The Haunted Mansion is one of the most iconic rides in all of the Disney Parks and there is a new major motion picture based on it in theaters right now. IGN had the chance to speak to the film’s director, Justin Simien, about bringing the ride and Jaime Lee Curtis’ Madame Leota from the parks to the big screen — and whether he believes in ghosts himself.
The Haunted Mansion first opened at Disneyland in 1969 and has since opened at every Disney Resort around the world except for Shanghai Disney Resort. There was a film from 2003 starring Eddie Murphy based on it and now a new take on the ride is in theaters that stars Curtis, LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, and more.
We asked Simien, who actually worked as a Cast Member at Disneyland Resort back in the early 2000s, how he went about bringing the Haunted Mansion to life once again.
“Well, with a movie, I’m pretty strict about it having to tell the story,” Simien said. “This is a story about a very specific guy who is moving through grief and is learning to accept the parts of himself that kind of annoy him, vis-a-vis people like [Hadish’s] Harriett and Owen Wilson’s character Kent, and these people that he would never choose to be locked in a house with in any other situation.
“But they all kind of represent parts of him that he needs to make peace with, at least in my mind, and that is how I see the story. So, if we come across something that we really love and that we really thought was cool, and it helped us tell that story better, then we do it. If it doesn’t, it’s got to wait. And it’s really that simple. I love all of the fun things that we got to do in this movie, but it doesn’t matter to an audience, and it doesn’t matter to me, if it doesn’t bring them through this journey that we’re doing right now.”
From the Crystal Ball to the Big Screen
One of the biggest things that did make the cut was Madame Leota, the legendary spirit of a psychic medium who can be seen in the crystal ball on the ride. While she was initially modeled after Disney Imagineer Leota Toombs Thomas, Jaime Lee Curtis had the honor of playing her in the film.
Simien and his team had a tough challenge ahead of them in regard to the character, however, as we’ve never actually seen Madame Leota’s full body. So, how did the team decide on what she’d look like beyond the face we glimpse in the crystal ball?
“This is the brilliance of Jeffrey Kurland, our costume designer,” Simien said. “When I first took the job, the first thing I wanted everyone to really have is a grounded understanding of New Orleans history. And to do so I introduced a cousin of mine named Jeremy Simien. He looks not unlike me, and he has this passion in life of restoring and finding artwork from Creole peoples of color that were here in New Orleans in the 1800s but had to flee when things got a little bit segregated and crazy down here.
“So, he finds these artworks all over the world and he brings them back, and it gives you a real picture of the actual people that were here and built this city and embodied it. And we poured over that material and we came up with this story. It started kind of simply, it’s like, ‘Well, when we see her outside of the ball, I still want her to have that round sort of silhouette around her head.'”
Simien elaborated and explained that Kurland then honed in on “these great Russian heiresses finding their way to New Orleans” and tried to make her look as accurate as possible and match what these women would look like back in an 1800s New Orleans.
“This was truly a global kind of hotspot around the world,” Simien said of New Orleans “And [Kurland] just kind of traced these very historically accurate lineages of the kinds of people that might have been here in the 1800s and were famous enough. So, when we meet Harriet in the present day, she’s modeling her whole look and her whole style after this woman she couldn’t possibly have known from the 1800s. And we just came up with the story that sort of made sense.
“And we don’t tell you that story, we don’t say all of that. But when you see her in her regalia, you get the sense that these choices were made, they were informed choices. And I was just so lucky to find other artists, people like Jeffrey Kurland, who really enjoy that part of it. They really enjoy the fictional research dive of it all. And that’s really how we approached all of it.”
Bringing Madame Leota to the big screen was more than just about her looks too, as they also had to make her look believable when she was in her crystal ball and not just on set with the other actors.
“First of all, the set where she appears is a practical set with a practical crystal ball,” Simien said. “We built one that she could put her head into because it was important for me to make sure when the actors were speaking to her that they were all really there. That didn’t end up working quite as well.
“So, we shoot with all of the actors around the ball, but then we also shoot with all of the actors around Jamie and this kind of motion capture rig. So we’re both using actual photography from the set combined with motion capture, with just digital animation to get the hair and to get all that other stuff righ. So it really is this kind of composite of three or four passes kind of put together.
“And it was remarkable to see it all come together because it was kind of a demand of mine from the front. It’s like nothing can just feel like, ‘Oh, you just clicked a button and made a thing.’ It has to feel like, ‘How did they do that? Where does the real crystal ball end and the digital part begin?’ And I wanted you to not really be sure. And so it took a few things to do that.”
Where Ghost Stories are Just Stories
Simien appears to be the perfect director for Haunted Mansion as he grew up with ghost stories as a part of his life. Or, as he called them, just stories. He grew up Catholic in Houston, Texas, and his mother’s family were all from Louisana and were “sort of like a Creole mix of blackness and Catholicism and Voodoo.”
“My mom would tell me stories about after her father passed and how she would see him in a cornfield and trying to get him to use the car,” Simien said. “I mean, ghost stories were just stories growing up. It was just sort of the fabric of life. And unfortunately, I lost my father at a really young age. I lost my grandmother. I’ve lost some folks and I think a lot of people have that experience.
“But every time I’ve lost somebody really, really important to me, there’s usually one of those ghost-wink moments on the other side that I am never expecting and cannot explain in any other way than there’s something going on. Now, what does that look like? Are they literally floating around? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t where they go. I don’t know where they’re from, but it just seems to me that’s probably more going on than meets the eye in this life.”
In our Haunted Mansion review, we said it is a “soulful ghost story that does an unexpectedly solid job speaking to younger audiences about the afterlife, nailing the film’s appropriately spooky gateway-horror ambitions.”
For more, check out Simien’s thoughts on why old Disney films are the “most scary movies ever” and get a look behind the scenes for a look at the set of the film.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
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