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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Wes Craven

Looking

You

Direction

" 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. "

" I think being Jewish has been covered really well but almost nothing about being fundamentalist Protestant. For years, I've had a movie in my mind called 'Total Immersion' that looks to my life as a kid where you're immersed in this different worldview from almost everybody around you. "

" Basically, I've found that if you have two films that don't perform well, it doesn't matter that you've had a bunch of successful ones. The phone stops ringing, and after 'Deadly Blessing' and 'Swamp Thing,' that's what happened. "

" In general, I don't even have the luxury of rehearsal time on most films that I make. It is just a scene-by-scene full cast read through. It's very much just doing the rehearsal sometimes the day before, at the end of the day, but just on the spot as the scene unfolds. "

" 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'm the kind of director, at any given moment, an idea occurs to me, I'll just do it. "

Wes Craven

Kind

Just Do It

" I was always told that films were evil and such, but I started to realise what a load of crap it was that something this good should be forbidden. I had been allowed to read as much as I wanted when I was younger, so I recognised great art when I saw it; I just didn't realise it would be at the cinema as well. "

" You just find the best actors that you can. There's an inherent drama within the framework of scares and killings and all that. In 'Scream,' there is very real drama that would be in almost any drama. "

" A friend introduced me to Bob Shaye. He was one of the most remarkable men I've ever met. He was a Fulbright scholar, an excellent chef, and very knowledgeable about the arts. "

" There will always be times where you think, 'What went wrong? Why wasn't that one more popular?' You can't always figure that out, especially if you think you've done the best job you can do and was interesting to you. I mean, 'My Soul to Take,' I thought should have done much better, and I still like that film a lot. "

" 'Last House' offended a lot of people. The results in the theaters, even in Boston, reminded me a bit of things from when I was studying Theater of the Absurd, and the rise and the appearance of Ionesco plays, and things like that. "

Wes Craven

Boston

Appearance

" My brother and I both used to worry about dying at 40 because our father died at 40. That probably wasn't terribly rational, since my father led a rather unhealthy lifestyle, shall we say. "

" I never went to film school, so I never had the chance to be rejected. "

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

" 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. "

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

" It's great to be thought of as the master of anything. Even idiocy. Master of idiocy, Wes Craven. But if it's master of horror or fear or whatever, that's great. "

" I can see that I give my audience something. I can see it in their eyes, and they say 'Thank you' a lot. You realize you are doing something that means something to people. "

" All I'm doing is rearranging the curtains in the insane asylum. "

" In high school, we would give away rulers to our friends that said, 'Jesus loves you.' I couldn't put together the concept that Jesus loves you, but if you don't love him back, you'll burn in hell forever. I worried, 'I'm rejecting the Holy Spirit, so I'm definitely going to burn in hell.' "

" 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. "

" I went to a Christian college. You would be expelled if you were caught in a movie theater. It was ridiculous. "

" I like to think I'm making films in the film business where movies are making enough numbers for the studios to let me keep working, but you also want those films to have content that makes you proud you made the film. That's not easy, but it's a fun puzzle to figure out. "

Wes Craven

Business

Fun

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

" A lot of life is dealing with your curse, dealing with the cards you were given that aren't so nice. Does it make you into a monster, or can you temper it in some way, or accept it and go in some other direction? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "