Jamie Lee Curtis didn’t know she was about to take on three more “Halloween” movies when she said yes to David Gordon Green’s 2018 film, the sequel to her 1978 film.
During a SXSW panel titled, “If Not Now, When, if Not Me, Who? Pivoting and Manifesting,” Curtis opened up about filmmaking and her career as an actress and producer. She first named her appreciation for Jason Blum.
“The only reason I am sitting in this chair today is because of Jason. Jason Blum, who runs Blumhouse, is the one who brought back the ‘Halloween’ movies,” she said. However, when she got the call, she thought it was one movie and didn’t hear until way later that they were planning to do more.
“If they had come to me and said it’s going to be a trilogy, I don’t think I would have said yes,” she said. “Jason Blum is notoriously cheap. How do you make low-budget movies? You don’t pay people. That’s the model.”
So, she used it to her advantage.
“While we were editing and doing the mix, David said, ‘You know it’s a trilogy.’ I was like, ‘Uh, no.’ I went to Jason Blum and said, ‘I have some ideas, maybe you could give me a first look deal, just pay me a little money,’” she recalls. “I said to Jason, ‘How about a little development deal?’ And I owed him two ‘Halloween’ movies, so what was he gonna say?”
Curtis wanted the extra money to pay Russell Goldman, a filmmaker who was working with her to try and get “Mother Nature” made. Goldman now works in development for Curtis’s Comet Pictures, and he’s making his directorial feature debut at SXSW with “Sender.” The premiere will be the first time Curtis ever sees the Comet Pictures logo on the big screen.
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“Jason Blum gave me a vanity deal,” she says, referencing an earlier moment of the conversation where they discussed how every actor takes the producer credit differently. She added that Blum likely never expected she’d then call him for multiple projects. For example, Curtis heard an NPR story about a school bus driver and teacher who saved 22 children and said she wanted to produce it. This year, the Apple TV film “The Lost Bus” is nominated at the Oscars for Best Visual Effects.
Later in the conversation, the moderator brought up that the Academy is seemingly finally respecting the horror genre with the massive amount of love for “Sinners.” Curtis noted that although she’s a Scream Queen, she doesn’t love the genre. But she can have a major appreciation for it.
“I’m in love with the independent filmmaking aspect of the genre,” she said, adding that she’s so thrilled to see how diverse it has become — showcasing different genders and sexuality, or, how she puts it, “the words that Donald Trump is trying to erase from our language.”
Curtis added: “So because of that, the genre aspect, I appreciate, and I owe my life to the genre, but I don’t have to pretend to you that I’m a genre girl, and that I love it.”
She later opened up about “Scarpetta,” which she had also called Blum about, when she realized Patricia Cornwell’s books had never made it to the screen and wanted them. But she never planned on starring in it.
Curtis met Kidman years before at the Academy Awards; Kidman had said to her, “I see you. I see who you are. I see what you do. I see how you do it. And I really like it, and I want you to continue doing it.” So when they re-met years later and Kidman asked, “And you’re in it?” Curtis couldn’t say no.
“I really didn’t want to be in an hour TV show, because the hours are awful,” Curtis added. “My only desire is to be made a sitcom!”
From Variety US