter’s nihilist 1981 classic Escape from New York – and as a director, for the 1984 cult favorite The Last Starfighter, in addition to other films).
“It’s a little bit of a mystery,” offered Castle, now seventy-years old, when asked of how his return to the role of cinema’s arguably most famous slasher came about. “I know that somebody suggested it from my end, which is, I have an agent doing horror conferences, Sean Clark, (who’s) a great guy in that business and he knows the world. He said, ‘Why aren’t you doing this thing coming up?’ And I said, ‘No one asked,’ and he said, ‘I’m just going to ask around.’ A few weeks later and Sean said, ‘Nick, you’re going to get a call and they’re going to ask you if you want to play The Shape.’”
As for Courtney, whose previous suit work includes a turn as the Der Kindestod creature in the 1998 “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” episode “Killed by Death,” “He has a stunt background, so he’s doing a lot of the physical work on the show,” said Castle. “I’m coming down to bless the set, and to do a couple of shots here and there.”
With forty years and a $9,700,000 budget difference in films, Castle was asked, ‘Has there been any directorial difference in instruction as to how to play the character?’
“It’s funny, because at both times there was very little communication in terms of that,” Castle allowed. “First of all, Myers is expressionless so really it’s about how are you going to move. I was just telling some other friends here of when I was going to do the first shot (in the original film), (which was) a night time scene, (where) Myers was crossing the street going after Laurie, that it was a determined walk…not in a rush or anything like that, and I went out in the street and stopped and went back to John and said, ‘So John, this is my first shot.’ Basically, I was asking, ‘What is my motivation?’ Something stupid, just like an actor, and John said, ‘Just go over there and (then) walk here.’ That was it. John’s embellished since then. I don’t know how true this is, but he’s said (since), ‘I always liked the way Nick walked,’ and I just kind of thought, ‘Oh, I don’t know what that means: I walk like a killer?’”
As for Courtney’s approach to the role, and in particular to the more violent aspects, he offered, “I learned how to kill from a mafia hitman who lived with me when he got out of prison. I was writing his life story, so he went to see the movie I did: it was called The Hit List. It wasn’t a big movie or anything, and when we walked out he was like, ‘Jimmy, it was a really nice movie but that’s not how you kill people.’ I’ve been complimented many times here on set on how efficiently I kill, and all I did was take what he taught me.”
“Why Malek and David brought me in,” he continued, “is because it’s just the way I move. It’s a place that exists (and) my job was to find that place. It’s a living, breathing place so when I go into that place everything is natural. I just do what that space dictates, which was created by Nick and John and Debra (Hill), and (which) has lived and breathed all (of) these years.”
Given that passage of time, the duo was queried as to whether or not they felt if age had changed that space in any way.’
“Michael Myers is carrying the space for the shadow that most human beings are afraid to look at,” observed Courtney. “Most human beings are afraid to look at the fact that there’s a killer inside them, (and) that there is someone capable of heinous acts. For me, when we were (shooting) in the mental institution before Myers broke out, all I focused on was his energy that’s been building and festering and expanding, and I just held that space from again what Nick had created, and I just let it grow and grow because Myers has become more powerful. He’s defying death. He’s defying any type of restrictive condition so to me, from my perspective, what Nick created has just gotten stronger.”
Stronger, but also older. In this continuity, Michael Audrey Myers will turn sixty-one years old this year, and will celebrate his birthday on the very date of Green’s Halloween release. Given the character’s advancing age, can he still take a beating?
“He’s a bad motherfucker, man,” stated Courtney. “He’s a bad dude. I’ve got to tell you, even old fighters don’t lose their punches. I got in the ring with Joe Brown on the set of Far and Away, who was Rocky Marciano’s sparring partner for seven of his eight title fights, and he said, ‘C’mon Jim, you can throw better than that,’ and I threw hard at him, man. And that old man’s (punches) kicked like a mule, and that’s when he sat me down and said, ‘A fighter never loses his punch.’ I think it’s the same with Myers. He’s not going to lose his strength, his virility, his power and his focus. He’s taking the hits.”
With a strict attention to continuity, as evidenced by the prosthetic FX appliance Courtney was wearing over his left eye (a result of the Myer’s character being stabbed with a coat hanger in the ’78 film – see our interview with FX artist Chris Nelson here for more on that), we asked Courtney, whose skills include decades of martial arts and pugilist training, if the resultant loss in depth perception was making his job difficult.
“Well, day by day it got better and by the third or fourth day, when I was fighting a gentleman with a crowbar, I started adjusting,” answered the actor. “Normally I track movement from my left eye, but (because of the appliance) I couldn’t see anything until it came into my right eye’s field of vision. But I think it’s really gifted me too, because it takes me into a space where I’m seeing the world from a different perspective.”
We had to know, ‘In this latest iteration, is Myers supernatural?’
“In that he can take a lot of punishment,” said Castle, “they keep it pretty real. I have seen some of the sequels where they suggested other worldly reasons for his power, but this one does not have that.”
With the films previous sequels obliterated within this narrative thread, so too are Laurie and Michael’s familial ties, which had been set up in director Rick Rosenthal’s 1981 sequel, Halloween II. The pair was asked, ‘Is Laurie then just another victim Myers missed?’
“I can safely say without giving too much away that he knows her,” answered Castle.
Courtney expounded, “I think it goes back to human nature. We all have obsessions, compulsions, fixations…why doesn’t Michael get to have one? It’s interesting (because) in the original film Laurie notices him when nobody else does. She’s always the one who sees him, (from) the classroom (to) around the hedge, and everyone else is kind of distracted, so is there kind of like a reciprocal thing there, where she’s kind of the only one who notices him?”
“I think like I said that she’s on his list, and some of that is like the first one, which I think is the right way to play (it),” said Castle. “A lot of things are vague, in terms of his evil and stuff like that, (and) his motivations for things (and) why he does things, but I think in the process of reading the script a number of times I get the sense that yeah, that’s in his mind, too.”
“It’s really important to note that (real-life dictators) Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin didn’t consider themselves evil,” Courtney offered of Myers’ own perception. “There’s a judgement where people are saying, ‘Well, this is evil,’ but Michael Myers is just being who he is. He’s being true to who he is, and that’s an awesome space to occupy, man. I can’t tell you how incredible it feels.”
Of wearing the mask forty years later (the original was little more than a modified William Shatner ‘Captain Kirk’ mask purchased for a buck ninety eight at Burt Wheeler’s now defunct magic shop on Hollywood Boulevard, whereas the 2018 version was sculpted as an aged-down recreation of it by an Academy Award winner), Castle told us of the masks, “They have the exact same dimensions, (and) I think they did a great job.”
“I can tell you,” added Courtney, “when Christopher (Nelson) brought it to the set and when I got to put it on (for) the first time it was, ‘Wow! This is really perfect for killing.’ There’s so much in that, do you know what I mean? It just closes you off from the world and then, something big happens man. It’s powerful.”
“From my perspective, Michael Myers operates so instinctively and he has such an incredible intuition about him,” Courtney concluded. “I mean, my mafia friend, he could walk into a place and tell you everything about the people in it, because his life depended on him reaching out that way. I think Michael Myers is the epitome of someone who can reach out and feel everything around him, and then hiding behind that mask makes it all the more private and personal.”