STACK #210 Apr 2022

MOVIE FEATURE

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busting,’” he laughs. “I don’t think my father ever expected me to come to him with a Ghostbusters story. We had

clearly gone on our own storytelling paths, and I thought of myself as an independent filmmaker.” Roughly ten years ago, Jason’s experience of being “the world’s first Ghostbusters fan” raised its spectral head, as he was struck with a vision of a very specific character. “It was a 12-year-old girl who finds a proton pack in a barn and, like many ideas I’ve had, I didn’t know why it just showed up,” he says. However, it was only after Harold Ramis’s death in 2014 that Jason suddenly knew who this girl was... she would be Egon Spengler’s granddaughter! "That was the story I wanted to tell – the story of a kid who finds this proton pack and discovers who she is, what her legacy is, and why she’s unique,” he says of McKenna Grace’s 12-year-old Phoebe

Director Jason Reitman follows his famous father, Ivan, into the world of ghostbusting and marshmallow men with new sequel Ghostbusters: Afterlife . W ho ya gonna call… again? Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard and Mckenna Grace prove they’re FAMILY BUSINESS

• Ghostbusters: Afterlife is out on Apr 6

ready to answer that call, facing down ghosts, ghouls and supernatural scares in Ghostbusters: Afterlife . Let’s just ignore Melissa McCarthy’s 2016 box office bomb (aside from the film’s one redeeming factor, Chris Hemsworth), because Afterlife is clearly the film that Ghostbusters fans really wanted.

who, unlike older brother Trevor, struggles to fit in anywhere. Phoebe takes after her grandfather in being a bit awkward while possessing a brilliant scientific mind, finding a bond with her new science teacher (Paul Rudd). There’s no doubt that Afterlife is a Jason Reitman Ghostbusters story, honouring the franchise that came before it while also pointing to the future. “I wanted to make a movie that was as much for my father as it was for my daughter; a generational story about a single mom with two kids who don’t know their identity and find out that they are quite special,” says Jason. “The script really made me cry the first time I read it. It captured the spirit and joyfulness of the first movie,” noted Ivan prior to the film’s

when his father brought him to the set of Ghostbusters in 1984. “I remember being on the top of Dana’s apartment building,” he recalls. “Before anyone knew what a terror dog was or what a proton pack was, I was watching a stunt man get pelted with shaving cream as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man exploded. I went home with a little piece of marshmallow man that sat on my shelf all the way through high school.” Consequently, the director couldn’t resist revisiting the Marshmallow Man in Afterlife – although perhaps that should read Marshmallow Men … Growing up in the family

A distant sequel to the 1984 original, Afterlife follows Coon’s single mum, the daughter of original Ghostbuster Egon Spengler (portrayed by the late Harold Ramis in the original and its 1989 sequel). Fresh out of options when she inherits her estranged father’s farm, she moves her kids (Wolfhard and Grace) to Oklahoma where they begin to unravel their family history and set about finishing their grandfather’s work, despite their mother’s reluctance. Combining franchise revival with nostalgia, the film is peppered with cameos from fan favourites, with Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts and Sigourney Weaver all reprising their characters from the earlier films. Ghostbusters: Afterlife feels especially poignant given how it represents a passing of the torch from Ivan Reitman, who directed the original, to his son Jason, already an Oscar- nominated director with critically acclaimed films like Juno and Up in the Air . With Ivan serving as producer, the nostalgia value of Afterlife became bittersweet following his death, aged 75, in February of this year. Jason Reitman was just six years old

business, Jason was drawn to depict the comedy of intimate family relationships within his work, a very different style to his father’s often outrageous comedic approach in hit films like Kindergarten Cop and Twins . Thus, over the years, whenever Jason was asked if he would ever make a Ghostbusters movie, he’d poke at that difference wryly: “I think I said, ‘There would be no

release. “Jason had a real sense of where he wanted to go in bringing his vision to a big scale movie like Ghostbusters . To funnel a family story through the large, world-saving concept of Ghostbusters seemed like a good thing.”

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