Ernie Hud­son, now 63, has been speak­ing with IESB about movies, act­ing and his thoughts on the third Ghost­busters movie.

IESB: When you hear all the rumors about the pos­si­bil­ity of a Ghost­busters 3 for all these years, is that some­thing you hope will even­tu­ally hap­pen, or have you just become indif­fer­ent about it because you’ve been wait­ing for so long?

Ernie: We did the first Ghost­busters, and that was really try­ing for me, in a lot of ways. I worked really hard on the movie for four months, and then the movie came out and was very suc­cess­ful, but work didn’t nec­es­sar­ily come for me, as a result of it. And then, it took five years to get the sec­ond one ready, and that was a chal­lenge, too. Now, it’s been 20 years since the sec­ond one.

I knew Bill Mur­ray really loved the fran­chise, but he was the hold-out. The dis­cus­sion with him has always been that he really wants to do some­thing excep­tional. We tapped into some­thing that was really cre­ative and dif­fer­ent with the first one, so you want to be able to bring that chal­lenge to it. The whole eco­nomic thing becomes an excuse to do noth­ing, so the ten­dency with stu­dios is, “Okay, let’s just do some­thing.” And then, because we have the audi­ence out there, even if we do some­thing bad, by the time they real­ize it’s bad, we’ll have made the money. But, I know that’s not what Bill Mur­ray wants to do, and that’s cer­tainly not some­thing I want to do.

It’s a real catch-22 because you really would love to do another one, since the fans have been ask­ing for it, but you also want to be able to stand by the work that you do. I’m really happy to have been a part of the movie. A lot of actors work for years and never find [some­thing that spe­cial]. Ghost­busters is nice to have in my fil­mog­ra­phy. Wher­ever I go, peo­ple have seen the movie and love it, so that’s really nice.

IESB: So, you’d be happy to return for another film, if they get a script together?

Ernie: I would love to do the movie, for a vari­ety of rea­sons, not the least of which is that I’d love to get paid. So, when Bill Mur­ray says, “I only want to do it if it’s some­thing really extra­or­di­nary that we can really com­mit to,” it’s a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent than my thing. I’m say­ing that I only want to do the movie for that rea­son, unless they pay me a lot of money. I’m prob­a­bly more con­scious of that. But, the fans are there. Wher­ever I go, peo­ple are always ask­ing about it. I think the stu­dio wants to do it, but hope­fully the script will be really good.

Harold Ramis is tak­ing the lead in it, from what I’ve been read­ing. I hear about it like the fans do. I saw Harold at the open­ing of his film Year One in New York, so I know that he’s been putting together a script that every­one will be happy with. I talked to Bill recently, and I know that Danny [Aykroyd] has been want­ing to do it since the day we fin­ished the sec­ond one. We’re all up for it. It just has to be some­thing we can be proud of and stand by. I’d love for it to hap­pen. I think it would be very, very cool. But, it really needs to be some­thing that makes sense. I don’t want to just do a cameo. If we’re going to do it, I want to be involved.

IESB: Did you enjoy return­ing to the char­ac­ter for the recent video game?

Ernie: I really was very happy with the game because the char­ac­ters were very much there. My char­ac­ter was totally involved. It was a lot of fun to do the voice-over, and hav­ing all the guys back to do it was really cool. So, I’m hop­ing the movie hap­pens, but I have not heard from Ivan Reit­man or the stu­dio, or any­body who signs checks. Until that hap­pens, it’s still just spec­u­la­tion. They also came out with a whole new series of toys. Wher­ever I travel, or when I was doing the play, peo­ple show up with the toys for me to sign.

Talk­ing with MovieWeb, Harold Ramis gives an over­whelm­ingly pos­i­tive pic­ture of the newly penned script. To sum­marise, the link between the Office writ­ers Gene Stup­nit­sky and Lee Eisen­berg, Harold Ramis and ulti­mately GB3 was “con­ve­nient” to the stu­dios. No new actors have been approached or signed, for the time being.

How does Egon live in 2012, Ramis shares this thoughts,

I had two ini­tial first instincts. One was that Egon had become a shaved head Bud­dhist monk. That is not going to hap­pen. The thing that I pitched for my char­ac­ter is that he’s been liv­ing in Geneva, and he works for the Insti­tute of Imag­i­nary Sci­ence. The work we are doing doesn’t require any con­cep­tual, intel­lec­tual, spe­cial, or math­e­mat­i­cal mod­els for what we are doing. Even we don’t know what we are doing. It’s that theoretical.

