You know what you're getting yourself into when you sit down to watch a Scream film, but with Scream 4 the 'horror movie rules' have changed a bit. Director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson's latest excursion into the world of the Ghostface killer includes some new rules to reflect the internet age.
"Well, we both spend a lot of time on the internet," explained Wes Craven during the film's LA press conference when asked how he came up with Scream 4's new set of rules. "I think most of our lives revolve around that now. I don't know, we’re just clever fellows. Yeah, I think even old fogies like myself, and to a lesser extent Kevin, use all those things now, like it or not. So once you start using them, you have to think of the possibilities of how they could be misused too."
Reuniting with Craven for the fourth film of the successful series are Scream veterans Neve Campbell ('Sidney Prescott'), Courteney Cox ('Gale Weathers'), and David Arquette ('Dewey Riley'). Together with Craven, the returning Scream stars talked about revisiting their characters and the continued appeal of the Scream franchise.
Wes Craven, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, and Neve Campbell Scream 4 Press Conference
How did the idea of a script come up after 10 years? Is there going to be a script for Scream 5?
Wes Craven: "Through time travel? How it came about, I don’t know. How do these things come about? Bob Weinstein, of the two Weinstein brothers, is kind of a godfather of Scream. He’s the man who bought the original script from Kevin. I think he and Kevin were talking and he felt it was time. He originally told us, I think, after Scream 3 that there were not going to be any more for a long time, that he didn’t want it to feel like we were just knocking them out to make money, and of course there was the Scary Movie sequence, the series, so we needed to get some distance from that. But I think at the end of the decade there was a feeling that this was the perfect time to turn around and look at the first decade of the 21st century, and it was quite distinctive from others. 9/11, that’s hovering over things, and certainly the presence of the electronic media being brought down to the people to the level where everybody is online, everybody can Facebook, people are tweeting, all over the world, all the time. It’s totally different. So it was time to take that into account. At the same time, the cinema was changing very much. You weren’t just watching movies. I have a step-daughter that’s 20 years old, she’s watching movies on her computer or her phone. The whole business, as you well know, is changing dramatically, and the way fans follow the movies and participate in the movies and make their own movies to emulate those movies is profoundly different. So it felt like this is time to make a screenplay that can reflect all this newness."
Courteney, you're playing a journalist again. Did it give you a new point of view?
Courteney Cox: "Well, I think that I’m playing a different kind of journalist, not like you nice people. I think it’s more about she wants her own fame and she always did, so 10 years later when the murders start happening, she just wants to get really involved so she can write her book and become more famous. She has kind of a one track mind. I like that part of playing someone who’s so kind of selfish. It’s fun, but I think it’s a different kind of journalism. It’s really about fame for her, a lot of it, and telling the truth and getting it out there, but she’s pretty silly in some ways."
Was it easy to get back into character after all these years?
Neve Campbell: "Yeah. I mean, it’s been 15 years now we’ve been doing these characters, so not difficult to jump into. I had fun watching the films again before we started this, just to get a sense of it, and it was really nice to see that they still held up really well. But, no, it wasn’t difficult to get into characters. With Sidney, it’s just imagining her circumstances and doing it."
Courteney Cox: "And you always play it so real. Neve is so good."
Neve Campbell: "Thanks, so are you."
Wes, you tweeted fans locally while shooting. What were you tweeting and what lengths did you go to keep the secrets under wraps?
Wes Craven: "Well, there’s kind of two separate things. Keeping things secret was kind of spy work. Everything from when we did our original casting, obviously we didn’t have to go through it with these guys but with hundreds of young actors reading pages from the script, we couldn’t have them read pages from the actual script so we had them reading pages from Scream 1 which was kind of bizarre. But I don't think we ever read actors with the actual pages from the script, so there were a lot of things like that that were kind of annoying but necessary to keep things secret."
"The twittering and tweeting was we did everything from having contests for getting posters of the film as the posters became ready, to having contests for people to identify photographs of weird bugs that we took off of the set when we were shooting at night and all these strange bugs would be falling out of the sky. So we just kept the fans aware that we were filming and that we knew they were out there. I have to say it was very intriguing to see how quickly people answered. Our co-producer, Carly Feingold, got it all really rolling for me. People were answering within 30 seconds, 15 seconds sometimes from Germany, other parts of the world. It made me realize even in the process of filming how different this reality was from even e-mails. Just much, much quicker and worldwide."
Do you think horror movies will always be bound by rules?
Wes Craven: "I think the very essence of the Scream films is that we break the rules. We establish or state what the rules are and then we immediately break them. That started right in Scream 1 when you say, 'If you say I’ll be right back, you’ll die,' and the person that says that is one of the killers. 'If you have sex, you’ll die.' Neve’s character has the first sexual encounter of her life and she’s one of the survivors, actually. We like to establish what the rules are, but they’re really the clichés. As soon as they’re stated in the Scream films, we almost always break them. It makes the audience not know what to expect next. If they think they know what the rules are, we immediately say, 'No, you don’t.'"
How do you take the darkness off when you’re done?
Courteney Cox: "Take a hot shower."
