In regards to those other franchises that are being remade, we must take pains to mention that we're the only one where the original creators are actually making the movie. It's a special feel of quality, like a Good Housekeeping quality.
That's one of the things we're most excited about, really, is just allowing this great, Oscar-nominated actor, giving him material to play in one of his signature roles.
Don's Mancini father was an advertising executive and I think Don really grew up and all of that stayed in his head. Some of the really great slogans we came up with, over the years, the big advertising buzz-words that we had, Don created those. It's just kind of fun just thinking about what we both love about pop culture and applying it to Chucky film and any others.
When I wrote Chuky script, I was a student at UCLA, an undergraduate and my biggest aspiration for it was that I would get my foot in a door somewhere, that I would get an agent or something and it was just beyond my wildest dreams that this big-time producer, David Kirschner.
There are things we could do like let Brad Dourif play Charles Lee Ray's brother or father , something like that, but I think any of those options would've been squarely in the horror-comedy realm.
I don't think we would be specifically remaking "Child's Play 2" and "Child's Play 3". I imagine we'd be dreaming up whole new stories.
Define the space horizontally rather than vertically in movie widescreen, 2.35:1 just having that rectangular shape and when you think of great horror movies like Halloween and Jaws that just really exploit the space so well and I just think we would have so many more opportunities in creating suspense and shocks.
One thing I would like to do, as the director, I would really like to shoot the movie widescreen, 2.35:1, which we haven't done in any of the movies yet and I think that would really provide another opportunity for scares and suspense, particularly because since Chucky, our villain, is only two feet tall, it makes sense to define the space horizontally rather than vertically. I think that will take it to another level.
After having, I think, rather successfully mined the horror-comedy aspects of this concept over the course of Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky, the fans are really telling us that they want it to be scary again. Doing the remake just provides us with a really good opportunity to bring it home, so to speak.
Brad [Dourif] would tell himself that he was not intentionally trying to mimic Jack Nicholson in any way. I think that actually bothers him a little bit. I just think maybe they have similar voices.
It just sort of suggested a very specific kind of impudence like this little-man syndrome. Chucky has this Napoleon complex. He's a little guy with a lot of rage and that really pointed us in the direction of exploiting that aspect of his character, which people always seem to enjoy.
There have been times that we've had arguments with Brad [Dourif] because he comes in with very strong ideas and, as in any working relationship, sometimes you're going to disagree, and he always goes to the mat and I've just always appreciated that attitude, that he takes it so seriously.
Brad Dourif as Charles Lee Ray, it's impossible to imagine anyone else in that role. I mean, he's just so great. Over the course of the five movies, he always just takes it so seriously, doesn't condescend to the material, whatsoever and just treats it as if he was playing Hamlet.
Chucky become a pandemic part of pop culture, definitely.
We want to stay with the animatronics because it gives you such a wonderful feel of Chucky's movement. It feels like something that has been brought to life, as opposed to a smooth piece of animation.
I've known Don Mancini for 22 years. We're dear friends. I know his humor, I know his mind.
In the first Chucky film, there's a scene in the elevator where a woman is just bringing food to a friend's home and they're in that cage elevator. She says, 'What an ugly doll,' and walks away. As the elevator begins to descend, Brad just decides he's going to drop this in and it was so simple but he just goes 'F*&k you,' and the audience went crazy. It was really a marker for us, and an evolution to understand what the potential of not just this killer, but this guy that obviously has some opinions as well.
There was a whole cut of the movie where Tom Holland decided to try a woman's voice for the voice of Chucky, proceeding from the logic that it worked with Mercedes McCambridge voicing the voice of Satan in "The Excorsist" so he thought he would give it a try. It didn't really work. Chucky just sounded kind of gay.We brought that back in Seed of Chucky.
I never expected that, 20 years later, Chucky would be considered a classic, if I may invoke that term. A golden oldie anyway, something that people still care about 20 years later.
