Jamie Lee Curtis has admitted that she wouldn’t have returned to the Halloween reboot if she’d known it was a trilogy, and has shed light on how she used that to her advantage.
READ MORE: Jamie Lee Curtis on her final ‘Halloween’: “The reboot has changed my life”
During a recent SXSW panel titled, ‘If Not Now, When, if Not Me, Who? Pivoting and Manifesting’, Curtis opened up about her career and heaped praise on Jason Blum for resurrecting the Halloween franchise, which began with John Carpenter’s 1978 flagship film.
“The only reason I am sitting in this chair today is because of Jason,” she said, per Variety. “Jason Blum, who runs Blumhouse, is the one who brought back the ‘Halloween’ movies,” she said, noting that when she got the call, she thought it was one film, and didn’t hear until further down the line 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.
“While we were editing and doing the mix, David said, ‘You know it’s a trilogy.’ I was like, ‘Uh, no.’”
It echoes comments she gave to NME back in 2022, when she said there was “no mention of a trilogy” when she started in 2018, explaining: “I didn’t think I would do it ever again. Later, David mentioned that there were these three stories: Halloween, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends. And here we are.”
Reflecting on that at the panel, she said she used the trilogy as a means to negotiate. “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 recalled. “I said to Jason, ‘How about a little development deal?’ And I owed him two ‘Halloween’ movies, so what was he gonna say?”
She wanted the extra money to pay Russell Goldman, a filmmaker who was working with her to try and get Mother Nature made. He now works in development for Curtis’s Comet Pictures, and was making his directorial feature debut at SXSW with Sender.
“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, saying 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.
“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.”
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