At the moment when something is discovered in Sidney's rental trunk from Wes Craven's "Scream 4" ©Dimension Films; courtesy Corvus Corax Productions / Outerbanks Entertainment
Wes Craven‘s household name has been earned through a long apprenticeship in low budget (and even adult) filmmaking, where he left an earlier academic life to create the most successful series of horror films of his generation.
Although the conversation segued into something quite different, Entertainment Heartbeat begin by asking Craven about the four sequels that culminate into his latest work, Scream 4 and its DVD/Blue Ray package.
“We don’t look at the screen series as sequels,” Craven says friendly-like, but he’s clearly thought the series concept through like no one. “We really look at them as first three as building a trilogy, and the way I would set those aside from sequels is that normally sequels if they have original people at all they kill them off in the first reel, and you go onto a new cast and a new story.”
As Craven reasons, we see that his Scream films don’t deserve the series collar and that his plans for its destiny are genuinely passionate. “We have kept intact the basic overall story, the overarching story of Sidney Prescott, by having Neve Campbell being in every single one of them, and Courteney Cox and David Arquette as well, so you have that basic framework of those characters and those actors seen over a period of something like 13 – 14 years, which is quite extraordinary and we develop it then through a young cast that is brought in to keep it relevant to the young generation but we have that history to it I think is very unique as opposed to just starting off with some sort of laboratory story sequel…So this is the new trilogy of four, five, six.”
Theatrical poster of Wes Craven's "Scream 4" ©Dimension Films; courtesy Corvus Corax Productions / Outerbanks Entertainment
We were most curious about Craven‘s well-known instinct for selecting the unknown actor (or even non-actor) to best interpret his vision for a particular film. “Yeah, I guess it’s just a gut instinct; Bruce Willis, I cast him, he just happened to be coming through L.A. on his way to the beginning Moonlighting and we put him in his first film role in a Twilight Zone thing for television; Sharon Stone, her first role in The Deadly Bluffing, a small film that I directed in the late ’80s, so, yeah, you just, sometimes somebody just walks in the room and you just feel like this is somebody really special.”
Other actors Craven brought into cinema stardom were not altogether unknown but more TV-new and young. “Coutney Cox and Neve Campbell were definitely television stars, Cox from the Friends series, I thought was really appealing and strong and had a great edge to her, so, all of the characters from that series were looking for feature roles, so we kind of grabbed her and she turned out to be just terrific. Campbell had a huge following from Party of Five, so, that actually brought in the female audience in the first time in a big way to horror films.”
Craven then reminds us of someone else who came from, well, nowhere. “Johnny Depp, actually had never been in anything before, he was in a band and he was the friend of somebody that we cast in the original Nightmare on Elm Street and that friend who played the coroner said I have this pal who is in a band but he wants to try to be in movies so do you want to see him as a favor, and I said, ok, fine, and then comes this guy named Johnny Depp and he had just such an extraordinary face and sort of manner about him that we cast him as Glen, the boyfriend of the lead in Nightmare on Elm Street and that’s how he got his start in show business entirely.”
Being fans of director Don Siegel and Howard Hawks (original creator of The Thing), we ask Craven why does Hollywood remake so many classical films. “Part of it is that Hollywood is always looking for a safer bet because filmmaking in general is a huge gamble with millions of dollars kind of put on the roll of the dice with will this film work, so if they have a story that is, has beaten out and has shown to work over many, many years, a classic, they might decide to do a remake of it, but somebody reminded me that, I think The Maltese Falcon was like a fourth version of that film, with Humphrey Bogart, so, it’s not necessarily going to be a lesser film because of that.”
There’s also a remake exception that may be unique to Wes Craven. “We remade Last House From the Left and The Hills Have Eyes because the producers of that and myself were the owners of it after 30 years and it turned out that we lived long enough to have ownership of it again, so we decided we wanted to experiment to remake them. But sometimes it’s just that there’s not enough new material out there or enough brilliant ideas in the mind of young horror film writers and directors to make something completely fresh. I know when both Scream came out and when Nightmare on Elm Street came out they were at the end of eras when they were deep into the sequelitis, Friday the 13th had gone on forever and ever before Nightmare on Elm Street even, there were many, many sequels just before Scream One came out, so, sometimes you just need a totally new idea to sort of break that chain.”
With the Home Video of Scream 4, we ask Craven what other features are in the new package. “There’s a funny reel with all the crazy things our editors put together that happened on the set. There’s at least a half dozen scenes that were taken out because the picture was a bit long…and they’re very good scenes in their own right,” Craven is such good company we don’t interrupt. “There’s also a commentary by myself and by some of the cast, so, there’s a lot of features in it. There was an alternate opening as well, the script went through a lot of changes while we were in pre-production and even shooting, Kevin (writer Kevin Williamson) had lots of ideas, we shot them all, so some of the things that were, just not able to be put into the final film are in the DVD and Blue Ray.”
As Craven leaves, we do think to ask the director if he would be keeping Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette in Scream series trilogy Four, Five, Six? “Well, we can’t guarantee,” Craven deadpans. “You know, anyone can die at any time.”
Foreshadowing the doubt as to the outcome of an intention, Craven is still the most popular school professor teasing his students.