Filming in Paris: Wes Craven said the experience was really nice. “We were kind of isolated from the rest of Paris but just the thought, I can remember just thinking between shots, ‘I’m filming in Paris; this is so fantastic.’ I’ve been to Paris many times and it’s so photogenic. I’ve often thought, ‘God, I’d love to do a film in Paris or a film in Europe.’ Suddenly there you are. It’s just a very heady feeling to be working with French people. The offices were this old building that used to, I think, repair trolley cars or something. We’d look out our office window and see this big gantry crane that used to be used. And all the people coming and going on the streets, I was just like, ‘This is really cool. It’s like the old days.’”
The Possibility of a Shocker Remake: Craven’s been hearing talk that there might be one. “The two films we did with Universal way back there, Shocker and The People Under the Stairs, are natural because Rogue Pictures is part of [that]. If you go up the chain far enough, you hit Universal. I think the one more likely to be done after we do Last House would be People Under the Stairs. I’m not sure why but we’ve found a couple of directors who really want to remake that. That would be more likely. But there’s a limited amount of us. Marianne Maddalena’s producing all these and we don’t want to kill her, so we’ll probably do one and a quarter a year, one 1/3 a year.”
Would He Be Surprised If They Remade Nightmare on Elm Street?: “I don’t know whether it’s inevitable. I wouldn’t be surprised but I haven’t heard anything. Seriously, I haven’t heard anything, but that doesn’t surprise me. They own the franchise. Nobody called me on Freddy vs Jason either, so it’s their piece of property.”
The Status of Last House on the Left: “Last House, well, it took a year to get all the legalities straight. The Hills Have Eyes was the same way. We had to find everything. It was like, ‘Do we have a contract on that? Where would it be? That turned up in a salt mine someplace,’ where business records are stored for long term storage. ‘Yeah, it’s in the salt mine. We found it.’ The Last House stuff had a lot of entanglements and everything else, so it’s taken a year to get that all straightened out. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re filming that by this fall.”
Last House means a lot to Wes Craven. “I think it’s probably the film I’ve made the hardcore fans respect the most because it’s just so brutal,” said Craven. “We don’t want to do it quite that brutal because it’s also just a great story. [Ingmar] Bergman did the story and before that it was a medieval story, so we’re going to try to split the difference. We’re trying to make a deal with a very interesting director who directed something. A Grecian, I guess, director who directed something called Hardcore about street prostitutes in Greece that I think is an amazing film. We want somebody who is a real artist who can give it his own vision.”
Craven isn’t even considering directing the remake himself. “No, I don’t think it’s good health, good creative stuff, to go back and redo your stuff,” explained Craven. “It’s hard enough to do it once. So the concept is to get a director who loves the original but isn’t in awe of it to the point where he or she won’t make their version of it. Alex Aja, I think, was the best example of somebody who went off and wrote it himself. [He] followed almost exactly the story, but then went off into the whole atomic village and the miners that was totally his own and made it his own film.”
A Modern Take on People Under the Stairs: Craven said, “The funny thing is we’re back into another Bush era. There was more in that era of Bush Sr. of the haves and the have-nots way down at the bottom and cutting social services and stuff. This Bush is so obsessed with the war that it’s not quite the same template, but we’ve had a couple directors give some interesting ideas so we’ll see.”
Wes Craven Shares His Thoughts on Digital Filmmaking: “I have nothing against it. I still prefer film. I just think it has a beauty to it. But some films don’t need that. 28 Days Later, my understanding was that was digital. I think it was terrific for that. Thirteen I believe was digital. The Michael Mann film about four years back, Collateral was digital or large parts of it were. So whatever helps you get the film into a theater, whatever is necessary. Certainly like The Hills Have Eyes 2 was shot on film but the minute it was shot on film, it was developed. I don’t know how they did it but I don’t think we had a negative. We certainly never had work prints. It was straight to digital on everything. We had all of our screenings in digital. [That’s] the first time I’d done that. I didn’t see a film version of it until we had the film totally made, at which time we found out there was a mis-registration flaw in like 80 shots that we would have seen in dailies but we never looked at dailies. We just looked at digital versions. Whatever the lab was in England screwed it up, so there are downsides to that - find out some things very late.”
Page 3: Wes Craven on Scary Movies and Being Known as a Horror Movie Director
