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" A friend, Sean Cunningham, who went on to do 'Friday the 13th,' was given a small budget to produce a scary movie, and he told me to write something. I'd never seen a horror film in my life; I'd fallen in love with Fellini. "

Wes Craven

Small

My Life

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" The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself. "

" If something comes along that is totally outside of horror, fine, but I find there's an immense amount of freedom within the genre. "

" I think I wrote the first draft of 'Nightmare on Elm Street' in '79. No one wanted to buy it. Nobody. I felt very strongly about it, so I stayed with it and kept paying my assistant and everything. At a certain point, I was literally flat broke. "

" You have to be aware of what the audience's expectations are, and then you have to pervert them, basically, and hit them upside the head from a direction they weren't looking. "

" Hawks is great, 'The Treasure of Sierra Madre,' 'The Big Sleep'... He could do the Salt-of-the-Earth very well. He was a very smooth director; a very good film architect in terms of his storytelling. "

" I've experienced a great deal of, you know, ostracism from the making of films. "

" I was anathema in polite society after I made 'Last House.' People literally would grab their children and run from the room. "

" I came from a very strict background. "

" My mother never saw any of my films until she was in her late 80s, and that was 'Music of the Heart' with Meryl Streep. "

" Great horror films don't win Academy Awards. "

" It's not an easy place to be - to write a horror film. You go down the stairs to the dark to find these characters. It's not a place anyone can go, and sometimes it's not a place that you want to go. "

" All of us have our individual curses, something that we are uncomfortable with and something that we have to deal with, like me making horror films, perhaps. "

Wes Craven

Horror

" My mother wouldn't even let me read DC Comics. I came from a very strict background. "

Wes Craven

Mother

Background

" I didn't see many films until I was in college teaching. "

" You want to give the person as much freedom as you can within the boundaries of being a responsible producer with a contract to a studio. It's about giving as much freedom as you can, and the more the filmmaker proves he or she is on the track that you feel good about, then you just kind of watch dailies. "

" When you have a name that means scares, you have to live with that. "

" I think everybody goes off and does their own vision. And I don't take responsibility for other people's work, frankly. It's bad enough taking responsibility for my own. "

" I didn't even know what a horror film was. I kind of made it up as I went along. "

" I have a lot of fans who are people of color. I think, if nothing else, I kind of understand that sense of being on the outside looking in, culturally. "

" The 'Scream' series is unique in that it's an ongoing murder mystery, even though it's a different killer, so if you know who that killer is, then half of the fun of the movie is gone. "

" I don't know, I always had an active dream life, and there's something so profound and wonderful about a movie. It's so alive. It's so shared. The thing of sitting in an audience and going into a dream-like state with several hundred other people that are sharing exactly what you're feeling is a profound event. "

" In the '60s, I was teaching humanities at a college in upstate New York and trying to publish a novel I'd written in graduate school. But nothing was happening. So I moved to New York City and got a job as a messenger at a place that made movies. "

" Within the structure of 'Scream 4,' there is the film within a film, but that's been part of the 'Scream' franchise since 'Scream 2,' when you had the 'Stab' franchise. "

" The thing of sitting in an audience and going into a dream-like state with several hundred other people that are sharing exactly what you're feeling is a profound event. "

" That's what's great about the horror genre is that you're getting a load of people together in the cinema at the same place and the same time, having them all experience extreme fear and come out alive at the end. It's an uplifting experience, and there's a sense of elation. "

" In 'Scream,' there is very real drama that would be in almost any drama. "

" I've done a few interviews where I realized that 9/11 was the ultimate home invasion, not to be glib about it. You know, where the place that you think is safe and the people that you think are safe and far from evil are suddenly just slaughtered by it, and you have no control over it. "

" 'Nightmare on Elm Street' wasn't that big. Over a long period of time it did very well, but this was different. 'Scream' didn't have a strong first weekend, and it went down the second, but then it kept going up. "

" I had been a college teacher. I had taught Greek mythology. "

" My goal is to die in my 90s on the set, say, 'That's a wrap,' after the last shot, fall over dead, and have the grips go out and raise a beer to me. "