More than a decade ago Wes Craven transformed horror forever with the divinely intelligent, appreciably self-referential and deliciously plotted “Scream”. A couple of sequels later, not to mention the odd spoof (“Scary Movie”), and Craven’s returned to the fold to give audiences another bout of Ghostface.
After ten years, how did the idea of Scream 4 come into fruition and will there be a Scream 5?
Craven: How did it come about? I don’t know, how do these things come about… Bob Weinstein, of the two Weinstein brothers, is kind of the Godfather of Scream. He’s the man who bought the original script from Kevin. I think he and Kevin were talking he felt it was time. I think he originally told us after Scream 3 that there weren’t going to be any for a long time, that we didn’t want to give the idea that we were just knocking them out just to make money. And of course there was the “Scary Movie” sequence, so we needed to get some distance from that… But I think that at the end of the decade, there was just the perfect time to turn around and look at the first decade of the twenty-first century. It was quite distinctive from others and certainly the presence of the electronic media being brought down to the people, to the level where everybody is online. That’s totally different. It was time to take that into account, and at the same time the cinemas were changing very much. My step daughter’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 the fans follow the movies and participate in the movies and make their own movies to emulate those movies is profoundly different. And it was time to make a “Scream” that could perfect all this newness.
There were a lot of rumors flying about the script, it changing or being worked on. Is it true? How did you feel about it and were you satisfied with the results?
Craven: We’re all pleased the way the script turned out. It was result of Kevin’s original master script and Aaron did a decent amount of work on specific scenes and areas of it. I wrote some of the film myself but it’s very much Kevin’s concept, characters, situations…framework.
What sort of lengths did you go to in order to keep everything under wraps?
Craven: Keeping things secret was kind of spy work, you know it was… everything from when we did original casting… with hundreds of young actors reading pages from the script, we couldn’t have them reading pages from the actual script. So we had them reading pages from Scream one, which was kinda bizarre. But, I don’t think we ever read with actors the actual pages from the script. So there were a lot of things like that that were kinda annoying, but necessary to keep things secret.
None of you have played these characters for a while, – was it easy to get back all the mannerisms and get your head back into the franchise?
Campbell: Yeah (laughs). I mean, yeah. It’s been 15 years now we’ve been doing these characters and so it’s not difficult to jump into. I mean, I had fun watching the films again before we started doing this, just to get a sense of it. It’s still really nice to see they’ve held up really well. But no, it wasn’t difficult to get into the characters. For Sidney, it’s just imagining her circumstances and doing it.
Cox: You always play it so real. Neve was good.
Campbell: Yeah, thanks. So were you.
Cox: Aww. Yeah. (laughs)
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