INT: Wes Craven

Last Updated on July 28, 2021

For a guy
who’s made so many brutal and memorable horror classics, director Wes Craven
is a very soft spoken guy. Craven is
currently producing a remake of THE
HILLS HAVE EYES, a film he originally directed back in 1977.
Craven’s version is a true cult classic and was caused quite a stir in
its day. With the new version being
directed by HIGH TENSION filmmaker Alexandre Aja, Craven sat down to discuss his
thoughts on his old film, the new film and the subject of remakes.

Wes
Craven

So
how do you think this compares to your film?

(Jokingly)
It’s a mere shadow… (laughs) Listen, if it’s better then mine, that’s
fabulous. I don’t know, I think
they’re both very intense films, but Alex certainly made it his own and
didn’t pull any punches.

How
excited are you that a new generation is going to see this?

I find it
very exciting, it’s a tribute to the original film I think, that it’s had
such legs and people know about it. And
that a young director like Alex literally met his closest friend Gregory
Levasseur, who’s his co-writer/producer, when they ran The Hills Have Eyes at
the house – one had heard about the film, the other said I have it, and that’s
how they met. And it’s one of the
reasons they got into the film business and I keep hearing that more and more.
As I get older, my early fans get older too, so now they’re in the
studios. As a director, first of
all, it’s just a nice thing to hear and it also gives you much more receptive
people at the studio you’re working at because the true fans have taken over
the asylum and that’s nice.

Do
you think the theme of nuclear radiation has a different impact today then when
the original film came out?

Yeah, I
grew up in the duck and cover era. I
can remember distinctly in third grade the first time they made us go out into
the hallway. Girls first and then
boys behind us. (laughs)
Cover your head! I’m on the
floor just thinking I’m gonna be incinerated.
I think the resonance to me is that there’s a sense that the
government’s doing things that are hidden from us that are very important and
that contributed to people in another part of the world being really pissed off
at us. That is the linkage.
But it might just be my interpretation, that’s kind of my sense of what
the resonance is. It wasn’t in the
first one, it was incidental, I mean I had intended for it to be the test site
where Doug had gone off and come back with a bunch of stuff, but never went
there, couldn’t afford to. I
thought half the audience might guess that was the test site because they refer
to that in the map and the other half it’s not important.

In
the original film there was a very prominent and intimate look at the deranged
family alongside the more normal one, whereas in this one the family is mostly
in the shadows. Do you feel that it
lessons the impact of what you had seen as the
vision of your original film?

I’m not
sure that it does. I know the
original intention was to take kind of mirror opposites and confront them with a
part of themselves they don’t even know they have.
The vicious people having tenderness and the tender people having
viciousness. Alex I don’t think
was interested in that, I think he had a totally different take on it.
So those people they had names and stuff, but you knew them much less,
which also worked very powerfully because you don’t have any sense of
familiarity with them at all. It was
one of the interesting things to me as a filmmaker was to see them take
something that I’d done and take it in quite a different direction in many
ways and it’s effective that way too. The
premise is kinda the same, but just a different take.

I
was really interested how you were so hands off with this, you didn’t even go
on the set. Did you see the dailies,
help with casting, what did you do on the picture?

I was very
much there in the selection of the director and the original concept.
I was very much there in the writing, tons and tons of notes and things.
When they started shooting, I was just stopping shooting Red Eye and I
was in the editing room, so it would have been impossible for me to go.
But I though a couple of times maybe on the weekend I’ll do it, but you
know what, I would be the eight hundred pound gorilla on the set, you know.
As a young director, imagining myself back then, I would not want the old
guy who done the original around, you want to be doing your own thing.
It’s like somebody in your bedroom.

Is
there something that you weren’t able to do in the original film that they
were able to do in this that you were happy with?

Well yeah,
I mean the whole town, we never could have done something like that.
We sunk everything we had into this trailer.
(laughs) I mean the car that
we used cost about two hundred dollars – and it wouldn’t make it over the
hill. It was an extremely limited
budget, we didn’t have cranes, we didn’t have a dolly, we had, I think, a
crew of eleven, it was very minimal resources.
I think we got what we needed, but there was very much a Guerra
operation.

Do
you think it easier to get a horror remake made today than an original horror
idea?

Yeah, I
would suspect. My preference is a
good script. I’m serious, I
can’t tell you how many scripts I read before I find anything that I even want
to go past page ten. What you have
with a remake or a sequel is you have a movie that has been constructed by
somebody very clever cause it’s been a hit someplace else, it has a story line
that’s all set to go and basically just to make it minimal you need to plug in
new actors. And then the great part
is that the director can actually make it come alive and change it to his own
thing. But the studio knows what
they’re dealing with in a way. Studios
are always taking these humungous gambles that all of us would have a heart
attack if we had to make. So
there’s always that delicate balance between art and commerce.

To
remake a film where the original is a bonafide hit, it’s an easy sell.
But some of your early movies grew over time with their cult status…

(Jokingly)
Kind of like mold.

Yeah,
but good mold. Do you think it’s
odd to remake this film?

Yeah, but
they get a hot young director, who’s new to the genre, they get a good old
director to go out and do promotion and put his name on it.
They get a story they know is pretty good and they get a new version of
it, so there’s a lot they get right at the get go that’s important.

Are
there certain films of yours that you personally don’t want to see remade,
like Last House on the Left?

Deadly
Friend? (Laughs)

I
liked Deadly Friend!

It was one
of the most troubled films I’ve made. It
was my first studio film, there were eight producers and the all had different
ideas. No, as matter of fact I’ll
probably shock you, we are quite advanced on talks about re-doing Last House.

How
do you feel about that?

It
doesn’t bother me if it can be done well.
It needs to be a really quality film, I don’t think it should be at the
level of an assault, because if we did it at that level then you have to
literally kill people on screen or something and none of us would want to do it.
But I think it’s a really compelling story, it’s another one of those
stories where there’s that flip where the civilized family suddenly becomes
really, you know.

What’s
happening with FEAST
(which Craven executive
produced)?

The basic
thing the press needs to realize, cause they keep asking me questions, is that
most of the time when somebody is involved like myself I don’t control it at
all. So that’s controlled by what
was Dimension and is now the Weinstein Company.
And they were going to open the same weekend (as The Hills Have Eyes).
They were going to open against us and got afraid of that, I heard they
pulled it, so the answer would have to come from them.
I don’t know why, I think it’s really good.
I’ve seen it and I think it’s funny and very blood and greasy and
everything else, but just fun, you know. So
I don’t know. I think Gulager
turned out to be a hell of a director, which is what we saw early on with his
films and I don’t know. The script
for Feast was a train wreck. I
thought they’re never going to pull this off for the budget and they didn’t,
they had to get more money, cause they had 21 speaking parts plus monsters –
expensive and time consuming.