David Gordon Green on the risks of rebooting 'The Exorcist'

Oct. 4, 2023 8:13 AM PT

Filmmaker David Gordon Green, first famous for indies like 2000’s “George Washington” and 2003’s “All the Real Girls” and now something of a horror-reboot expert, came of age in the Presbyterian Church before attending a Jesuit high school in Dallas.

“It was really interesting getting to know the difference between those two religions,” Green, 48, recently told The Times on a video call. “I guess I just always thought a church was a church. The world of demonology was something that I had never had any exposure to.”

It was around that age that he saw William Friedkin‘s landmark supernatural thriller “The Exorcist” for the first time, an act of secret defiance. “My parents were very strict about the content I could watch,” he said. “The public library had a copy of it so I could go watch it in short bursts with headphones on in a little cubicle. That’s also how I saw ‘The Shining’ for the first time.”

Out of such trespasses, directorial careers are born. Green said he still carries that kid around with him — the boy in the cubicle who guided him through a recent trilogy of updated “Halloween” movies that surprised fans and exceeded box-office expectations.

“In a weird way, making those movies was a way to confront those anxieties and demons from childhood and be able to do what I needed to do with Michael Myers,” Green said. “You’re asking me to go to my childhood, face my fears and be the curator of what happens next. For almost every one of my films, I could point to the 11-year-old in me excited to become a filmmaker.”

Green’s latest project, “The Exorcist: Believer” (in wide release this Friday), is another expression of that youthful impulse. It’s bound to draw in the curious who, casting back on their own childhoods, remember Friedkin’s classic as a sleepover rite of passage. Starring Leslie Odom Jr. as a widower whose daughter unwittingly welcomes in a malevolent entity, the new movie echoes back to the original, while telling its own distinct tale.

“‘The Exorcist’ is the holy grail of [horror movies],” the director said. “I thought if I’m ever going to do another one, this would be the tallest mountain to climb, so why not get that out of the way?”

Green is refreshingly honest about the kind of work that has come to dominate his career, beginning in 2018 with “Halloween” and extending through 2021’s “Halloween Kills,” 2022’s “Halloween Ends” and, potentially, two more “Exorcist” sequels.

“Love them or hate them, these are movies that there’s a large degree of interest in, that people want to see, and they make smart business,” Green said. “Tentatively we’ve got a road map for two more movies, but I’m going to let this film become real first.”

Studio head Jason Blum, whose Blumhouse co-produced “The Exorcist: Believer” along with Green’s “Halloween” trilogy, confirms that more installments are planned, films that will “evolve as we see the reaction,” he said. Blum has made a reputation as a supporter of original horror stories, such as Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” and Gerard Johnston’s “M3GAN,” but he also knows what goes into a reboot.

“When you’re doing a continuation of an iconic movie, you need something close enough to the original movie that it makes sense to use the title, but not too close that it feels like you’re ripping it off,” Blum said. “And I think what compelled me most about David’s story is it checked both of those boxes.”

Green’s screenplay, co-written with Peter Sattler, evolved from a deep dive into the ritual of exorcism itself, indelibly written into public consciousness by Friedkin’s original, but universally recognizable across several different faiths, not just Christianity.

“It got really overwhelming because most [religions] do [it],” said Green. “So there’s a huge world of opportunity for storytelling and exposing an audience to something that they may not know. Being able to study the different rituals through a variety of religions is fascinating from a writer’s exploration, but also brings something fresh to the genre.”

A man in a gray overshirt looks into the lens.

Green opened up his narrative to include many different religious perspectives, including those of a Pentecostal preacher, a root doctor and a Baptist clergyman.

“In the opening of the film, we got a real Haitian priestess to do a blessing and it resonated with everyone,” said Green about an early scene. “It shook us. It was a beautiful, emotional, physical, vibrant, musical ceremony and it was one take, 12 minutes long. We edited it, but it’s undoubtedly profound. I didn’t know at the time the words she was saying, the song she was singing, what exactly was happening, but you feel that charisma, that magic in the air.”

Unlike the first “Exorcist” and its conservative undertones, which aim to proselytize the “power of Christ” against Satan (and, by extension, the early 1970s teenage counterculture), Green says his film has no immediate sociopolitical context.

“To me, it’s a love story,” he says. “It’s about finding faith, not necessarily in an established infrastructure of religion but maybe in your community, in your family. The belief in something larger than yourself is really important and pertains to every religion and everybody on this Earth. There’s no road map to what’s above and beyond. You can read every Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking book, but at the end of the day you’re like: What the f—?”

Green clearly takes the material seriously — seriously enough to approach “The Exorcist’s” Ellen Burstyn for guidance, first as an adviser, then as a full-fledged onscreen participant. She updates her Oscar-nominated performance as Chris MacNeil, formerly an actor, now a successful author after publishing a book about her brush with evil for parents undergoing similar phenomena.

A man and a woman have a discussion in a hospital.

“I called her up and said, ‘I want to know you, because you are one of the essential ingredients in this legacy,’” said Green. “And we started swapping books — from spiritual texts to reference points for this character and her journey — and found something that felt really applicable to what Chris might have been doing.”

He also consulted Burstyn about how best to ensure the mental well-being of the younger actors on set. (Notoriously, the 1973 production was trying for all involved.) “Believer” employed a team of coordinators led by self-described soul coach Carla Duren to ensure the “spiritual safety” of the cast and crew, Green says.

“We had the amazing Carla Duren come in as a real balance to all the various perspectives,” said Green. “Not just of the themes of this movie, but to the crew. You’ve got hundreds of people surrounding this climactic sequence, but we’re all bringing energy to the scene. And so having Carla come in and bring a little bit of peace to that inner circle was really valuable. Sometimes, that’s doing research and talking through the dialogue. Sometimes it’s burning sage and doing some kind of traditional healing.”

There has always been this attentiveness to Green, sensitive to the softer, natural notes of his surroundings. (Around the time of “George Washington,” he was often compared to Terrence Malick.) That artist is still at work, even if the work now involves blood, crucifixes and vomiting high schoolers.

The director, who lives in South Carolina, says the time he spent driving between Charleston and Savannah, Ga., to shoot “Halloween Ends” was a major source of inspiration for “The Exorcist: Believer.”

“Going through the low country, it’s a place that’s beautiful and curious,” Green said. “This place that’s drenched with history, theory, mythology, ceremony, music, creation. It’s a very vivid and rich environment, and that’s one of the things that drew me when I moved here many years ago. And so that’s where the story started, literally, on those road trips: Spanish moss and old oak trees and just thinking about different philosophies and different parts of the world than you grew up in.”

He mentioned Beaufort, S.C., as a place where he once saw a ghost. “That changed my life,” he said. “It was something unexplainable and endlessly fascinating.”

Uniquely sincere and a veteran showman, Green does not elaborate. His movie will do that for him.

Director David Gordon Green brings his inner 11-year-old to his ‘Exorcist’ reboot

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