And these filmmakers brought along some talent as here are some of the actors who are involved - Nick Nolte, Gena Rowlands, Fanny Ardant, Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, Ben Gazzara, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Bob Hoskins, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Emily Mortimer, Natalie Portman, Miranda Richardson, Ludivine Sagnier, Barbet Schroeder, Rufus Sewell and Elijah Wood.
I got to see the movie and while not every short worked, as a whole I really enjoyed what the film was trying to do and absolutely recommend checking it out when it finally gets released in your neck of the woods. The best partwas the wide variety of stories that were told. Some involved couples that had been together for a long time and some are about finding love in a most unusual wayâ¦
To help promote the film Wes Craven did a press day recently and the transcript is below. He talks about how he got involved in this project as well as future remakes he might be making under his deal with Rogue Pictures. If youâre a fan of Wes or the horror genre youâll dig the interview.
As usual you can listen to the interview as well as read it, so click here to download the MP3. And if you missed my article of high resolution images from the film go
How did you get approached for this?
It came out of the blue. I canât even remember, I think it was an e-mail, âWeâre interested in you participating in this and hereâs what weâre up to. Youâll be shooting in
Was adding the ghost story element just bringing Wes Craven to it?
Maybe. I guess maybe it was. I certainly felt like Iâm not going to say Iâm not who I am but beyond that, I donât know. It was just that place is haunted by ghosts in a way in the sense that you can just feel these gigantic personalities of the people that are buried there. One of the Bonapartes is buried there and you have Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Balzac. You just walk around and itâs one great name after another. You realize sometimes giants walk the earth and a lot of them are buried here, so itâs pretty amazing.
Was doing it in French ever a consideration?
Uh, no. I couldnât write in French. It would be a disaster.
Well, have it translated.
I wouldnât trust anybody to. I need to be able to know what people are saying. It was fortunate because initially, they had mentioned that I could shoot in French if I wanted to. I donât think I could do that. But they had some kind of a deal with the French government where they had to have a certain percentage of actors that know the language, being French and it was fairly high percentage. It was something like 80%. I donât know, I havenât seen the film yet but most of it is in French, is it not? Iâve only seen my own and I saw Alexander Paineâs and I saw the Coen Brothers and the one with Ben Gazzarra while we were editing, those were around. But the rest were in French and they didnât have subtitles or anything.
How did you cast Alexander Paine as Oscar Wilde?
You know, I kind of discovered in the course of just being around the offices of that place that people had been doing cameos in each otherâs films. And then shortly after that, I got a call from Alexander Paine who Iâd never met and said, âHow are you doing? I like your films. I like your films. I hear you have a role for Oscar Wilde you havenât filled yet and Iâd love to do it. What do you think?â I said, âLetâs talk.â So he came over and he looked like yeah, that could be Wilde. Itâs not quite the famous Ambrose Pierce or whoever did those drawings of him but he has an elegance and a sort of charisma. He said, âYou can revoice me. Youâll have to revoice me.â I said okay and it was as informal as that. He came down, got wardrobe I think in an hour and showed up a couple days later when we were shooting and pulled it off beautifully.
How was it to go down to making a short?
Well, I kind of looked at it as a scene because then I could, âOkay, itâs just a scene and we have two days to shoot it. Thatâs pretty good.â The tricky part is to get the whole story of these two people into that one five minutes which was another stricture of basically you need to- - your film needs to run five- - they gave me I think 5:20 or maybe 5 and a half but it needed to be basically in that ballpark. That was tough. There were things I had to take out and so forth because it would have been too long but itâs like a haiku where somebody imposes a certain discipline that can lead to good things.
Did anybody go over with intentions for DVD?
Not that I know of. Itâs perfectly possible. I only met Vincenzo and Alexander Paine. They were the two guys that were around when I was shooting. It was kind of a long serial shoot where people would come and shoot and hang out a little bit and then go. So obviously mine was kind of in the middle and it was the one that was going the most and then Vincenzo was about to shoot I think right after I finished mine I went and played a corpse in his vampire movie and froze my butt off for a whole night. And then somebody else had shot just before us. I think Alexander Paine had just so thatâs kind of who was around.
Did you audition for this or just go after certain actors?
I just went after certain actors. Emily Iâd worked with before and we needed to do it very quickly, so I just called her up and basically she said, âOkay, great.â Rufus was- - we kind of had the strictures we couldnât bring people from the
What are you working on now or coming up?
We just finished coming off of Hills II being producer of that. That was very labor intensive. I spent quite a bit of time in
Did I hear theyâre talking about remaking Shocker?
Well, it must be out and around because somebody in the last- - the two films we did with Universal way back there, Shocker and The People Under the Stairs, are natural because Rogue Pictures is part of- - if you go up the chain far enough, you hit Universal. I think the one more likely to be done after we do Last House would be People Under the Stairs. And Iâm not sure why but weâve found a couple of directors who really want to remake that. That would be more likely. But thereâs a limited amount of us. Marianne Madedalenaâs producing all these and we donât want to killer her so weâll probably do one and a quarter a year, one 1/3 a year.
