INTERVIEW: New documentary is a love letter to ‘Ghostbusters’
Photo: Cleanin’ Up the Town: Remembering Ghostbusters takes a close look at the classic 1980s comedy. Photo courtesy of Screen Media / Provided by Falco Ink with permission.
Director Anthony Bueno and producer Claire Bueno, brother and sister filmmakers, like Ghostbusters, the influential horror comedy movie from 1984. Honestly, they really, really like it — so much so that they have put their creativity together and crafted a new documentary called Cleanin’ Up the Town: Remembering Ghostbusters, which is now in theaters and on demand.
In the documentary, the filmmakers have access to many of the actors involved in the landmark film, plus several of the key behind-the-scenes talent. They had the chance to feature everyone from Dan Aykroyd to Harold Ramis to Ernie Hudson to Annie Potts, plus director Ivan Reitman and other creative team members. The documentary is a true love letter to a film that is still so popular there’s a sequel coming out in the next few weeks.
“It was insane fandom that brought this to life,” Anthony said in a recent Skype interview. “I’ve been a fan since I first saw it in the cinema when it was originally released, and I just loved it ever since.”
Claire concurred: “Yes, it was the first film I was allowed to go and see as a teenager without parental supervision with my friends, so it was kind of a rite of passage film for me. I remember sitting in the cinema … and me laughing at myself for being frightened because it was genuinely scary.”
Anthony has been down the making-of documentary road before. Another bullet point on his résumé is Beware the Moon: Remembering An American Werewolf in London, so it’s safe to say he is lovingly stuck in the 1980s, a decade he simply will never forget.
“I just happened to come into doing making-ofs, which was something I was interested in doing,” he said. “Then through what Claire was doing with things in front of the camera, and I was doing all this stuff behind, we said, ‘We should make one on Ghostbusters.’ Then I was in the fortunate situation to be able to talk to John Landis at one point.”
That Landis talk led to an exclusive interview with Akyroyd, one of the stars of Ghostbusters. Then the director wrote down a rough structure of what the documentary could look like, and the brother-sister team started filming in earnest in 2008. Now, several years later, the reaction to their finished product has been delightful and surprising.
“We premiered the film in Canada in Calgary where they were shooting the new Ghostbusters film, and we also premiered the film in the UK at the BFI IMAX, which was such the most prestigious thing,” Claire said. “We’re sitting there with an audience. It was thrilling and terrifying at the same time because when you’re sitting in an audience with fans of the original film, you know that they’re going to know a lot about the movie. … I think we wanted to deliver things that people wouldn’t have seen before. … Why make a film about Ghostbusters? There’s so much in the public domain already, but as people will see from the film, we have been able to retrieve archival material that’s never been seen before because we went and had it processed. So there’s lots of new information and tidbits and archive because it has been provided to us from the filmmakers themselves.”
Impressing the fans of a beloved classic like Ghostbusters is a trying experiment. As Anthony said, the fans don’t hold back if the filmmakers have missed something crucial or the narrative doesn’t feel right.
“Are they going to really like this?” Anthony asked himself. “When they all start reacting and laughing, and they’re coming to us after and saying, ‘I did not know that about that,’ or ‘I kind of knew about this, but I didn’t know it that was kind of level,’ it is very rewarding, and it gives you that kind of ease because you don’t know how people are going to react to it really.”
Claire added: “We literally were looking at each other in the cinema where people were laughing and interacting, responding to it, gasping in places where there’s some upsetting scenes, things like that. We were looking at each other in amazement because we’re like, oh my God, people are really responding to this more than we could ever have hoped for. So we’re thrilled with the fans’ response.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Cleanin’ Up the Town: Remembering Ghostbusters, directed by Anthony Bueno and produced by Claire Bueno, is now playing in theaters and on demand. Click here for more information.
