When Gil Kenan made his feature directorial debut with the 2006 animated feature MONSTER HOUSE, it demonstrated his ability to infuse family-friendly entertainment with genuine scare content. Now, at the helm of GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE, he looks to give the supernatural-comedy franchise its most horror-centric entry yet. RUE MORGUE got exclusive words with Kenan, who also scripted FROZEN EMPIRE with Jason Reitman, following their writing collaboration on Reitman’s previous GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE.
FROZEN EMPIRE, opening this Friday, finds the Spengler family (Carrie Coon as mom Callie and Finn Wolfhard and McKenna Grace as teens Trevor and Phoebe) relocated to New York City and teaming up with the original Ghostbusters (Bill Murray’s Dr. Peter Venkman, Dan Aykroyd’s Dr. Ray Stantz, Ernie Hudson’s Dr. Winston Zeddemore and Annie Potts’ Janine Melnitz) against a new supernatural menace. This evil being, Garraka, freezes his victims to death and threatens to unleash a new Ice Age–and every ghost the ’busters have previously faced–on the Earth. Paul Rudd and William Atherton are also back as Gary Grooberson and the meddling Walter Peck, and new to the franchise are such comic talents as Patton Oswalt and Kumail Nanjiani.
The trailer makes it look like FROZEN EMPIRE leans more on the horror than the previous GHOSTBUSTERS films have. Would you say that’s true?
Absolutely. A lot of it involved tapping into the inherent potential of GHOSTBUSTERS to genuinely scare an audience. I don’t know what your experience was with the first film in 1984, but I think people went in with an expectation based on it starring four of the most well-known comedians, and right away, that movie shows you it’s not goofing around, with the library ghost. So there was already that DNA in the film series, but we felt we had an opportunity with FROZEN EMPIRE to lean into the suspense and the horror a bit more. I’m really proud of this being a scary GHOSTBUSTERS film that’s also funny.
It looks like you have the scariest lead ghost of any of these films, too.
Yeah, Garraka’s no joke–he’s nightmare fuel! He came about because we had finished the Gozerian saga with AFTERLIFE, and Jason and I, when we sat down to write, knew we had the opportunity to create somebody really memorable, with a unique mythology. While we were writing, I started a series of sketches that were drawn from the deepest, darkest horror crevices of my brain, and it was fun to be able to bring something so genre-inflected to the screen. It felt like a character worthy of a ghostbusting adventure.
Was he inspired by any existing mythology, or completely invented for the film?
The answer is more nuanced than either a or b. We wrote the bulk of this script in London, where I make my home, and Jason and I definitely took some trips to museums that were inspirational. But it’s an original mythology. There’s a rich tradition in GHOSTBUSTERS of drawing on ancient culture for creating backstories and mythologies, and we definitely took advantage of some of the ancient lore that’s not obvious either to these films or to modern storytelling. There was some exploration and mining we did that felt genuinely thrilling, and worked its way into Garraka’s backstory.
It’s also great to see a lot of the action recognizably filmed in Manhattan for the first time in the franchise since the second film.
I’m really excited about this being a New York-set film! We knew that the second story in the Spengler saga, as we’re calling our films, was going to come back to New York. We had to make that bold departure to Summerville, Oklahoma [in AFTERLIFE] in order to ground these stories in character, but the path back to Manhattan was set in that film, and I gotta tell you, it feels good to see the Ghostbusters back in the city. It just feels like their natural habitat.
So how much of FROZEN EMPIRE was actually shot in New York City?
A surprising amount of the big action was filmed there. Obviously, our interiors and a couple of key exterior setpieces were done in London at our main facility, but we had the entire Coney Island sequence, and big parts of both of the largest setpieces in the film were shot on the streets of Manhattan. And you can feel it. It’s one of those cool intangibles; I mean, you watch Ivan [Reitman’s] films, the ’84 and ’89 GHOSTBUSTERS, and part of it is the grit and the authenticity of the city. The other part is spectators craning their necks when a Ghostbuster runs by, or Ecto-1 screams past, and that stuff’s so cool. You can’t really define it, you can’t bottle it, but it’s part of the GHOSTBUSTERS secret sauce. You just feel that authentic interplay between the city and its citizens and the Ghostbusters.
Did you shoot a lot at the original firehouse location?
We shot the exterior quite a bit, but we also recreated both the interior and the exterior facade in the studio, at an almost unbelievable level of exacting detail. Eve Stewart, our production designer, and her team measured every square inch, not just of the firehouse but of the curb and the street in front of it. You could feel the place where the asphalt started to break away and the cobblestones were visible underneath it, just like in the TriBeCa original. For the kind of action I had to shoot in and out of that firehouse, it would have meant snarling traffic to the Holland Tunnel for weeks [laughs], so this was a more sustainable solution.
Can you talk about bringing the original stars back for larger roles this time?
