Wes Craven
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Back in 1970’s Wes Craven turned the movie world on its ear with horror films such as Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. He had even greater success in the 80’s with A Nightmare on Elm Street. But unlike many of his contemporaries who have fallen on hard times and made crappy film after crappy film, Craven has had great success in the past 10 years with the Scream franchise and his first mainstream thriller, Red Eye.

Red Eye is a very tense movie that eschews all the trappings of a traditional thriller. Lisa Reisert [Rachel McAdams] hates to fly and moments after takeoff her seatmate, Jackson Rippner [Cillian Murphy] reveals the real reason he's on board: He is an operative in a plot to kill a rich and powerful businessman and Lisa is the key to its success.

I got a chance to talk to Craven about the extra packed DVD of Red Eye, the new remake of The Hills have Eyes and much more.

Buy the DVD of Red Eye

Daniel Robert Epstein: In a lot of the extras on the Red Eye DVD many of the people interviewed, including you, make a clear delineation between horror and thriller. I know it didn’t make much of a difference to Alfred Hitchcock. Do you really see such a strong separation between them?

Wes Craven: Yeah I do, in the sense that most horror films are about something supernatural going to take your soul and destroy you, there’s a fair amount of blood involved, usually the weapon is a knife. Red Eye ends up with a guy chasing someone with a knife, but he’s not a maniac. It’s not like a series of five, six, seven murders that make up the movie. It’s much more a psychological drama. That’s why we all thought to call it a thriller rather than a horror film.

DRE: Was it always going to be PG-13?

WC: Yes. When the script came from the studio they had already made that decision. I didn’t think there was anything in Red Eye that would make it horror necessarily and they didn’t make us cut the throat scene which surprised me.

DRE: Was it really that much of a big deal for you to do a thriller that was PG-13 rather than R-rated?

WC: Yeah. Just to keep making movies you have to be able to demonstrate, that you can make movies that are commercial that get good critical attention and that move with the times. Even though it is already swinging back the other way at the time the swing was towards PG-13 caused by The Ring, The Grudge and all the little Japanese ghost story movies. Suddenly every studio didn’t want to do horror; they want to do PG-13. Even Cursed got cut down by the studio after we turned it in. I thought everything that was great about the Red Eye script could be done PG-13 anyway, so I didn’t mind having a broader audience rather than a narrower one.

DRE: Is there an R-rated or unrated cut out there?

WC: No. We used every particular thing that we shot and it was always shot to be a PG-13. I don’t know what could be put in there that could make it anymore than it is.

DRE: One thing that I notice in movies is exposition and Red Eye definitely does do that. How do you make something like exposition work in a film like this?

WC: We just tried to use only what was necessary absolutely. It was actually an experiment and we went back after we had cut the film together and had two test screenings. We had persistent questions about certain things such as, who is William Keefe [played by Jack Scalia]. That was a big problem for the audience. We shot for an extra three days and included the television appearance and explained that he was a Homeland Security official because originally he was written as a wealthy businessman which explained the woman who played his wife because she had a trophy wife look. It was [screenwriter] Carl Ellsworth’s idea and we all thought it was topical. Originally my thinking was that the audience would have fun with that because they could make up their own story. It’s not the politicians that are having hits put out on them by international groups but actually some kind of mad power game. But as soon as we changed that, the audience was happy. We tried to make everything said by the characters just part of the dialogue. Everything else we let fall by the wayside unless it was absolutely essential.

DRE: Brian Cox really seemed to transform himself for this movie. Normally he’s a little bit heavier. I figured you dyed his hair to make him seem younger so he would be more believable as Rachel McAdams’ father.

WC: I’ll take credit for that but the real truth is Brian just showed up looking that way. He had run across some diet guru, who just put him on this incredibly rigid diet. Since The Bourne Supremacy he has lost something like 40 to 50 pounds. Also he was in a play and his character looked like that. It did help since Rachel is of a certain young age and he’s at a little bit of an older age. I thought he was amazing. He only worked four days but he just came in and nailed that stuff really quickly. He’s been raving about how great it was working with me. On my part, it was the least work I’d done on the film.

DRE: I never watched any episodes of Survivor, but I did see Colby Donaldson in a very funny episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm playing himself. I’m assuming he came in and auditioned for you.

WC: Yeah. I didn’t know who he was. I hadn’t watched enough of Survivor to even know who he was. They said he was on Survivor twice. A lot of people know who he is so I read about him. He was great. He felt like a guy who could handle himself. He’s young and bright, but it feels like he could take orders from an executive. He could easily have had military service. He just seemed to fit the role of that kind of guy. I’ve seen enough of them when we did a documentary in the White House.

DRE: Was the hotel explosion the biggest one in any of your movies?

