WES CRAVEN INTERVIEW
That's right! Eat yer Twitchin' hearts out or Pluto might do it for ya!!! I got to sit down with several of my fellow Chi-Town scribes for a whopping 45 minute chat with none other than Wes Craven director of so many horror classics I won't bother listing them. I had read enough interviews to know I had better be on my toes and was prepared for a one on one interview but I was actually relieved it turned out not to be just me, myself and the creator of Freddy Krueger.
Wes was in town to promote his new thriller Red Eye which is generating solid fan buzz all over the country. He graciously answered our questions about all things horror in the movies and real life.
INT: Red Eye would seem like a challenging departure for you. You’ve done work outside the horror genre, but as a close as the thriller genre is it requires an intense attention to detail if you want the audience to keep suspending their belief. One mistake, a plot hole, and they’re lifted out of the film.
WC: You’re right; I could have easily fallen on my face with this one. So much depends on the drama generated between these two people that are basically immobile for a large part of the film. Whatever happened later in the film I knew it would succeed or fail based on what the two leads established early on. It was a departure from the horror genre and so it was exciting for me in that sense but also because Red Eye dealt with such intense human emotions. I had dealt with that in Scream a little with Sidney Prescott’s story but that was a little more soap opera.
INT: What was it like shooting in such a confined space?
WC: The plane was constructed in eight-foot sections. We could have moved things around but I decided I wanted to approach the shoot more like a documentary since so much depended on that feeling of being packed in such a small space. There are a few shots not in that style but it’s mostly static.
INT: At the beginning of the film you seem to be playing with 70’s film conventions where we get to meet the other passengers and expect to see their stories woven into the whole but we never really find out anything about them.
WC: I was trying hard not to do a 70’s disaster kind of thing. [Laughs] In development we wanted to do more with all those characters but we realized after awhile that they were there to help provide a sense of Rachel being surrounded by good people.
INT: The situation in the film is very reminiscent of Hitchcock where you have an innocent person forced into this evil plot but even more so when one considers that the villain is such a classic “movie” villain who plays to our fantasies about evil rather than the real life banality of it. We’re you aware of how such a character and central situation would be perceived in a post 9-11 world?
WC: I think both characters in this film are actually pretty complex. In the beginning we seem to encounter these characters in a love story. But for Cillian’s character that continues even after they’ve become these bitter enemies. He’s enraged but he can’t help but admire her courage and her ability to stand up to him. He’s even somewhat tender to her when she’s at her weakest. I think ultimately he sees himself as something like an older brother. He’s always giving her advice, “Everything will be fine if you just do what I say.” And he’s always saying ‘I’ll never lie to you!” Of course the whole first part of the film he’s telling her one lie after another.
And ultimately what makes him such a great villain is that he doesn’t see himself. He’s a total professional at what he does but what causes him to underestimate this girl is that blind spot. He sees inside her well enough control her but only up to a point. Of course what he does is take this nice, normal person whose been victimized before in her life and build her into such a furor that she finds herself capable of some really violent things.
INT: that theme of the ordinary person forced to do extraordinary violence to survive is a theme in almost all your films.
WC: I’ve always asked myself throughout my life how I’d react if I were in different situations that you read about or hear about. And mean we live in a world where people do kill one another as part of their daily lives. Who will make war among civilians? How do the machinations of the powerful affect the average person? What will people do but also how will they be changed? I think characters in my movies end up with very tough wisdom, hard earned that makes it impossible for them to go back to being who they were. They survive but who they were before doesn’t.
INT: Many of your best films like New Nightmare or People Under the Stairs contain a lot of social commentary. And Red Eye features two characters who both take orders and do what they’re told without asking questions and they’re surrounded by people who do the same. It’s only until one refuses to blindly obey those around her that things change.
WC: I liked recognizing where we are today in terms of how the powerful affect people. My brother and his wife both recently lost a substantial part of their pension and I was keenly aware of how devastating that was to them. My brother is 75 now. You think you have a parachute until you get shoved out the door.
More and more people in service industries like Rachel are just there to be pretty and efficient and never disagree, never treat the person like the asshole they really are. And that’s the class of people that are really getting hurt by all this nonsense. The only way they can survive is by being a people pleaser. No wonder airline stewardesses are grumpier.