Yeah, it turns out those folks know how to ghostbust [laughs], and they really like it. These characters that have now been with them for four decades have been really meaningful parts of their lives. It was an incredibly joyful and gratifying experience putting the team back together. I think they all got a taste for it in AFTERLIFE, and they love these characters and they loved being on set with each other. There’s so much camaraderie between the four Ghostbusters, and it was great giving them situations and opportunities where they were able to pick up the proton wands and save the world shoulder to shoulder again.
Did Bill Murray do a lot of his patented improvisation in the film?
Yeah, this is my second experience with Bill. We did a movie called CITY OF EMBER together, way back in 2008, and there are very few people in this world who can make me laugh as much as Bill Murray, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. We made sure to leave room for Bill to bring his brilliance into Venkman, and I’m very proud of the Venkmanisms in this film! He was given room to truly channel the character, and there were moments when I would just sit back and look at the monitor and think, “That’s Dr. Peter Venkman! There’s no other way to label what I just watched.”
Does he get to square off with William Atherton’s Walter Peck again?
[Pause] There’s a moment [laughs]! William is incredible, and it was so cool being on set and watching him. I’d had conversations with William for months leading up to it, but when he showed up on set and looked at me, and his eyes flashed with that kind of acerbic bite… He’s got this way of attacking a scene and looking at the world that was instantly transporting to 1984. It was so cool to be able to direct him as that character.
After the last scene in AFTERLIFE, any chance we’ll see Sigourney Weaver back in this one?
Sigourney is not in this story, but we are massive fans of hers, and of Dana Barrett as a character. Jason and I don’t think we’re done telling these Ghostbusters stories, so watch this space!
How was it working with young leads Finn Wolfhard and McKenna Grace?
Obviously I was around a little bit during AFTERLIFE, as a writer and Jason’s creative partner, and got to see the casting process on it, and was dazzled by the life, the ingenuity, the spark, the intelligence our young cast had, and I include Logan Kim as Podcast in that, and Celeste O’Connor as Lucky. I got to know all four of them through that process, and really cemented that during the promotional tour we all did for AFTERLIFE. The conversations started early with them about FROZEN EMPIRE, which came together very quickly. I mean, Jason and I spent a bit of time writing the script, but once we turned it in, this thing came in like a freight train; it came together as quickly as I’ve ever seen a movie come together, and so those conversations were fast and furious.
It was so cool to feel the grounding, the confidence that each of them had in their characters, and understanding that this was happening two years down the line from the story of AFTERLIFE. Each of these kids has grown in some notable way, and actually, tracking that development–both their growth as actors and their voices changing, they’re a few inches taller–all of that is part of the joy of our investment in them as an audience.
I love watching the progress of time on characters, and even though it’s just a couple of years later, those couple of years make a difference when you’re a teenager. We were able to tap into some of those transformations–not just externally, superficially, but also internally, the emotional processes, the upheaval, the searching, the instability of being a teenager and moving to a city like New York, with a new, defined destiny as Ghostbusters. All of that is fertile ground for character and drama, so it was a joy to explore that with our cast.
You have the original Ghostbusters, the new family and some fresh characters in FROZEN EMPIRE. Was it a challenge to juggle them all in the scripting and directing?
Yeah, absolutely. This film has scope, and that involves both the visual storytelling and the cast of characters. Part of that is because we have some new environments. We have the paranormal research center where characters like Lars, played by James Acaster, come to bear, and we have Patton Oswalt’s Dr. Hubert Wartzki, who is a new and hilarious character. All these new roles, by the way, were custom-written for these actors, especially the one Kumail Nunjiani plays. We started to have conversations with him right from the very beginning of our creative process on this. And it feels like one of those things that’s a huge opportunity in a GHOSTBUSTERS film: You find the best and brightest comic actors, and then you find ways to craft a character that works for that specific film.
Obviously this saga is intended to continue; has there been any discussion about where the third film might go?
Well, we definitely have a plan in motion for where the GHOSTBUSTERS storytelling universe is going. As for where Jason and I are going to take the main Spengler saga, that’s something we’re going to have to wait and see. We want to make sure audiences embrace and connect with this film, but we have some ideas, and we’re excited.
Looking at your résumé from MONSTER HOUSE on down, is it your general goal to make fantasy films that appeal to young audiences but that take the horror elements seriously?
Absolutely. When I was a young movie lover–and make no mistake, I was a movie-obsessed kid–GHOSTBUSTERS was one of those gateway films for me when it first came out, and I had that experience over and over again in theaters. As a child of the ’80s, I felt movies weren’t pulling their punches, that they weren’t insulting my aptitude for the dark side of the universe. I feel like that was something that went away in a big way when mass entertainment became a bit more homogenized. So I’m proud of the ability to tell a story that I believe in my bones is entertaining for an entire audience, but that can actually scare you. This is gonna be a fun one, and it’s also part of what makes a theatrical experience: Seeing a movie with a crowd in a dark theater carries that collective sense of giving over your safety, your control, for the time you’re in there, to be told a great story. I’m definitely still tapping into that original instinct of how to create real, unadulterated suspense for as wide an audience as possible. And GHOSTBUSTERS is the perfect vehicle for just the kinds of stories I like to tell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJDl4a25ktA
