Busick spoke to ComicBook about building a better sequel, adding new rules to the game, more human explosions, and Grace’s final fate. Warning: This interview contains lots of SPOILERS for Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. First up, the question of Ready or Not 3. Was this Grace’s endgame? Is she truly free of everything? Or does Busick consider this a trilogy?
“Much like the Scream movies – James and I built 5 and 6 – you never know how they are going to do. You never know how they are going to be received. We don’t ever plan trilogies. We don’t even plan sequels. Of course, we are always thinking about it. Of course, there are little discussions on set of, “What would it be about?” I am not going to lie and say it hasn’t come up. I am very proud of the fact that we always look at each instalment as a complete meal. So, if that was the ending of the franchising, it would be satisfying. I don’t know what the future holds.
I know I love this character and I love this world. It’s the only franchise Ryan and I have created with the rest of the team and producers and Radio Silence. It’s important to us and special. I would just say, as I said up top, if we can’t crack the perfect idea, I wouldn’t want to do it. I wouldn’t want to tarnish what I would consider to be two really fun movies. They are probably my two favorite movies that I have ever worked on. I guess we will see what the future holds. We will see how this one does and the conversations that happen. I definitely have a notepad with some ideas scribbled down, and I know Ryan does, too. We will see.”
If you look at Scream there’s a DNA or formula baked into the narratives. How much pressure did you feel coming up with something fresh and new for Ready or Not: Here I Come, that built on the mythology of the previous chapter?
Guy Busick: That was the challenge. We didn’t want to do it if we didn’t have a reason to do it. That movie is really special for everyone involved in it. The producers, the studio, me and my writing partner Ryan, the cast… particularly Samara… It’s just a special movie to all of us. We are very proud of it and have gotten such a great response to it over the years. We were like, “If we are going to break it, don’t do it.” So, when we heard the studio, which was shortly after the first one came out, was interested in exploring a sequel, we were like, “Let’s be very gentle with this. If we mess it up, that’s going to ruin the legacy of the first one.”
It wasn’t until Ryan and I sat in a room over several sessions, and the ideas that would originally come up were not quite enough. It wasn’t quite enough of a reason to make a sequel. Then, we figured out a couple of things. In the first movie, you hear about the Van Horns, and they don’t want anyone to know what happened to them. “Didn’t they die when their house burned down? “That’s what they told you.” So, there are other families out there that have made deals with this Mr. Le Bail, aka the Devil. So, who are they? And do they have any communication with each other? Is there an organization? If so, who runs it? Who is in charge?
The other critical piece of cracking the story was at the very end, when Grace survives, and Alex has just exploded all over her, Grace, for a moment, sees Mr. Le Bail in his chair, and he gives her a quick nod. Ryan and I went, “What could that nod mean?” That’s where we came up with the idea that she’s going to be given an opportunity. Even though she’s going to be hunted again, it’s a game of survival again; if she wins, she will rule the world. We were like, “That’s a big, batsh*t crazy idea for us to justify bringing that character back and putting her through another ordeal.” The DNA has to stay the same.
It has to be a game of hide-and-seek. How do you make that more exciting? What if the hunters this time were actually quite good? What if the landscape was entirely different and wasn’t so self-contained? We wanted to give flavors to what the franchise is, which is a deadly game of hide-and-seek, and it’s this character that has to survive. It was a fun challenge, and when we hit it, it wasn’t long. I think we hit the big conceit in quite a few days. We pitched it to Matt and Tyler, the studio and the producers, and we were like, “Yep, that’s the movie.” It never really altered much from there. The specifics did because we developed it for several years.
Did you ever entertain making Grace partake in another type of game?
Sure. Yeah, I think a lot of ideas were thrown about in the blue-sky days. If we could do anything, what would be fun? What would be unexpected? Ultimately, it felt like, “No, we didn’t want to stray too far from that. What we are going to do is throw in 90 other twists that we are not seeing in the first movie and giving a third act that you will not guess, that you will not anticipate, and just keeping bigger and bigger swings. That was it. We had to top ourselves and make a better movie than the first one… And I believe we did.
Can you talk about introducing this council and giving this instalment a global flare?
That was part of the early idea, too, that there would be a council. There would be different families, but the one seat at the table would be the high seat. One family would have more power than the others. Throughout the various drafts, we had a lot of fun banter with the families. We always knew we wanted that peanut gallery, Greek-chorus club room commenting on the action. Originally, there was much much more of that, but that wasn’t really servicing story or plot, so it had to go.
