Dan Aykroyd and Ivan Reitman Reminisce About Success, Slime, and More in Exclusive 'Ghostbusters' Blu-ray Clips
Bill Murray could hardly have picked a better time to offer his casting suggestions for a female-driven Ghostbusters 3: Next week, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment will release a Blu-ray set of the supernatural-comedies that raked in more than half a billion dollars in ticket sales and made an icon out of a giant walking marshmallow man. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment’s special collectors edition of Ghostbusters (celebrating its 30th anniversary) and Ghostbusters II (25 years after its release) will have a host of new special features, including an in-depth “Roundtable Discussion with Director Ivan Reitman and Dan Aykroyd.”
Reitman and Aykroyd drop all kinds of insights throughout their chat (hosted by frequent Comic-Con moderator Geoff Boucher) — and Yahoo Movies has a few clips to share:
In the first clip (above), the pair talks about the cultural phenomenon that was Ghostbusters in the ’80s, and whether or not they saw it coming. Reitman points to the moment he first shot the three O.G.’s — original Ghostbusters Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Harold Ramis — running down the streets of midtown Manhattan in their uniforms and Proton packs. “I just looked up, and saw them, and I just got this amazing shiver up my spine… I just had this sense at that moment, that we were doing something that was going to work.” Aykroyd, meanwhile, was convinced they might be making something special, once the tough-to-impress Bill Murray acknowledged as much during one of their lunch breaks.
Fans of the movies seem to love scenes involving a viscous protoplasmic ooze. “Slime was a big thing in Ghostbusters,” Reitman says. Aykroyd recalls one sequence that was particularly unpleasant to shoot, where he and Ernie Hudson had to climb out of a manhole, in their underwear, covered in “this really uncomfortable substance.” Worse, Reitman didn’t get the shots he needed, so they had to return for a second day of discomfort. “We had to climb into that hole again, and do the same thing!” Aykroyd remembers.
As far as getting to work on the second film, Reitman says the experience and also the success of the first movie (it racked up an amazing $229 million, becoming the second highest-grossing movie of 1984) prepared them well, yet also had it its downside. “We weren’t as naïve when we went into it” he explains. “But we also had this weight of this extraordinary success of our shoulders.”
