Halloween Script Took 8 Months, 80 Drafts to Complete

CBR

By Sam Stone

Published Jul 23, 2018

Director and co-writer David Gordon Green reveals scripting for the Halloween revival lasted for 8 months through the last week of production.

Rewrites for the upcoming Halloween revival went to the very last minute up until the last week of principal photography.

Director and co-writer David Gordon Green revealed that the scripting process for the new Halloween lasted approximately eight months and went through approximately eighty drafts. Writing went from the Green and co-writer Danny McBride's initial pitch to Blumhouse Productions right until the last week production earlier this year.

"It was probably eight months of 80 drafts, exploring different ways we could go and following different characters. Then we started casting it and we learned Jamie Lee [Curtis] wanted to be in it. So then we geeked out and wanted to beef up the Laurie Strode character," explained Green in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "Every Saturday was rewrites for Sunday rehearsals so that I could feed off of what we learned that week or for what an actor's idea might have been or a skill set that we didn't know we had in front of us. So we were writing up until the very last week of production."

While the latest installment of the long-running horror franchise ignores all the sequels and reboots leaving only the 1978 original as canon, Green also observed that early drafts of the film had included and referenced the events of other films in the series.

"We started incorporating all the follow-ups and then it got overwhelming trying to engineer something that made sense. Some of the plot points became a little stretched thin as the franchise went on," admitted Green. "[Danny] McBride came to me and just said, "What’s the Michael Myers movie that you really want to see?" Halloween I was, to me, the most pure and, in a lot of ways, the most simple. I get the real connection with the terror of a movie that isn't so lost in its own mythology."

Debuting on October 19, the latest Halloween is directed by David Gordon Green from a script written with Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley. The film stars Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, and Andi Matichak with Nick Castle and James Jude Courtney sharing the role of masked killer Michael Myers. The film is executive produced and scored by original filmmaker John Carpenter.