It was a little surprising when it was announced Justin Simien – best known for directing Dear White people, Bad Hair, and being announced as the showrunner for the still not produced Lando series (we’ll get to that) – would be directing a reboot of Haunted Mansion, which is also a staple ride at the Disney theme parks. This came as a surprise to Simien, too, who assumed he’d read the script and politely pass. But he wound up being impressed with Katie Dippold’s script and, well, here we are with Justin Simien’s Haunted Mansion premiering this weekend in theaters.
As you may expect with Simien’s involvement, this version has little resemblance to the 2003 film starring Eddie Murphy. LaKeith Stanfield plays Ben, a widower and former scientist who has kind of given up on life and when he’s not day drinking, he gives city tours of New Orleans. Rosario Dawson plays Gabbie, a widow and mother of a young son who gets a really good deal on an old house, but immediately discovers it’s haunted. The problem is, once you enter the house, the ghosts will haunt you wherever you go. Through a local priest (Owen Wilson), they hire the services of Ben to document the ghosts because he once built a camera that can photograph the paranormal. Thinking this is all nonsense, Ben accepts the job for the quick money but gets more than he bargained for and is now also trapped in the haunted mansion with the aforementioned characters, along with Tiffany Haddish as a psychic and Danny DeVito as a local historian.
Ahead, Simien explains why he decided to make a Haunted Mansion movie and if the people who know him best were surprised. Also, there hasn’t been an update on the Lando series for quite some time and the way Simien explains it, it’s probably not happening anytime soon, if at all.
How does this happen? Do you get wind they are making this and express interest? Did they come to you?
This one came to me. I mean, you know, you do all of the above. I write, too. I develop. All that stuff. I was in the halls of Disney, already, working on a little something with Lucasfilm, and also just trying to figure out what my next feature was. And the screenplay came in by Katie Dippold, who I adored and whose work I love. But Haunted Mansion? I knew they made a movie before. But I get this script and I think, okay, well, this will be a pretty quick read and probably, “No thanks.” And it just got me, man. I legitimately stayed up and laughed and cried. And it had been a really long time since a screenplay did that to me.
I also felt this weird connection, because I had worked at Disneyland. I was already extremely obsessed with the Haunted Mansion as a ride. And my family is from Louisiana. So I have all of this connection to the culture of New Orleans, and that mixture of voodoo and Catholicism that some of the New Orleans’ vibes come from. It was as if I made a list or something, and we went and found the perfect project for me. But it was quite organic.
It almost sounds like you had the same reaction to hearing about this that most people had the reaction when we heard you were doing it. Like, “Wait, what?”
Exactly.
But then you see the movie and it’s like, “Okay, this makes sense.”
Also, it’s kind of the fun of it, for me. I love the unexpected. I love doing things that people aren’t sure I should do. That was a surprise.
I’m curious, from your friends, did you get any like, “Wait, that’s what you’re doing next?”
I wouldn’t say anybody was as overt as that, but I certainly clocked it. I think that the general assumption – and this assumption isn’t untrue, by the way – is that especially if you are an artist, filmmaker, and you write and you have things you want to say in your work and stuff, this is sort of like a necessary evil, to go and do a big studio movie…
But it’s also kind of the dream, right?
Yeah, it’s also the dream. And it’s also kind of a miracle to get a script that is both based on existing IP, but is also totally original. It’s the first of something. It isn’t a remake. It isn’t the sequel to the other Haunted Mansion film. It’s just a totally different way about it. I think those are really, actually, really hard to find. Especially as well executed as Katie Dippold had it on the page when I encountered it.
I haven’t seen the Eddie version in a really long time. But I don’t remember it having as much gravitas as this one does.
Yeah, it’s a very different film. Different goals for that film. Different reasons to see. And that was also really refreshing about the script, too. It didn’t spend any time, whatsoever, even addressing the other film. This is just a new movie. And that gave me permission to be untethered by that film, for better and worse.