But what were the perks of having that high seat? The idea that the David Cronenberg character, Chester, had sort of tortured the other council members, the other Le Domas families out in the world, and being a petty dick. It’s him saying, “I need you to bring me a cup of coffee.” And somebody going, “Ok, where are you?” “I am on top of a mountain.” He puts them through their paces because he could. You have to follow the rules, that was the whole thing in the movie. And then Grace finds one loophole in the rules, which Shawn Hatosy’s character, Titus, accidentally revealed and that’s his downfall.
Was the purpose behind Ursula’s death to set up that loophole? Or was it to establish Titus as a psychopath?
It was both. The movie is really about two pairs of siblings. One is coming back together and one is drifting further and further apart. The thing with Titus is the only thing that could keep him in check was his father and now his father is gone. Ursula thinks she can do it, too, and tries to slap him the way daddy did. Titus realizes over the course of this long day and night of Hell, “I don’t have to be anyone’s bitch and I want it all for myself. And I don’t trust you because I overheard what you just said. You were plotting against me, so I am going to get you first. I am bigger and stronger, and I am going to choke you out.”
The other little plot detail was Grace finding the loophole because he says, “It’s not against the rules to kill a family member.” As soon as they are married and it’s official, she can do it. She burns it all down. She dissolves the council. She removes herself from the entire organization and the family. She’s free. She’s reunited with her sister. It was a great journey for Grace.
How much fun was it making some of the council and some of them family incompetent boobs?
Some of them are incompetent like in the first movie. We wanted at least one of the big bads to be very capable in terms of being hunters. Titus is, obviously, scarily violent. But a lot of these rich people have never come out of their own bubbles, so they don’t really know how the real world works. And how many people have actually done this before? And like Viraj of the Rajan family, he’s a big, scary guy. They get the best of him, but it’s touch-and-go there for a minute. Little Felipe with the machine pistols is probably the most capable of the El Caido family. Francesca doesn’t even know which way is front or back. Some of them are competent. That occurred to us, too. Nobody in the first movie knew what the hell they were doing. This time, we had to amp up the stakes and make sure it’s scarier for Grace.
Ready or Not culminated with the Le Domas family blowing up into bloody smithereens. How important was it to deliver something that would top that?
We needed to top it somehow, and nothing was going to be as shocking as that first one. We wanted the very satisfying twist to be what Grace does with the ring. She now has the power to rule the world, and she’s the only person in the world who would be willing to give it up, because she’s seen what it does to people. That was the twist instead of whether the Devil is real or not. The cat is out of the bag. You can’t put it back in. That’s why we decided we are going to have to go hard. We are going to have to go fast. We have a person explode in the first 15 minutes at the hospital, and it’s in the trailer. We are saying, “No, no, no. We have somewhere to go with this. It will be satisfying. It’s going to top the first one, but not in the same way.” Sure, it does get a little bloody there in the end as certain people begin to pop like popcorn. For us, we wanted it to be a more emotional character twist that makes you feel satisfied.
One other wrinkle involves bloodlines being wiped out if a council member accidentally or intentionally murders another council member.
That was one of the first things we came up with. Then you know you have to do it once you put it out there. Writing those scenes was one of the most fun things in that whole process. By the way, as a bit of trivia, when it happens in both movies, it’s written as Paff. That’s what it sounds like when they explode. The thing that happens at the end we refer to as “Mass Paffening.” That was actually on the shooting schedule. I missed the Mass Paffening in the third act. I missed that day, and I was pretty bummed. That was all practical, too.
Last year, when we spoke, you had just returned from the Toronto set. What impressed you about the church sequence?
For Ryan and I, it was our own Temple of Doom. That’s how we wrote it and that’s what it felt like. When we had the opportunity to go up and hang out on set for a week or two, that’s immediately what we chose, which was one of the last weeks of shooting. It had been in our heads for six years and our junior-high versions would be so thrilled to know that we wrote a movie where we got our own Temple of Doom, and we go visit, and see a goat pit and a dark satanic wedding. It just tickled us. What happens every time I work with Matt and Tyler is they pull things directly out of my brain. I don’t know how they do it, but it almost looks exactly like what I imagined. Clearly, there is some kind of mind meld going on with this team. I feel very lucky to be working with them and continue to work with them in the future. We have other things planned that hopefully will surprise and delight people.
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