The Monster House and The City Of Ember director Gil Kenan talks to us about remaking horror classic Poltergeist.

Heres our conversation from the very beginning.

GK: Bodies are falling left and right here…

Its quite alarming to hear that.

Well, Im an evangelical disbeliever in the supernatural, so you cant scare me.

Thats exactly what they want to hear, Brendon.

Lets go to the other end of the spectrum and talk about reason.

Tell me how you work out some of your filmmaking choices, starting, generally, with the camera.

How much do you use process and how much is instinct?

This strips away this adult instinct to look down on children and disregard their fears and thoughts as childish.

Stereography is a language that a lot of people dont understand at all.

How did you make your choices with the 3D?

For me its an exciting and underexplored region of stereo filmmaking.

Can you cite a choice in this film that youre pleased with?

It ramps up the natural sense that the foreplay is leading somewhere, its exciting and risky.

Knowing that 3D can do this too got me excited.

Another sequence where I was able to much more conspicuously was with tracking cameras.

Ill cite the example of the first electrical awakening of the house than leads to the iconic television moment.

You talked about how that horizontal shot was driven by performance.

Do you generally bring the actors in and block with them, change your plans around what they do?

Lets clarify the journey of the screenplay, then, through this.

Was there a draft when you came on board?

How did that change during the workshops and development?

Did you leave a lot of pages behind before shooting?

And did many minutes get cut out in the edit?

Ill venture to go through it in order.

I loved the central conceit that this family would begrudgingly accept their defeat in this subdivision.

And there were a lot of things I wanted to explore.

A lot of the dynamic between Sam and Ro came through those workshopping experiences.

The script had several scenes that I shot but that did not end up in the film.

Yes, who knows what well have in a few weeks time.

Ive started the process with Fox Home Video of figuring out a probably 100 minute cut of the film.

Another six or seven minutes is it?

Probably seven or eight.

So, before we go, I would like to know what was happening to yourGiantmovie.

I love that movie so much and I came so close to shooting it twice.

Both times we got into pre-production.

I hope so too.

Thank you, Gil Kenan.