WC: It probably approaches it. We blew up a trailer in The Hills Have Eyes. We blew up a house in The People Under the Stairs, but really that was air mortars than anything else. I think that was the most ambitious, because it not only had to explode but we had to have live people in it and then we had to use the set for the aftermath. It had to explode in a way that made it look like it left parts of the structure intact. It was a very carefully contrived thing. Ron Bolanowsk, our special effects genius, and his brother rigged all that. Everyone left the building except for Ron, his crew and the two stunt guys. As far as the people in the elevator and everything else, we shot that on the blown up set afterwards. The explosion was sequenced so that when they get out past that wall in the narrow part of the corridor, they knew it was going to go, so they just dove and the stuff just blew over their heads. We were sitting outside in the rain for an hour and a half waiting for the set to be rigged up and be done just right. The whole stage shook but it was beautiful. It was only one take and it worked great.

DRE: I hate to use the word Hitchcockian because it’s so overused so let’s say DePalmaesque

WC: [laughs] He was very Hitchcockian so you might as well go back to the first.

DRE: This film had a very different look from your previous films. Did you test for that look or did you know what you were looking for when you picked your cinematographer?

WC: I’m actually a little lazy about cinematographers. I’ve seen Wes Anderson’s pictures, which [director of photography] Bob [Yeoman] had shot. I recently got married and my wife was a Disney executive who did all of Wes Anderson’s films. She said, “Bob’s really great to work with. He seems like the relaxed kind of guy you like to work with.” He was really great. His crew was wonderful. I think he had the best focus puller I’ve worked with in 35 years of making movies. The guy was an absolute, stone genius. We were shooting anamorphic with tons of close ups. Every single pull was spot on. Rachel’s eyes were always crisp as diamonds and it was amazing to watch because she was always moving around. I felt like I was in such good hands with the camera crew.

DRE: Alright, Wes, now I get to ask you some questions I’ve wanted to ask since I was a kid. I don’t know how proud you are of this film but Deadly Friend scared the hell out of me when I was younger.

WC: It did? Well I’m glad. I always cringe when I hear that one because it had such a weird process. It was going to be my first big studio film and it turned out to have eight producers and they all had different ideas about how it should be. So, there were just tons and tons of conflicting notes on it. Then it didn’t score well with audiences so they told me to punch it up and I wrote a couple dream sequences. We also knocked the woman’s head off with a basketball. Then it tested really high but then the ratings board just crucified the film. They just tore everything I had done apart. At the same time I was getting divorced so it was just a horrible period. It was like one of those years from hell. I’m glad it did something on the right side of the ledger.

DRE: Well, I apologize for bringing it up, but that final shot with that robot screaming BB sends chills up my spine even now.

In one of your first films, Last House on the Left, you exhibited a fondness for gadgets and traps. That that all seemed to come to a head with People Under the Stairs where the whole house was a trap.

WC: I was fascinated by houses, and in general I still am. I was raised in the part of the country that had the classic three-story house, with the attic, two floors of living space and then the basement. To me, it easily symbolized the zeitgeist of the family or of a character. I just felt they were very evocative. All the stuff in People Under the Stairs, I used to do as a kid. I used to spy on my sister by going down to the cellar during the summer and sticking my head in the door. I could hear everything from all of the rooms because all the ducts came down to one chamber in the furnace. This was back in the day when furnaces had a lot of space on the inside because they were coal burning.

DRE: No matter how many times I see interviews with actors in your movies, people always eventually ask the question, “What’d you expect Wes to be like?” and they always say you’re a sweet nice guy. It seems that the reporters still expect you be this Renfield-like fly eating character. When is that going to end?

WC: I don’t know. I’ve been doing a lot of films that have been low budget so I’m always working with new actors. But I certainly can feel there’s a change in perception in that a lot of actors want to work with me now. I’ve picked up a reputation as an actor’s director, which is great. I’m getting scripts now that are at the fringes of the genre and some that are completely out of it. It feels like I’ve made that transition in people’s lives. That’s a great thing for me because I never set out to be just a horror film director. Although I’ve enjoyed the hell out of it, I also wanted to be able to do other types of films, too. I’m glad I’ve lived long enough and stayed sharp enough so that now I can do films like Red Eye, which is quite different from my normal fare.

DRE: Do you have another Music of the Heart type film in you?

WC: Yeah, actually I do. We have something called Starstruck that’s something I want to do late next year. Right now I’m starting pre-production on an HBO psychodrama called Swango [written by Brian Keith Nelson] that’s based on the life of an actual doctor who poisoned over 70 of his patients.

DRE: Do you have a cast yet?

WC: No, we’re just starting up but we’ll shoot in March. Right after that, I want to do Starstruck unless something else comes along. We just got contacted yesterday by somebody who’s interested in doing a remake of Wait Until Dark, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. I passed on a Disney movie that was a 125 million dollar big action-type picture because I thought the script needed too much work. I didn’t feel like they’d want to cut certain things. I want to do one or two really big pictures because when I die, I want them to say, “We didn’t realize that guy had a talent that went in all sorts of directions.”

DRE: I read this book called The Fearmakers [edited by John McCarty] years ago which had about ten pages on you. It said that you won’t talk about the films that you made before Last House on the Left.