Would you be surprised if they remade Nightmare?
I donât know whether itâs inevitable. I wouldnât be surprised but I havenât heard anything. Seriously, I havenât heard anything but that doesnât surprise me. They own the franchise. Nobody called me on Freddy Meets Jason either, so itâs their piece of property.
Is the budget on your side project much higher?
Not much higher frankly.
Do you know the story?
No. Iâm not talking about it. I just think itâs bad luck.
Howâs Last House coming?
Last House, well, it took a year to get all the legalities straight because these first couple- - The Hills Have Eyes was the same way. We had to find everything. It was like, âDo we have a contract on that? Where would it be? That turned up in a salt mine someplace.â Where business records are stored for long term storage. âYeah, itâs in the salt mine. We found it.â The Last House stuff had a lot of entanglements and everything else so itâs taken a year to get that all straightened out. I wouldnât be surprised if weâre filming that by this fall.
Is that a more special film for you because it was your first?
I think itâs probably the film Iâve made the hardcore fans respect the most because itâs just so brutal. We donât want to do it quite that brutal because itâs also just a great story. Bergman did the story and before that it was a medieval story so weâre going to try to split the difference. Weâre trying to make a deal with a very interesting director who directed something. A Grecian I guess director who directed something called Hardcore about street prostitutes in
You wouldnât do it?
No, I donât think itâs good health, good creative stuff to go back and redo your stuff. Itâs hard enough to do it once. So the concept is to get a director who loves the original but isnât in awe of it to the point where he or she wonât make their version of it. As Alex Aja I think was the best example of somebody who went off and wrote it himself, followed almost exactly the story but then went off into the whole atomic village and the miners that was totally his own and made it his own film.
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Would you work with Alex again?
Oh yeah, absolutely. I donât think I could afford him anymore though.
People Under the Stairs was such a product of its time. What would a modern take be?
Itâs not quite like- - the funny thing is weâre back into another Bush era. There was more in that era of Bush Sr. of the haves and the have notâs way down at the bottom and cutting social services and stuff. This Bush is so obsessed with the war that itâs not quite the same template but weâve had a couple directors give some interesting ideas so weâll see.
Could you see the day they remake Scream?
I wouldnât be surprised if they tried to make a Scream 4. The actors are still around. Courtney and David are out of a job. No, Courtneyâs doing a series. I shouldnât say that.
What are your feelings on digital filmmaking?
I have nothing against it. I still prefer film. I just think it has a beauty to it. But some films donât need that. 28 Days Later, my understanding was that was digital. I think it was terrific for that. Thirteen I believe was digital. The Michael Mann film about four years back, Collateral was digital or large parts of it were. So whatever helps you get the film into a theater, whatever is necessary. Certainly like The Hills Have Eyes II was shot on film but the minute it was shot on film, it was developed, I donât know how they did it but I donât think we had a negative. We certainly never had work prints. It was straight to digital on everything. We had all of our screenings in digital, the first time Iâd done that and didnât see a film version of it until we had the film totally made. At which time we found out there was a misregistration flaw in like 80 shots that we would have seen in dailies but we never looked at dailies. We just looked at digital versions. Whatever the lab was in
Ever want to do a romantic comedy?
Of course. Thatâs why I did this.
What would Wes Craven bring to a full length rom-com?
I suppose a wicked sense of humor or something but itâs always struck me as kind of weird that I fell into making scary pictures. It was pure happenstance. The first time somebody talked to me about making a film, âIâve got some money from these guys and they want a scary movie for their theaters.â I literally said, âI donât know anything about writing scary movies.â âYou were raised as a Baptist, right? Well, pull all the skeletons out of your closet.â And after that, both he and I, Iâm speaking about Sean Cunningham, neither one of us wanted to go on and make another horror film. We felt like that was enough. And we went I think almost four years individually and together trying to get other things going and just could not get any money. We knew no one in
Do you like romantic comedies?
Yeah. Occasionally. Sure, I watch whatever I feel is a good film.
Any lately?
No, not really. Have you? I mean, there was the Wedding- - what was it, Wedding planner? Wedding Crashers, that was kind of but I didnât point to that film. Something about marriage.
Was there a point you became comfortable being known as the scary director?
No. I think thereâs always a part of me that feels like, âFuck, if I had just not- - or if I had worked harder or come to
Filming in
It was really nice. We were kind of isolated from the rest of
Any thoughts of a future projects youâd like to do in the city?
No. It just seemed so unlikely I didnât think about I frankly. I had no idea how this film would come together. I just did it in a really on the run between two or in the middle of two big press conference tours. It was like do the best you can and then [zoom noise] youâre off doing all this stuff. I said, âI wonder how thatâll turn outâ but thatâs how it was.
Whatâs the fasted you ever wrote a feature?
I wrote Last House on the Left in a weekend. That was I guess the fastest. I did a major rewrite on a script that was almost a page one rewrite in five days.