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Craven turns from horror to suspense
Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Aug 20, 2005 by Dixie Reid Sacramento Bee
Wes Craven has scared the socks off us for 30 years. He brought Freddy Krueger into our nightmares, on Elm Street and elsewhere, and left us "screaming" in our sleep.
And now Craven, the director known as "the guru of gore, the sultan of slash," wouldn't mind if he never made another horror movie.
"I feel like I've done that. After a while, it really gets old," he said with a shrug.
Maybe he is finished with horror, after creating the classic "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and the "Scream" franchise, but he is not done with delivering horrifying moments on the big screen. That's because the man who longs to make a musical comedy is simply superb at suspense.
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His new movie is a thriller, called "Red Eye."
Rachel McAdams ("Wedding Crashers") is Miami hotel executive Lisa Reisert, who boards a late-night flight out of Dallas, heading home after attending a family funeral. She's pleasantly surprised to find herself seated next to Jackson Rippert (Cillian Murphy, from "Batman Begins"), who bought her a drink at the airport bar.
Flirtation turns to terror as Rippert reveals himself to be a really bad guy.
If Lisa doesn't agree to cooperate in a complex plot to assassinate America's deputy secretary of Homeland Security (Jack Scalia) at her hotel, Rippert will order the execution of her father (Brian Cox) at his home. Arrangements are to be made on an in- flight phone, which often malfunctions as the plane flies through a raging thunderstorm.
Craven created a claustrophobic setting for this ugly encounter, with his heroine literally trapped by this psycopathic killer.
Craven had been looking for a thriller when someone sent him the "Red Eye" script, written by Carl Ellsworth (TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Xena: Warrior Princess").
"I'd been kind of complaining of being stuck in the ghetto of doing horror films, so I'd been looking for a thriller to say to the world at large, 'Hey, I'm a director, OK?' " Craven said emphatically.
Craven, 66, isn't the least bit scary himself. Lanky and bearded, the one-time humanities professor and New York cabbie actually is rather sweet.
He didn't see a movie until he was nearly grown.
Craven was born in 1939, in Cleveland, Ohio, and was raised by fundamentalist-Baptist parents who did not allow him to see movies. They sent him to a strict Christian college, where films also were banned.
"The first movie I saw was 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' It was my senior year, and I could have been expelled," he said. "That's when I realized, this can't be evil."
He couldn't get enough after that. This was the mid-1960s, when European New Wave films were en vogue. So his earliest influences were not the horror flicks of the day but the works of such celluloid masters as Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Francois Truffaut.
He spent night after night in movie houses while earning his master's degree in writing and philosophy from Johns Hopkins University.
"There was a point when I fell in love with movies," Craven said, "and my department chairman told me I needed to start working on my Ph.D. I talked to friends who were doing their Ph.D.s, and they hated everything they were doing, and so I just quit and went to New York to learn how to make movies."
His family thought he was "crazy," he said, and his decision wreaked havoc on his young marriage. He went to New York alone one summer, sleeping on other people's couches and trying to find work in film while living off his small teaching salary.
When summer came to an end and he'd had no luck, he said it occurred to him that he might not have a talent for filmmaking. He returned to his wife, and got a job teaching high school English.
The following summer, he went back to New York to try filmmaking again.
"One of my (high school) students had an older brother named Harry Chapin, who wasn't Harry Chapin the singer yet. Harry was editing film at a post-production house and taught me the basics.
When a messenger was fired from the post-production house, Craven applied for the job. He ran film around town to various labs and learned what he could from Chapin, but after 10 months, not liking where the job seemed to be going, Craven quit. He drove a New York cab for a year.
Then he got a job working for Sean S. Cunningham, who was making a short film for some theater owners in Boston. Craven and Cunningham, just a couple of years apart in age, became close friends. And when the Boston contingent wanted to back a scary movie, Cunningham suggested that Craven write the screenplay.
Even though Craven did not think he could write a scary play, he came up with "The Last House on the Left" (1972), which he also directed. The Boston backers loved it, but it was so violent that it was banned in several countries and underwent heavy editing before its U.S. release. Cunningham was one of the producers.
"After that, everybody assumed I must be a terrifying person who lived in a cave. We both (he and Cunningham) tried to make other kinds of films, but we couldn't get any money. They were offering us money to make scary movies, so I went off and made 'The Hills Have Eyes,' and Sean went off and did 'Friday the 13th,"' Craven said. "And once you've done two, they think that's who you are."
