Rob Zombie’s Halloween and Halloween II not only offered audiences unsettling experiences on screen, but the process of bringing the movies to life sounds equally as stressful, with the filmmaker recently recalling the frustrating process of working with producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein to realize the films. Even when the first film was a success at the box office, the producers were frustrated that it wasn’t more successful, and Zombie revealed that the only reason he even returned to make the follow-up film was to be able to get out of a deal in which he had to make a total of three films for the producers.
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Appearing on the Howie Mandell Does Stuff podcast, Zombie noted that the experience of making the first Halloween was “craziness all the time, where like someone gives you definite notes on Friday but you know by Monday they forgot about them.”
Making the movie was so challenging that Zombie found ways to intentionally deceive the producers in hopes of avoiding complications.
“I made sure [the Weinsteins] were always one day behind what I was shooting. I don’t know how I tricked them, but they were like, ‘This is what we want done on day ten,’ blah blah blah,” Zombie recalled. “No problem. I’d already shot day ten, I was shooting day eleven while they were yelling at me about day ten.”
The producers would offer their own suggestions on what Zombie should do with the material, which tipped him off to how their visions for the film weren’t aligned.
“It was just based on crazy ideas, ‘I was thinking last night it should be this suddenly.’ Sometimes the ideas got so crazy … The ideas would go insane and then I would just think, ‘Okay, I have to realize I’m dealing with a crazy person and then answer that way,’” Zombie recalled, while noting that Bob Weinstein was “very cuckoo.”
Zombie wasn’t the only one subjected to the Weinsteins’ hostile attitudes, claiming that “they would find a way to upset every single actor” and the experience felt like “being in Crazy World.”
In hopes of taking more creative control of the project, Zombie claimed that the Weinsteins demanded he hire a new editor, which he did, but that he stuck with the original editor as the replacement editor instead did odd tasks around the office. For 14 years, Halloween held the record for the best Labor Day weekend opening, which still wasn’t good enough by Weinstein standards.
“Then the day the movie came out, Bob calls me at 10 a.m., he goes, ‘It doesn’t look good. This thing’s a f-cking disaster.’ It’s 10 a.m., are any theatres even open anywhere yet?” Zombie expressed. “And then he calls me a couple hours later, ‘We’re adding more screenings. This thing’s going through the roof!’ But then Harvey calls Bob and goes, ‘If you had listened to me, we coulda done double!’ So then they start fighting. The number one, record-breaking weekend isn’t good enough because I was talking to some people in their office who were like, ‘Oh, it’s a nightmare here right now. They’re fighting. They’re screaming at each other over why it’s not 60 million.’”
Zombie recalled how the producers asked for changes to be made to the project without taking into account how the film was being made out of order, so slight changes would require massive changes to the entire experience.
“One of the best ideas [Bob Weinstein] came up with, I was on set shooting, because he would call me the whole time I’m shooting, all night long, constantly. He was like, ‘I think Michael Myers should have a necklace of severed ears.’ I go, ‘Well, besides the fact that I hate that idea, we’re so deep into shooting, how do we get that… continuity… this is dumb on every level,” Zombie shared. “Where does he get them? How does he have them? Why does he have them in this scene, but he doesn’t…’ and that’s when I start going, ‘I’m not sure they know how movies are made. They don’t understand we’re shooting out of sequence, we shot that, we left that set, we’re not going back, we tore it down.’”
He continued, “We don’t have any of these sets or actors or wardrobe, so I don’t know how he’s going to rise from a cemetery that doesn’t exist here at the mental hospital set.”
Based on the financial success of the 2007 reboot, a sequel started moving forward relatively quickly, and while Zombie had no interest in returning to the franchise, he realized that sacrifice could conclude his partnership with the Weinsteins.
“I go to make the sequel, which I refused to do at first because I just wanted out of my contract because I wanted to kill myself. I had a three-picture deal, then a couple years later, they had fired twelve different directors for Halloween II so I came back,” the filmmaker expressed. “‘I’ll direct it if you let me out of the third picture. So I don’t have to do three pictures. Let me out of the deal and I’ll do it.’ So I go to shoot that and Bob comes to the set. He’s showing me the trailer for my Halloween, as if I’ve never seen it, and he goes, ‘Every frame of this movie’s f-cking genius.’ This is the same guy who said, ‘Every frame in this movie I f-cking hate.’”
While Zombie’s Halloween II performed better than some other entries into the series, the franchise was ultimately rebooted again in 2018 by director David Gordon Green.
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