Halloween Heroine by Marc Shapiro -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why don't you come to my trailer?" says Jamie Lee Curtis as the Halloween: H20 cast and crew breaks for lunch. "I want to show you something." The request does not come as a complete shock. The actress who defined '80s horror in such films as Halloween and its first sequel, Terror Train, The Fog and Prom Night has been everything that many horror heroines on the '90s Fango beat have not: available to the press, honest to a fault and enthusiastic rather than condescending about the genre she's working in. But an invite to her trailer? What secrets is she hiding behind those doors? "Have a seat," she good-naturedly orders, brushing aside papers and folders from a chair. The trailer is comfortably disheveled but, laughs Curtis, nowhere near as confining as her accomodations on the original Halloween. "You haven't seen cramped until you've seen that first Halloween trailer," she laughs, a good-natured but tough tone to her voice. "Every time I turned around, I was tripping over the art department or a makeup guy. It was crazy, but it was a great situation to be in." Curtis reaches into a pile and produced a video tape, which she pushes into the VCR. "You're the only one who's seeing this," she says as she turns on the TV. "I think you're going to like it." The screen flickers on a relatively clean cut of the first 20 minutes of Halloween: H20 flickers to life. It is a dark, foreboding series of events setting up the arrival of Michael Myers, featuring a subtle mind game between Curtis and Adam Arkin, a momentary confrontation with her real life mother, Janet Leigh, and the expected teen hijinks. The footage fades to sprocket snow, then to black, and Curtis pulls the tape out. "So, what did you think?" Fango has to admit that after the total fiasco of Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers, the assembled footage looks pretty damn good. Curtis likes what she hears, and then acknowledges that returning to Halloween after 20 years later was entirely her inspiration. "It was completely my idea to come back," she says, setting back onto a couch. "I went to everybody. I went to John Carpenter and Debra Hill. I went to Miramax. I said, 'Let's go back there!' I mean, Grease just came out and it was the same fucking movie. I told everybody, 'Let's go back 20 years later, call it H20, make it a completely new movie that really rocks." And to make Halloween: H20 rock, Curtis was convinced that her Laurie Strode character had to hit rock bottom. "Laurie is an alcoholic mess!" the actress says. "She's barely functioning as a human being. I wanted to show that, unlike a lot of horror movie [characters], Laurie could not confront the terror of Michael Myers and move on to a normal life. In order for this film to work, Laurie had to be really fucked up 20 years after the fact. In this movie, the scars are still with her. For me, this is a really faithful return for Laurie, because she's totally repressed." The actress is well aware that H20 will be the first Halloween without the Dr. Loomis character, but does not look upon that as a major disappointment. "I miss Donald [Pleasence] immensely, but I don't miss Loomis. In the first movie, I never saw him," she says. "I didn't even know he exsisted until the last three minutes of the film. In the second movie, I did not see him until the last three minutes. So, for all intents and purposes, Laurie never really knew who this man was." But Curtis recalls that that did not stop the H20 filmmakers from attempting to resurrect the good doctor in one form or another in the early script stages. "What we ended up doing was a scene in which Laurie tells her boyfriend Will [Arkin] the whole story of Michael Myers. We played it like a sex game. It was creepy and emotional and, in a sense, I was Loomis." Curtis had her heart set on original director John Carpenter joining her in this Halloween reunion, and was disappointed when he passed. She was certainly familiar with the credits of eventual H20 helmer Steve Miner (having worked with him previously on Forever Young) but was cautious until he stuck his neck out on a pivitol story decision. "An early draft of the script had these parallel stories going on," she says. "We had the Laurie Strode story, and they threw in a cop who is hot on the trail of Michael Myers, and actually hired a well known actor [Charles Dutton] to play him. It was three weeks before we started filming, and Kevin [Williamson] was polishing the final draft when Steve came up to me and said, 'I want to try a draft without this cop, because we've seen this story a million times.' Steve insisted that we completely get rid of the B story and just make an A story. "I was like, 'What are you, crazy?' I really thought he was nuts. But it was absoluteky the best call that could be made, because it kept you in the movie. When it came to that decision, Steve was absolutely right on the money." Her respect for Miner grew once filmimg began. "He was the most unassuming guy I'd ever met. He didn't yell at people, and he was very specific about what he wanted. You would think that somebody would have to be totally obsessed to make this, but he was so low-key. He was fantastic." That's not entirely Curtis' reaction when she looks back on her two previous Halloweens. "The first movie was so beatifully told. It's the best. I never saw 4, 5 or 6 and, quite frankly, Halloween II stinks. It's a terrible movie. I should have never done it. The only reason I did it was out of loyalty to John and Debra. But it was definitely a mistake." As for the string of genre movies she made in the '80s in the wake of Halloween, Curtis has little to say. "I've never like horror films," she admits. "Yeah, I know I did a lot of them, but back then, they were nothing more than a job to me. I mean, making those films was a good experience for me, but bottom line, I don't like fear. Never have, never will." She turns fiesty on the subject of being an '80s scream queen. "Look at you! Pigeonholing me like that. Classifying it as '80s is shit. Is it becase Neve Campbell has come along and taken it away from me? It used to be that I just was. Now I'm of the '80s." Point of fact, Curtis and terror continue their assocition into the '90s with Mother's Boys, in which she played the villain instead of a victim. "I had to get totally insane, but in a different sort of way than Laurie. I felt a real scary vibe on that film. It's too bad it did not hit the mark." The actress' cooperative manner takes a sudden downturn when she's asked to comment on the upcoming Virus, in which she leads a tugboat crew trying to escape alien, bio-mechanical monsters on an abandon freighter. "I'll tell you plenty if you turn of the tape machine," she says of the film, which was bumped out of its August slot to January when H20's release was moved up. Curtis doesn't have much that's good to say about Virus, though all the really juicy blasts must remain off the record. But when the recorder is turned back on, she offers this much: "I never wanted to be Sigourney Weaver in Aliens," she says of her motivation for accepting the role. "The idea is bullshit. The producers sent me the comic books the movie was based on, and it turned out to be an exciting story. I had never done anything like science fiction or been in that kind of movie before in my life. The money was good and the opportunity, timewise, was good. That's why I did it. I'm not going to lie and say it was the greatest experience of my life. Physically, it was challenging; I worked really hard to make it good." Returning to H20, she has found the experience a more positive challenge. "Night shooting is never fun; it has been cold. But working with Adam has been fun and Josh [Hartnett] has been perfect as my son. Halloween movies have certain rhythms, so it took a few days to kind of get my bearings in terms of how I was suppose to react. But Laurie, 20 years later, has a lot of vitality, and that made getting into this picture a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. It's easy to act scared. But when you're dealing with Halloween, you're dealing with a whole new level of fear, and so I really had to work at it." Curtis is in the midst of explaining a particular element of the Halloween: H20 production when she suddenly stops, turning thoughtful. "You know, there's a moment in this film ... I shouldn't be telling you this, but fuck it, I'm going to tell you anyway. There is a moment in this movie when Laurie is running from Michael Myers and, suddenly, makes a conscious choice not to run anymore. I won't tell you how or why it happens, but something occurs. And when that moment occurs, it's the only time we hear the Halloween music. It's a heavy moment." Just then, there's a knock on the trailer door and the unit publicist sticks her head in. Curtis laughs. "Hey! Guess what? I just gave away a big plot point!" The publicist goes ashen. "What did you tell him?" Curtis responds, "I told them that at one point Laurie decides not to escape." The publicist is livid. "You're not going to give up that information, are you?"