Neve Campbell: "We were having fun during the film. We would often just go have dinner and have a nice glass of wine and have some laughs, so even during it, you’re not feeling like it’s this really intense experience or dark experience because there’s a lot of humor in these films as well. You can’t take them incredibly seriously. Part of the fun of these is that they’re self-referential and make fun of themselves."
Courteney Cox: "If it was like a devil possessed kind of movie, I probably wouldn’t do it because I’d be so scared. This, you just need to get the corn syrup off, hope that someone’s ready to hang out."
What are the challenges in bringing the story to a newer audience? You’ve got a long-established fan base, but you’ve got this new audience now.
David Arquette: "Well, it’s really interesting. We’ve done these for 15 years, and the connection we’ve all made, and that this fourth film is bringing to life the first one, and having fun with it, and there’s been 10 years in between with different horror films and technology changes. It’s just really exciting. I think with the new cast coming to this, it was really interesting to see because they’re reflections of us when we first got there. It really brings an electricity that I felt on the first film with this and I think that people with that generation who are going to discover the old stuff. I was talking to my friend’s girlfriend the other day, and she was nine when she snuck in to see the first Scream and she’s horrified of horror movies now. She can’t even see the next one. This is a 20-something year-old woman. It’s so wild, the way time flies."
Wes, everyone knows you’re a master of horror, and nobody can take that from you.
Wes Craven: "Oh, yes they can. Have you read the reviews of my last movie?"
People have been questioning the stuff you’ve been doing the last year. Is the way fans, general audiences, and critics react to this movie something that still makes you nervous? Also, there’s been some rumors on the internet that there’s been a lot of changes to the script. Are you satisfied with the results of the script that you finally used for the movie?
Wes Craven: "Well, to answer backwards – you’ve seen the movie – I’m very pleased with that. We’re all pleased with the way the script turned out, and it was the result of Kevin [Williamson]’s original master script, and Aaron did a decent amount of work on specific scenes and areas of it. I wrote sections of the film myself, but it very much is Kevin’s concept and characters and situations and overarching framework for the film. As far as the first part, worrying about what people think, yeah, you do a film like My Soul to Take and people think it sucks – that hurts. We put a lot of work into it and it’s a good film, but you go on. The good feeling about doing this film was getting back with old friends, working on something that I thought was really good, and had a chance of being a little bit more recognizable to an audience, and saved my career."
What do you think is the secret ingredient that makes Wes' movies so consistently scary?
Courteney Cox: "He’s an amazing filmmaker. David and I were talking about this earlier in an earlier interview, but he’s always – yes, he is the master of this – he’s made three of these films now, four of this particular film, and he’s always watching. He’s so current on everything. I don’t even know what MySpace is; he’s watching things and learning. He’s constantly bettering himself, his mind. He’s amazing. And the way he directs Ghostface, it’s the most... The way he has his head, 'Tilt his head!' – it’s so eerie. There’s something about Wes. He’s just like a choreographer when it comes to Ghostface. He’s just a great director."
Neve Campbell: "Shots, and timing, and music. Wes just told me today Marco [Beltrami] did all of the films, and Wes found him on the Internet. He’s now become this phenomenal composer and very successful. Wes has a really great eye and ear and taste in people, casting, writing, and all the people who get involved in the film. He’s also just phenomenal with timing, humor and with scaring people."
David Arquette: "He actually made a swinging houseplant very scary in this film. That takes incredible talent."
When you watch horror films and you come to the scary part, are your eyes fully open or partially closed? Are you a screamer?
Courteney Cox: "The last two."
David Arquette: "I just get a kick out of watching the audience, too. I love when you go to a horror film with real horror fans and everybody’s there watching, getting involved, and screaming. That’s when it’s most alive and exciting for me. Wes brings that out in these films."
Neve Campbell: "These films are a roller-coaster ride. I think they’re great fun to watch. I usually cover my eyes and scream and cry during horror films. But like David was saying, they’re just great fun."
The movie touches upon the theme of celebrity, how people perceive it, and what people do to achieve it. How do you think the definition has changed over the years and what do you think the public sees celebrity as?
Neve Campbell: "It’s definitely shifted with reality television. It’s much easier for people to become famous nowadays, and not for a whole lot of anything. So I think the mentality has definitely changed. I think that’s a bit sad. But it is what it is, and people love reality television, and we love the gossip magazines. I think maybe because there isn’t a real family here other than – we’re not too impressed with our politicians and we look for other things to look up to in some way. Whether that’s healthy, I don’t know, but it’s definitely switched."
Neve, David and Courteney, what do you think about playing alongside Hayden [Panettiere] and Emma [Roberts], the newcomers?
Neve Campbell: "It’s great! Courteney and I looked at each other and were like, 'We could be their mothers.'"
Courteney Cox: "Grandmother."
Neve Campbell: "But they were good. They came with so much enthusiasm to the project. People keep asking whether we had to show them the ropes, and they’re professionals in their own rights. They’ve had long careers already at young ages, and they came in and they did a great job."
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Scream 4 hits theaters on April 15, 2011.