And on the dif­fi­cul­ties of writ­ing the sequel,

I think we are just going to try and make a good movie. The inten­tion of a sequel is not to give an audi­ence more of what they didn’t get enough of the first time. It’s to give the audi­ence some­thing that is new. We want them to feel that they are hav­ing a new expe­ri­ence of some kind. That becomes a tightrope. Yeah, we def­i­nitely are intro­duc­ing new Ghost­busters. That much is for sure. And there will be inter-dimensional crea­tures vis­it­ing New York. And we will deal with it. That’s all I am allowed to say at this point.

In August Akroyd stated the new Ghost­busters 3 script wasn’t quite ready yet. Speak­ing to the press in Bal­ti­more he casu­ally men­tioned that the script had been com­pleted and that he’d be read­ing it shortly. The project is still mov­ing along, bit by bit. Let’s hope the script is good and the film picks up some pace.

Will Slimer be mak­ing a cameo in the upcom­ing Ghost­busters movie?
I’m going to see the script in the next few hours, I’m about to read the third script, I’ve been sub­mit­ted it and we’ll see what happens.

MakingOf have posted a great inter­view with Harold Ramis with exclu­sives on the Ghost­busters 3 project. A very insight­ful look into the devel­op­ment of the poten­tial sequel.

Speak­ing with the LA Times, Dan Akroyd pro­vided a few updates on the Ghost­busters 3 project. He believes that Ivan Reit­man, direc­tor of I and II, is cur­rently too busy to take on the movie, and expresses an inter­est in see­ing his sec­ond choice, Harold Ramis, take it on. Cur­rent GB3 screen­writ­ers Lee Eisen­berg and Gene Stup­nit­sky recently worked on Year One with Ramis. Pro­duc­tion could begin by Win­ter ’09.

“I don’t put not mak­ing the third movie on Billy. We can’t do that. I’ve been very busy. Harold’s been busy, Ivan’s been busy. And a third script really didn’t coa­lesce prop­erly. And Billy, you can’t blame an artist for not want­ing to do the same thing again. He did two of them, for God’s sake. Although I’m the biggest cheer­leader as the orig­i­na­tor of the con­cept but I’ve never begrudged Billy not doing a third movie. I never said he held it up or that he refused. Hey, lis­ten, he’s an artist. You can’t force some­body into it. I’m sorry he never read my third draft because I thought it was pretty good but, look, now we’re at a point that there’s a story that he can accept and that’s going to work, and I think we’re going to be in pro­duc­tion fairly soon. We could be in pro­duc­tion by winter.”

Sto­ry­line — Akroyd says they are aim­ing for a five mem­ber ‘core’ crew, with more than one female. Some of his choices are Alyssa Milano and Eliza Dushku — nei­ther of which have been cast. Sigour­ney Weaver is now on board.

Dan Akroyd has offered up a cou­ple of Ghost­busters 3 tid­bits for us. There shall be Ghost­buster cadets, pre­sum­ably in train­ing, using all the new Ghost­buster tools that have been devel­oped since their last big NY out­ing. Harold Ramis main­tains that every­body from the orig­i­nal cast shall return, though Sigour­ney Weaver is doubtful.

“There will be a whole new gen­er­a­tion that has to be trained, and that whole new gen­er­a­tion will be led by an indi­vid­ual who you’ll all love when you meet him but I’m not going to tell you any­thing yet,” teased Aykroyd. “They’ll be lots of cadets, boys and girls, who’ll be learn­ing how to use the psy­chotron, the accel­er­a­tors and all the new stuff, the neu­ron split­ter, which is going to be the inter­planer, inter­cep­tor and all these great tools that they’re going to have, to flip from dimen­sion to dimension.”

The word, ‘Cadet’ implies there may be some sort of ghost and para­nor­mal acad­emy. And using the word ‘lots’ sug­gests there will be a large group of Ghostbusters.

Time to throw an odd­ball out there, with mere spec­u­la­tion you can see how this might spread out to form a num­ber of Ghost­buster fran­chises across the US, tack­ling the para­nor­mal every­where, rather than just NY.

At ShoW­est 2009 Sony Pic­tures Enter­tain­ment pres­i­dent, Rory Bruer, talked about their plans for movies in 2011. On the list were Spider-man 4, Men in Black 3 and Ghost­busters 3 — which are all actively being developed.

An early sum­mer 2011 release could put film­ing approx­i­mately a year from now. This announce­ment shows us that Sony are tak­ing GB3 very seriously.

Via /Film