| Legendary Horror Director Wes Craven Still Has Eyes - Page 2 |
| Written by Brad Balfour | ||||
| Friday, 30 March 2007 12:39 | ||||
Page 2 of 2
Q: What was the experience of writing the movie with your son, Jonathan?
Director Wes Craven has been making horror movies since his 1972 debut "The Last House on the Left"
Craven's son Jonathan co-wrote the script to help the film gain a fresh perspective
Daniella Alonso as PFC Missy and Michael Bailey Smith as the mutant Hades
Alonso and Stroup wield heavy weaponry in "The Hills Have Eyes 2"
From left: Wes Craven, Jonathan Craven, Daniella Alonso and Jessica Stroup WC: No, you can only do that when they're not watching. We're talking about doing "Last House" as our next film, with Sean Cunningham. I've ironed out the legalities of it and everything, because the film had been passed through many studios and entities, so I think we're cleared out. Q: Who owns it? WC: Essentially Sean and I, as we found out. It's funny, I've lived long enough for all these things to revert to us. Thirty years from now they'll be dead. Q: Are there any other genres you'd like to cover? WC: Romantic comedy. Q: With a horror tinge? WC: A stalker tinge. It would be funny. We actually have a script that we're trying to develop that is about that and it's a lot of fun. I think horror is very close to comedy. It's a lot of talking about the forbidden in a way that is entertaining and the timing is very similar, I think I could have a good time with comedy. Q: Would that be your next directing effort? WC: The next thing I'm starting to write is this thing for Rogue Pictures, the new Universal [production company]. This picture was very, very difficult, given the location and everything else. I kind of jumped in with both feet on this one. Going back to writing, we're working on a script which we refer to as "Bog," which was my original idea for the title, but it turns out someone else got to it first, so now we call it... that thing. Q: Can you give us an idea of what kind of picture it is. WC: No. Scary. Scary and fun. Q: What do you prefer: directing, writing or producing? WC: Well, I like the try at writing, directing and editing. I haven't edited in many years for a lot of reasons. One [reason was] because I had such a fantastic editor, but I like making the whole thing. But it is very time consuming when you're not writing anything else and I do have a company, so that's why I think for the last ten years I've pretty much been not writing. Plus the "Scream" scripts came along and they were pretty great to start with, but every once in a while I'll make a film from beginning to end. Q: Can you comment on the "Shocker" remake? WC: I hadn't brought it up, but there's talk about it. I think there's a vague offer, and probably it could conceivably be through the same Rogue deal through Universal Pictures. I'm really open to doing any of those over again if they can be done in a way that are original takes like Alexandre Aja did with "Hills." He started with the original story and then took it off in his own direction and made it something unique. Q: Is there anything in the "Shocker" remake that wasn't in the original? WC: I'll tell you one thing that wasn't in the original was that we had all of the special effects completely collapse into weeks before the mix, and it turned out that none of the opticals were actually working. I found that out from our special effects guy who was trying a technique that didn't work. I think one of Jonathan's first big jobs in film was not doing that the standard way, calling everyone that we knew. The concept was that this was a guy who could go through anything electromagnetic, I think it could lend itself to a lot of interesting visual effects without losing the personal touch. Q: When did the idea come to get rid of the dog's point of view (a much-maligned sequence in the original 1985 "The Hills Have Eyes Part II") for the remake of "The Hills Have Eyes II?" WC: I still think that was a thing where the world just wasn't ready for it. They could have just let us use a piece of old footage so we could get our time up to level. I guess I'll never live that one down.
|
