SPIRITUAL REAWAKENING

Long before Jason Reitman was crowned king of the noughties comedy-drama, he was the world’s first Ghostbusters fan. The son of director Ivan Reitman, who called the shots on both Ghostbusters and its ’89 sequel, seven-year-old Reitman Jr. was bewitched by the work-in-progress cuts of his father’s latest film featuring four funnymen running around New York in boiler suits, catching ghosts with the unlicensed nuclear accelerators strapped to their backs. To say the film left a lasting impression would be an understatement the size of a rampaging Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

“It was a movie that I thought about more than anything, for years,” Reitman says over Zoom, speaking to TF while tousling a mop of unruly hair that could handily be described as Egon-esque. Several of Reitman’s earliest memories are from his time on the Burbank Studio lot, where much of Ghostbusters was filmed, including the day that William Atherton’s snivelling suit Walter Peck was buried under 50lbs of ‘marshmallow goo’ (it was actually shaving foam). Reitman was on the roof of ‘Spook Central’. He attended scoring sessions and countless early screenings. Naturally, he dressed up as a Ghostbuster for Halloween.

“There’s something about those first few films you love that develops your sense of language, almost where you see other movies through them,” says Reitman who, perhaps inevitably, would go on to direct comedic films himself. “Ghostbusters was part of my early language, just as a film fan.”

To work on “you had to be a fan”, as Reitman puts it. Among the cast Paul Rudd, who turned 15 the summer hit cinemas, recalls feeling “a bit like a little kid” on the set. hit at exactly the right time for Carrie Coon, who fondly remembers watching reruns of both films on TV while guzzling CocaCola and devouring dangerously sugary cereal: “They were such a huge part of my childhood.” For star Finn Wolfhard “it really did feel like a dream being on the set”. While Mckenna Grace, who was just 13 years old at