Following yesterday’s news that he had teamed up with writer Katie Dippold to make the all-female Ghostbusters reboot, Paul Feig sat down with Entertainment Weekly to shed some light on his vision for the film. Feig put a lot of emphasis on his respect for the original films and the pressure of taking on a Ghostbusters movie especially in the wake of Harold Ramis’s death and Bill Murray’s lack of interest in continuing the franchise:
I love origin stories. That’s my favorite thing. I love the first one so much I don’t want to do anything to ruin the memory of that. So it just felt like, let’s just restart it because then we can have new dynamics. I want the technology to be even cooler. I want it to be really scary, and I want it to happen in our world today that hasn’t gone through it so it’s like, oh my God what’s going on?
As for how Feig landed on the idea to direct a movie about an all-women Ghostbusters team, he explained:
How do you come back into a world that’s had these ghosts and all this? It just felt too difficult. How do you do it and not screw it up? But then it was bugging me for the next few days because Ghostbusters is such a great thing and everybody knows it, and it’s such a great world. It’s a shame to just let this thing sit there. I want to see another one. My favorite thing to do is work with funny women. I was like, what if it was an all female cast? If they were all women? Suddenly, my mind kind of exploded: that would be really fun. And then I thought, well, what if we just make it new? It’s not coming into the world that existed before. It’s always hard if the world has gone through this big ghost attack, how do you do it again? I wanted to come into our world where there’s talk of ghosts but they’re not really credible, and so what would happen in our world if this happened today?
Feig went on to tell EW that he hasn’t yet set a cast for the film but enjoyed Bill Murray’s suggestions. “I’ve got a lot of ideas on that but nobody set in stone,” he said. “That’s part of the fun for me is figuring out what’s the best combo, what’s going to be relevant and fun. Bottom line: I just want the best, funniest cast.” Will there be nods to the original films in Feig’s reboot? “We want to do clever nods to it, but not cloying nods to it.” Is he open to cameos from the original Ghostbusters cast? “So as far as I’m concerned, anybody wants to come back I welcome with open arms. It would just be in different roles now, but it would be fun to figure out how to do that.” Finally, what’s his take on the criticism that a female-fronted Ghostbusters is too gimmicky? “I really cannot believe we’re still having this conversation … When people accuse it of being a gimmick I go, why is a movie starring women considered a gimmick and a movie starring men is just a normal movie?”