INT: Do you think genre films are uniquely suited to holding a mirror up to society?
WC: Well it’s always freer if you’re doing a smaller picture. I’ve done some really big budget films and the studio is all over everything because there’s so much money at stake. But on smaller pictures like People Under the Stairs, which was, in basic terms, a metaphor for the Reagan era, you can do whatever you want as long as you make people scream and have a good time.
I think horror offer a great metaphor for the working stiffs because they are down in the nitty-gritty, the darkness, scrambling to make a living. There was a point after Last House On The Left when I felt trapped in the genre but then I started to see how flexible horror was. I love that about it. I was studying eastern religions when I came up with the idea for Nightmare on Elm Street and really connected with the concept that all these things we think of as being spiritual are actually about very nitty-gritty everyday stuff. What the hell are we doing here? How do we deal evil? It’s amazing what you can talk about.
INT: Has your definition of good and evil changed since Last House and your early beginnings in the adult film industry to now?
WC: I don’t think it has. I’m just exploring really. And I never think of good and evil as two discrete entities. I’m always fascinated by how quickly they blur. In Last House after the killers commit these heinous murder they find they suddenly can’t stand the blood on their hands. They’re appalled but they don’t understand what’s happened. Likewise the parents, when they take their revenge show themselves to be shattered people.
There’s something about that apparatus. We live in a country where we enjoy so many privileges but we’re unaware of the violence that makes that work, that keeps everybody else away. The only time the average person really gets behind the lies I think is in combat. A guy goes off to Vietnam or Iraq thinking they are going to help people and shoot bad guys and ends up blowing up a family because they were afraid to stop at the roadblock. Or they wind up putting electrodes on prisoners, or bags on their head or dog leashes on them- these are normal people who have been thrust into a situation. In Red Eye I think you get a good model of what happens to a person in that situation. They have to reconstruct themselves in order to survive.
INT: You’re talking about consequences but isn’t that what’s missing from most horror films today?
WC: Well, Last House was totally uncensored. We were just two guys in New York in a little tiny office. We didn’t know anything. Somebody told us that before we could get it released we’d have to get it rated. So we sent it off and the MPAA said, “We can’t figure out a way for you to fix this film.” So my producer Sean Cunningham went across the hall to someone who had an R Rated film and borrowed their negative and stuck their R rating on our film. I guess it’s the kind of thing you can do once in your life because nobody thought to sue us.[Laughs]
But of course the whole point of Last House was to show the repercussions of violence. That when people get stabbed they don’t just elegantly collapse and die quickly, that killing people does something to the person doing the killing.
The quandary for people making horror films is that the more real they make it the more threatened the MPAA seems to feel. Ironically the MPAA would rather have you show people getting machine gunned down by the dozens with little or no blood or suffering. Terminator is a great example of that. Arnold drives his vehicle into a police station and slaughter’s a bunch of police but we never see them suffer, or with their families in the hospital or laid out for funerals. The overall message ends up being that guns are cool and violence doesn’t have any consequences. You turn violence into a fantasy. You wouldn’t believe some of the notes we get back from the MPAA, section between frames 104 to 201 too intense - take out the intensity.” What does that mean?
There’s a segment of the horror film audience that would probably like to see as much blood and gore as possible. But even with these people, and I’ve met a lot of fans at conventions and what not, you find they are so sweet and gentle. It’s almost as if a lot of them use the chains and tattoos and piercing to make themselves as scary as they can because they are so sensitive to the horror of life that they respond to it by this defense.
INT: Was it good to get back on the horse after the troubled production on Cursed?
WC: It was essential. Cursed was two and a half years of trying to solve problems. Red Eye was written ready to shoot and we had the kinds of conflicts everybody has when they make a movie but I was able to make the movie I wanted without feeling like I had to be nasty or grouchy or devious.
INT: What’s next?
WC: I feel like some sort of epochal shift is happening in my life. You know when a hurricane is approaching you go out on the front porch and wait to see if it will blow you away. But even if it doesn’t it will probably be interesting. I feel really strong about Red Eye. I have two or three scripts I would do if someone put up the money, and I’d even do them without taking my normal fee. I could retire or write another novel. We’ll see.