WC: [laughs] There weren’t that many. Actually I don’t think there were any before Last House. I shouldn’t even mention it, but there was a film between Last House and The Hills Have Eyes, one that you wouldn’t want your mother to see. Before that, I was a college professor, so there was one year where I was the faculty advisor to the film club. I think there were two or three shorts, plus a 45 minute long Mission Impossible spoof that we did. I think I do have the prints someplace but it didn’t even have a negative or a soundtrack. It really is just totally amateur. Beyond that, Last House was certainly the first feature that I did.

DRE: I know that Abel Ferrara just got his soft-core type films released, but he’s a lot crazier than a lot of people.

WC: I’ll let people find them after I’m gone.

DRE: Do you have any idea what’s happening with the release of Feast?

WC: I just heard yesterday from my producer, Marianne [Maddalena,] that they had pulled it from release, which is very disappointing. All I can say is that whole Weinstein Company now is unsure and in all sorts of stress. Maybe they didn’t have enough funds to release it last year or something. I’d seen a cut of it and it was a lot of fun so I hope they do release it this year. It certainly deserves it.

DRE: I worked on films before I started doing this so Project Greenlight bored me but I found the horror one just riveting.

WC: It was a lot of fun, wasn’t it?

DRE: It was really amazing to watch.

How has your outlook changed on making straight up horror since working on Cursed and everything that went on with it?

WC: That really didn’t have anything to do with the genre as much as it had to do with a studio that was in a crazy period. I think Miramax was going through the separation from Disney and there was a lot of free-floating panic. They just couldn’t decide what kind of film they wanted it to be.

DRE: So you’re not leaving the genre.

WC: Oh no, I won’t leave. In fact, I want to do one more like Nightmare on Elm Street, but I want to write it myself and keep a really healthy part of the ownership. I’m tired of everybody else becoming a billionaire off of my work. When you do a film like Nightmare on Elm Street or even Scream, you make money, but the studio’s making a humongous amount of money. There’s a refreshing resurgence of smaller films made by people who found the financing themselves. I hope I have one more of those and maybe I’ll scare the shit out of people.

DRE: Are you involved with the remake of The Hills Have Eyes?

WC: Yes, a great deal. I wasn’t on the set but I frankly thought that would have been detrimental anyway. I certainly wouldn’t want some guy who’d done the original on the set with me when I was doing my own remake. But we worked very much with [co-writer/director] Alexandre [Aja] and [co-writer] Grégory [Levasseur] on the script. I read version after version and gave a lot of notes. Then I was completely there again in the post-production.

DRE: That’s great. How does it look?

WC: It looks great. It’s had some screenings and they’ve gotten rave reviews. I think it looks very positive. I’m very excited about it. We got our R rating and it’s moving very quickly towards the release date in March.

DRE: Is anyone bugging you about a Red Eye sequel? Is it possible?

WC: I think it is completely possible if you extended those characters because they had such incredible chemistry. Whether those two actors would want to come back again or would be affordable, I don’t know. But I thought it would be fascinating to have something like Rippner being held hostage by the government and needing her help for some reason. So they get thrown into bed together, so to speak. In a way that they’d be the oddball duo, they hate each other and eventually become a tight-spun team. I think Carl was sketching out stuff. I know the studio was interested. Rachel would be trickiest for them to get because she has a manager who's extremely cautious about her career. They’d have to have a really terrific script and I'd jump at that job in a minute.

DRE: It’d be interesting.

WC: It would be a lot of fun. I had lunch with Neve Campbell a month and a half ago and she said she had been approached about a fourth Scream. Right now I think she would do it.

DRE: Would you be interested?

WC: Not really. It'd have to be a situation where the gig and the money were right. Then I would have to have complete control of the film because it just got a little too nutty over there at Miramax for me. I think there's a burnout factor with that company. As much as I was a fan of their daring, their love of film and everything else, everybody who works there is like, "Let me out of here!" It just gets a little bit too crazy.

DRE: I’m sure it is a real pressure cooker.

WC: I can operate under pressure perfectly well, but it's very difficult if, like with Cursed, where you shoot for 11 weeks and then they pull the plug then make you completely rewrite the thing and then you shoot for another 45 days. Then after you turn it in, they have somebody else not only cut it down to PG-13, but shoot scenes in video and put that in your picture. If you want to play that way, do it with other directors.

DRE: Is Kevin Williamson involved with the Scream 4 sequel?

WC: I don't know. I'm just not in that loop anymore, and I'm not making any effort to be in that loop. I heard about it from Neve and she asked me if I was going to do it and I said I knew nothing about it.

DRE: I enjoyed The Fountain Society. Are you going to be writing another novel?

WC: I'd like to but they're very time and labor intensive. It would have to be some point when I had some time. I would like to write a book on how I got into the business or Wes Craven's How to Make a Horror Film. I figure that could be a lot of fun and I could tell stories about all the crazy films I've done.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/words/Wes+Craven/