And LaKeith, he is really going for it in this movie…
He’s brilliant. He’s brilliant. I knew I needed somebody who could make audiences, particularly audiences showing up for a quadrant kind of movie, to care intimately and as fast as possible about somebody who was grieving. Somebody who kind of hates people. Somebody who is hard to get into. I mean, I talk a lot about Up with the studio and that lead character. And this is an old man that really hates everybody. And yet you just love him and you root for him. Who can do that for us? Who can bring somebody in? And I had just seen Judas and the Black Messiah. Obviously, I’ve been a fan of LaKeith for a while. But he always is doing that. He is making you so empathically connected to people that are just bizarre and hard to love.
He does that in Knives Out, as well.
He does that in Knives Out. He does that in Get Out. He does that in Atlanta. And the other thing is, I just felt like it’d be really great to surprise people. If that sort of emotional punch doesn’t work, I don’t know how interesting the rest of the story is. And I don’t know. I felt like he had some of that Johnny Depp magic, too. Like from Pirates, when we suddenly saw this weird, eccentric character actor in a leading man role. And the just cognitive dissonance of that was really fun and exciting to me.
Were there antics on this set? Because you have a lot of personalities here.
There weren’t a lot of antics. I mean, the truth is, that we’re making this movie during COVID.
Oh, right…
And it wasn’t easy. “Fun” is not the word I would ever use to describe making a movie. It certainly has fun moments. But everyone came ready to work and knew the assignment and put it on the screen. And part of that is luck. You never know what you’re going to get when you’re dealing with an ensemble of really big movie stars. But these were all really warm people who just love the craft of acting and ensemble work and finding things together. And it was really lucky. They really took to the creative environment that I wanted to create for everybody.
How are you feeling with this coming out? Because it’s like, your other movies did really well. But there are going to be a lot more eyeballs on this.
I’m ready. I’m ready. I’m ready. I’ve been ready. But I look at other people in my class of Sundance, and there are differences in our careers. There are differences in the kind of movies that they got offered and the movies that I got offered. And I have been dying to play in a sandbox this big and with resources this deep, for a while. These are the kind of movies I grew up on. And all of my stories are personal. All of my films come from a really deep, personal place and a need to put a specific thing out there in the world. But, at the same time, I’m a nerd.
But I think you bring that to this one, too.
Yeah, I would include this one. Yeah, I’ve been dying to work at this level and for people to know that I can do that. You get typecast a lot in this business. And whether or not people saw me as an indie comedy director, or as a social satirist, or as a TV creator, or whatever … to me, I’m just a storyteller. And I will make a story that is appropriate for the venue that I’m given. And this was a huge, huge venue to showcase what I can do.
I haven’t heard about Lando in a while. You mentioned Lucasfilm earlier. I know nothing’s going on right now with the strikes, but is Lando still on the table?
I don’t know. To be honest with you, I haven’t heard anything, either. The last thing I heard was the last thing the world heard.
Well, that’s not a good sign.
So, I wish I could speak on it, but I literally don’t know anything. That was something that I put a lot of time and energy into until I couldn’t anymore. It was not possible to.
I’m curious if you feel like you spent a couple of years on something, or however long it was, and nothing came out of it and you could have been doing something else?
Yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard. And what I’ve learned is that it’s par for the course. I mean, for everything you see from any filmmaker, and I can certainly say this for myself, there are so many things that were worked on that you didn’t see, that didn’t make it, that didn’t get announced. So it’s something you just got to acclimate to. I haven’t, yet, reached a level in my career where I have the privilege to say, “I just want to make this. Everything else has to stop.” I’ve got to put a lot of buns in the oven before one starts to bake. That’s the way my career’s always been. So, it is hard to invest a lot of time and creative energy into something that doesn’t go. But, at the same time, you’ve got to learn that, as an artist: you get better, the work gets better, and a lot of things are learned on a project that get pulled into another project. And there are projects that have been dead for a long time that suddenly come back to life. And there are projects that feel like a slam dunk, sure deal, that die suddenly. It’s a very volatile industry, that way.
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