Sarah Michelle Gellar

The folks over at Now Playing magazine recently nabbed themselves an interview with director extraordinaire Sam Raimi and his producing partner Rob Tapert . They talked a little bit about the evolution of the recently announced sequel to their huge horror hit THE GRUDGE. Part of the interview is below.

On director Takashi Shimizu coming back for the sequel:

"He [Shimizu] came to America, to Los Angeles, and we met with him in a little room on the Columbia Pictures lot and hammered out an outline for the first draft of part two. And he’s planning, I think, on working in the same subtle, elegant way that he made the first film in."

On creating a storyline for the sequel:

"Sam and myself sat with the producer Taka [Ichise], the writer Stephen Susco, the director Shimizu-san, our partners from Ghost House Pictures, and probably 10 of us in a room like seven and eight hours a day going over stuff. So it was kind of a creative free for all for all of us," says Tapert, while also pointing out that THE GRUDGE 2 will stand apart from the other versions, both American and Japanese, of the tale. "The second one is much more of a standalone movie than the first one was. In fact, there are very few elements in the second one, at least where it is right now, that are derivative of previous works. The first one kind of borrowed from all of the previous movies that have gone before. And this one is going in a new direction and that’s one of the reasons that the director is interested. He’s kind of told the story so many times that he didn’t want to go back and revisit what he’s done, and it was only that he and the writer had some new ideas that they wanted to explore in terms of The Grudge that brought them back."