Wes Craven Quotations

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.

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

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?

I learned to take the first job that you have in the business that you want to get into. It doesn't matter what that job is, you get your foot in the door.

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.

We have a romantic comedy, a road picture and a period piece that I've developed over the years, ... Now we're just putting them out there for consideration (by investors).

She has a quality that is missing in a lot of American girls now ...

I don't know where the limits of her range are. I certainly didn't find them.

For me with all this stuff, both the horror films and thrillers like this, the most interesting thing is what goes on inside people's heads, ... The rest is just the setting. She is sort of trapped in her seat, with this guy a few inches apart watching her facial expressions for clues about what she is going to do and it is just so oppressive. Even when he lets her go to the bathroom she doesn't get long to unwind.

If we shot them from the front, we had to be peering over the heads of the passengers in front of them.

There is an emotionality and vulnerability. She knows what is of value and what is not. And for another thing, she's a legend in her own time. I think everyone in Hollywood takes her very seriously.

I said, 'I don't know how to write a scary movie,' and he told me, 'Just pull all the skeletons out of your closet,' ... Over the weekend, I wrote The Last House on the Left , and those guys (in Boston) loved it. We shot it in 16 mm. It caused a firestorm of controversy, and off I went.

My whole family still lives there, ... I mean, where is Cleveland anymore? They're in Cleveland Heights, Burton, Willoughby, places like that. Mostly all over the eastern suburbs.

Without being on the set, I was very closely involved.

Those are the only two films I've made in which I have significant ownership. So you can make a deal where a studio releases your film but doesn't have final cut. You have a lot of power that you wouldn't have otherwise.

I've seen the final cut and it's a lot of fun, ... It actually turned out pretty well and it ended up with everybody thinking, 'By God, John really knows what he's doing.' He pulled it off. Absolutely. He did a real, real good job.

Rachel was one of the early names that came up. As soon as we started thinking about her, we really got excited. She has a quality that is missing in a lot of American girls now. You know, just a sense of wholesomeness. And I had seen her movies and I thought they showed such range. At one moment, she's doing 'Mean Girls,' which is sort of high-level comedy, in a way, and then she's doing this really beautiful love story.

So then it's a matter of, do you want to make movies? Yeah. Then you're going to make scary movies. So it was like, how do I make the best scary movies I can, movies I would like to see? I never went out of my way to make a single one. I don't particularly like them. My conviction is that I can do any kind of film.

The monsters are a little silly because they had no money, so obviously they can't show them for very long, ... But the film itself is a romp; a very bloody, goofy, scary one.

That's how this (movie) felt to me, a real director- actors' piece, with two people just sitting in airplane seats. It's gripping.

Alex was familiar with the location. It also meant we could spend another $2 million without taxes and union fees. As much as you don't like taking films out of the U.S., we had to do it.

Alex made the picture fresh, which was important. None of us wanted just to shoot the original script again. Alex took it and made it his own.

You can't ignore the 800-pound gorilla: There's no shortage of post-9/11 jitters. I don't think anybody likes sitting down next to a stranger for five hours.

It's kind of experiment time, ... We'll see if people get behind us, and if the picture's any good. But it has to be that people will experiment with me. If not, fine, I'll just go back to writing books or something. But I have the feeling I'm onto something.

It's a thriller, it's definitely not a horror film, but it has enough of the elements that also work in horror films like suspense.

It was the beginning of the end of my affiliation to the church,

It was a very concise, taut script, ... I simply chose not to have a standard car chase or any of that nonsense. I felt it was all about what's going on between these two characters. And the moment they're separated, I want to figure out how to get them back together again. I've actually had a lot of people thanking me for not making the movie go any longer than it had to.

It's obviously not buckets of blood; it's a psychological thriller, ... For me, it was kind of an announcement that I can step out of the horror context and hold my own with the best of them.

Everyone from Tom Cruise to Jude Law was talked about for this role - and not everyone was available, and some we couldn't afford.

Everybody's making horror films and, to me, not especially well. I don't know if it's (due to) the corporations taking over studios or what it is. But it really calls for some young filmmakers to come in and just do something from their hearts.

The audience that would see that movie, by and large, doesn't go to see horror films, ... It was a great pleasure to make, and to see Meryl (Streep) nominated (for a best actress Oscar) for it. But most of the people I run into who loved it are surprised that I made it. When you have a name that means scares, you have to live with that.

After that, everybody-assumed I must be a terrifying person who lived in a cave. We both 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 ,

I just feel it takes just one picture where it becomes common knowledge that Craven can do other things,

There's more emphasis on art and culture in Europe than there is in the United States and I think that a lot of American directors and writers are just trying to copy other American horror films, they don't pick up much in the way that European filmmakers do.

Something like Nightmare On Elm Street, to me, was kind of an examination of levels of consciousness and the pain of facing the truth, and how easy it is to fall asleep, or want to fall asleep.

I realized that I really, almost by accident, had fallen into a labyrinthine, very powerful paradigm for dealing with these things through genre films. And once I realized that and realized the power of it, and the fact that because horror films aren't, in general, studio products - studios back them sometimes, but they don't try to meddle too much, because they kind of don't want to sully their skirts - you have a lot of freedom.

I did have the resource of having taught Greek mythology and the history of Western civilization, and you can go back into the plays of Aeschylus and follow what happens when people seek revenge, and there are people plucking their eyes out. And Greek mythology is filled with all kinds of monsters and whatnot.

