Jamies Lee Curtis & David Gordon Green Talk 'The Evolution of Laurie Strode'

Star Jamie Lee Curtis & director David Gordon Green met with the international press ahead of the Halloween Kills premiere today at Venice Film Festival. Curtis, who was also awarded a Lifetime Achievement Golden Lion Award before the highly anticipated screening, talked her career and what it's been like playing the iconic final girl Laurie Strode for more than four decades.

"Laurie/Jamie, we’re the same thing after 43 years. If you really boiled it down, the thing that made me successful in this genre is that I scare easily and naturally… I do not like to be frightened. The most exciting thing for being an actor in the same role for 43 years is that we all have changed, we’re battered and bruised and we grow… Ultimately we’re saying we are all human and you relate to Laurie because you are wounded too, and fighting back against the demons."

Reflecting on the recent entries to the franchise Curtis added Green has explored something deeper than previous films.

"I think that what David has done, particularly with the 2018 movie, was to explore something deeper."We’re actors, so the deeper you want us to go, the deeper we will go, but also it was prescient what David and company figured out: We were on a verge of a wave of women understanding their own trauma and voicing it. The collision between the reality of life and the reality of Laurie’s life… happened in a pretty profound way. We are seeing all around the world, collective community rage against the machine… The next movie amplifies that thought on an existential note to the nth degree. We’re a divided world, in the U.S., we’re are a divided country. Evil is seeming to win a bit, it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen always, but evil has won many times through history… What David has created in these three films will be very much a view into these times we live in."

Green did note that had the 2018 film not have been a success, Kills and Ends would not have gone ahead as planned.

"The immediate goal in 2018 was to make something that if it didn’t connect for any reason it would feel like its own contained movie… Upon the success, we were very thrilled to be able to activate the second chapter which builds to “operatic chaos.” Halloween Ends will be our version of meditation and resolve."

Halloween Kills, in cinemas October 15th 2021, follows up Green's 2018 sequel to Carpenter's original 1978 film. Production is soon to begin on the film which will close out the series; Curtis revealed she had just read the script on the plane over to Italy and “did not sleep” afterwards. In Halloween Kills, an injured Laurie Strode leads a vigilante mob to hunt down unstoppable killer Michael Myers and end his reign of terror once and for all.

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