THE NIGHT SHE CAME HOME

JAMIE LEE CURTIS AND DIRECTOR DAVID GORDON GREEN RETURN TO HADDONFIELD ONE LAST TIME FOR HALLOWEEN ENDS

- GARREN SCOTT

HOW DO YOU SOLVE a problem like Michael Myers? For Haddonfield babysitter Laurie Strode, that’s a question she’s asked herself for over 40 years. For director David Gordon Green, well, that’s not an answer he’s giving up easily.

It’s day four of 12, trivia fans for the final sound mix on Halloween Ends when SFX sits down with Green. He feels good, but sad about the culmination of five years of his life, describing it as bittersweet but fun”. An unexpected delay in the schedule means he’s been working on the finale for three years.

WAITING FOR HALLOWEEN

“Lots of time to write and invent and rewrite, recast, just trying on hats a little bit,” he says of the small budgets but big ambitions. It gives me the creative freedom to take chances and do what I want, and not have a lot of people breathing down my neck about it.”

Has the delay allowed him to revisit ideas that may not originally have been part of the plan for Ends? Sometimes you talk yourself out of things,” he suggests. In the case of the first and the third of these movies, you talk yourself out of things. Do we need it? No. Let’s just try it without it’ Then you put it together and you think, But wouldn't it be cool..?

“There’s a couple of things that were in very early drafts of our script for Ends that we didn’t film in our initial production and went back to film]. So we did a few extra days this summer to be able to put the icing on the cake.”

When the final instalment of his Halloween trilogy comes to a close with Halloween Ends this month, four years have passed since the events in 2021’s Halloween Kills. Critical response to that movie, he says, hasn’t impacted on how Ends was completed.