[I was] feeling like I'd done something horrible, "I'm a despicable person and I'm perverse," and all these things, to a sense of the power and the necessity, in a sense, of horror films and dealing with dark material.

I have felt over the years a definite progression or arc from feeling guilty about what I had done with the first one [film], because certainly there was all that fundamentalist guilt that came pouring back in.

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.

There was a generation of kids who were just kind of emulating distant heroes and wearing peace symbols, and parents who were thinking of themselves as liberal and removed from barbarity, but it also was the era of Vietnam. I very much was influenced - and I think the whole country was kind of in a state of shock - for the first time seeing the horror and cruelty of war.

I wrote, I think, half a dozen films that were completely out of genre. Comedies, love stories, even one serious film about Vietnam, and we couldn't get backing for any of it. And we both sort of drifted from making, at that time, serious money on Last House to going through it all in the course of almost three years and only getting offers to do something scary again.

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. Thinking, "My God, people actually are getting into fistfights. People are having heart attacks. People are actually trying to get into the projection booth to destroy the print."

You can look at what's happened to America in the last years and say a lot of people were asleep. A lot of people were not staying awake and watching what was going on and facing the pain of that and dealing with it.I don't care if the rest of the audience doesn't think along those lines at all, because the audience is a huge spectrum of people, from people who are introspective to people who just want to be scared and have fun, and all the points in between.

If you're in a theater, people are texting, all around you. You have the little glowing screens everywhere. Think of how annoying that can be.

I don't want to rescind American directors but I think that European directors in general, because of the size of the nations in Europe are exposed to all different cultures, they can easily travel from one distinct culture to another in a matter of hours - you can drive for two weeks across the United States and you're in the same basic culture - so there is a certain breadth of understanding and sophistication that they bring to it and frankly, in some cases they are less expensive than American directors.

It's quite rare that you make something and think that you did something that no-one else had done.

I make something I can look at and say, "That's a good piece of work, and there's some terrific directing and acting in it, and you should be proud of it."

I'm having a reputation of being somebody who will not be crazy. Not descend to doing drugs and spending an enormous amount of money, and instead delivering a product to people. Something they can sell and recoup their money and make a profit.

I think if anybody had a roll of dice with a lot of money at stake, they would not want Wes Craven and a romantic comedy.

I think that there has been a slow recognition that there's a mind at work here, and there's a skill and some bit of artistry, and that I could probably do other things. Otherwise, I don't know that I would've been given the opportunity to do Paris, Je T'Aime.

I love the fact that a lot of my audience is people from the inner city. African-Americans love my films.

I came from a very strict background. [So if you want to make a scary movie] if you were raised as a fundamentalist, just pull all the skeletons out of your closet.

A collection of masks, depicting historical figures in life and what I like to call the eternal repose.

But I made him the Deputy Secretary for Homeland Security because that added an element of political espionage.

My mother wouldn't even let me read DC Comics.

Many, many things are dangerous in our world, commercials and TV are dangerous, and so is the world of sitcoms. But nobody does anything about them because they're turning in alot of money.

I wasn't allowed to see movies when I was a child. It was against the religion I was raised in, Fundamentalist Baptist. I didn't go into a commercial movie house until I was a senior in college, and that was on the sly. It wasn't until I was in graduate school that I immersed myself in films. Then, I went to see all the films by Bergman, Fellini, etc.

Dad, girls don't fall down every time they run.

When I was a kid, I was taken to something called Telenews in Cleveland by my best friend's father. My own father was gone by the time I was 5, I think, but this man would take us to Telenews at the end of World War II, and we'd watch all these newsreels. I'd seen real stuff. That kind of stuck in my mind.

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.

I'm writing a film called 'Bug.' It's an original script, and it's not about killer insects. It's a thriller set in a high school. The bug of the title refers to a surveillance device.

If you think it, the camera will see it.

People who are kind of at the cutting edge of life and survival, and being near the nitty-gritty, like my films, and I like that.

I believe the cinema is one of our principal forms of art. It is an incredibly powerful way to tell uplifting stories that can move people to cry with joy and inspire them to reach for the stars.

As long as you keep the audience on the edge of their seats, either scare them or keep them guessing, you can put anything in there that you want.

I came to terms with living mostly in a world of horror pictures or genre pictures. I have had a few chances to get outside and do something different, like Paris, Je T'Aime or Music Of The Heart, but mostly it's been my lot. And to have created, with a few shocking films, an awareness or a perception of me as somebody dangerous and scary - that can be sold, but trying to sell me for some other kind of picture, like Music Of The Heart, was very difficult.

The first monster that an audience has to be scared of is the filmmaker. They have to feel in the presence of someone not confined by the normal rules of propriety and decency.

I think the important thing about staying creative and staying sharp and original is not to look back too much.

The experience of going to a theater and seeing a movie with a lot of people is still part of the transformational power of the film, and it's equivalent to the old shaman telling a story by the campfire to a bunch of people. That is a remarkable thing, if you scream and everyone else in the audience screams, you realize that your fears are not just within yourself, they're in other people as well, and that's strangely releasing.

I like to address the fears of my culture. I believe it`s good to face the enemy, for the enemy is fear.

Horror films don't create fear. They release it.