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Features
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Better Red Than Dead
Imprisoned by his success in horror movies for over 30 years now, Wes Craven is hoping the care he has lavished on his new thriller Red Eye will change all that.
Friday, August 19, 2005
By Pam Grady
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Filmmaker Wes Craven
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Wes Craven has been scaring the daylights out of people for over 30 years, ever since he had the audacity to remake Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring as 1972's The Last House on the Left, a terrific horror-thriller hybrid. He is the auteur who gave the world Freddie Kreuger in 1984's Nightmare on Elm Street and started another horror franchise in 1996 with the stylish Scream.
Of his 25 features, nearly all have been horror movies, earning him such sobriquets as the Sultan of Slash and the Guru of Gore, nicknames he finds imprisoning. He tried to break free from the genre once before with 1999's Music of the Heart, a biopic of East Harlem music teacher Roberta Guaspari. The film earned Oscar, Golden Globe, and SAG nominations for its star Meryl Streep, but Craven tells FilmStew, "It didn't make enough money for the studios to feel really comfortable."
In actuality, it earned just $15 million at the domestic box office (it cost an estimated $27 million to make), as audiences could not wrap their heads around the terror king gone sentimental.
Yet Craven still aches to escape that horror box and he is betting that Red Eye is just the instrument he needs to break free. "I wanted to do something that was out of the genre, as far as I could get," he explains. "I think I could make a thriller that can make the studio money and also be doing something that would be personally be fresh and challenging."
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Christina Radish / Agency Photos
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Rising star McAdams
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The 66-year-old director insists that Red Eye, written by longtime TV writer Carl Ellsworth, would have been a terrifically scary ride even if an event like 9/11 never happened. Certainly, there is an inherent tension in the story of a woman trapped alongside a professional killer in the claustrophobic confines of an airplane with nowhere to go, who is further terrorized by the sense of responsibility she feels for her fellow passengers, her dad, and the man she is being asked to help murder.
But 9/11 did happen and Craven acknowledges, "It's a great script. Even without the 9/11 trauma kind of floating around, I think it would've been a very good picture, but definitely when I read it I felt just personally that it was an opportunity [to make] a movie that talked about those things in a way that was entertaining but not exploitative."
Craven himself understands this anxiety from personal experience, even if he describes the situation he found himself in as "kind of cool." Not so long ago, he was leaving London after a junket, seated inside a 747 on the plane's upper level as it taxied down the runway when suddenly it stopped and veered left.
"[It] started taxing out into this very sort of overgrown area of the tarmac and stopped suddenly," the director remembers, "And [the flight attendants] started screaming, 'Everybody! Up! Out! Don't put your shoes on and don't take anything with you.' I found myself jumping out of a third story window basically 10 seconds later. We were all told immediately, 'Run! Run away from the plane!' 300 people ran away."
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Christina Radish / Agency Photos
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Summer villain Murphy
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So maybe it was that special inside that made him understand that the best way to amplify the suspense of Lisa's situation was to make it as real as possible. If she really seemed trapped in the sky, then the filmgoers' tension would ratchet up exponentially. To that end, instead of simply building a plane's interior on a soundstage, Craven's team actually rented a real airplane in sections, mixing and matching pieces from various models until they had built a realistic approximation of a 767. The specifications were exact; only the plane's bathroom was made slightly bigger to accommodate the action that needed to occur there.
The different sections could be pulled apart like a jigsaw puzzle to allow Craven to put the cameras where he needed them and the top could come off to facilitate crane shots. The whole thing rested on a hydraulic deck, which in turn sat on airbags that could be inflated and deflated at will to simulate turbulence. For the actors, the effect created almost too much verisimilitude. Craven laughs, "We had people telling us, 'I almost had to use the [barf] bag.'"
But more important than any effect, he knew, was the casting. "It's all about the script, the acting, and directing," Craven insists. He had confidence in his own directing and he describes Ellsworth's screenplay as the best he's read since Scream, so getting the right actors was going to be key. "I knew going in that I would have to have really, really good people. It was all close-ups, sometimes for 10 minutes at a time. It was more about what was going on interiorly between these two people," he suggests.
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Christina Radish / Agency Photos
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Co-star Jayma Mays
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Casting McAdams he considers a no-brainer. He had seen her in her very different roles in the romantic drama The Notebook and in the teen satire Mean Girls and noted both her range and her ability to disappear into her characters. He was even more impressed when he met her.
"She has an air of integrity and discipline,” he reveals. “She's got a great kind of resolve in her eyes. At the beginning of the meeting, she was checking me out. You could see, like, you don't want to mess around with this girl." Once he found out she had been a championship ice skater, he was sold, knowing that she could take the punishment from the physical stunts Lisa's part required.
Actor Cillian Murphy was a harder sell. The Cork County native lobbied hard for the role of the psychopath, but after speaking with the actor on the phone, Craven was convinced that he wasn't right for the part. His Irish brogue was thick and the director was casting for an American yuppie of the criminal class not the Irish Republican Army. But Murphy was so set on playing the character that, on his own initiative, he flew to LAX two days before his wedding (talk about taking the red eye!) to have lunch with Craven at the airport.
The 29-year-old promised Craven that he could perfect an American accent in the five weeks before shooting commenced. The director decided to take him at his word, as he realized upon meeting the actor, that he had the perfect physical attributes to play the villain. "I was just struck by his energy, his face, his eyes,” Craven recalls. “I knew so much of this picture was going to hang on faces and what was going in the eyes of these two people."
Allowing Craven to make a movie that so intimately involves two people sitting in the confined space of airplane seats was enough to give the studio suits fits from time to time. Craven does break away from Lisa and Jack from time to time with little bits of business involving other passengers or the plane's crew. Bringing the background foreground he says was inspired by reading Mad magazine when he was a kid. "There was always something going on in the background. I like that, because it makes people go see your movie two or three times," he chuckles.
But none of those little scenes were in the script, as Ellsworth and various studio executives pointed out to Craven as they watched the dailies. He sought to reassure them, telling them, "'Yeah, but it'll work. Don't worry about it.'"
| He adds, "You have to be able to do that as a director. You have to be able to kind of be in flow and say, 'How can I deal with this character?'"
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More worrisome, from the studio's standpoint, was all those long close-ups. They urged Craven to move the camera more, but he was adamant in sticking with his original strategy. "It never gets boring. It's all about what's happening in their minds, in their eyes, and kind of in their body posture."
The finished film is only 85 minutes long, as Craven describes himself as ruthless on pace. He stripped the script of lines and pauses, anything he found unnecessary to arrive at the right alchemy of action and suspense. "We ended up with kind of a greyhound of a film that just moves from the time it opens," he boasts.
He is hoping that momentum is enough to propel him once and for all out of his horror prison. He has three scripts he's currently considering, a romantic comedy, a road movie, and a costume drama. "I would love to do any of those," he sighs.
| But Craven is realistic about the odds, as he admits, "I think there's a natural human assumption that anybody who does something really, really scary must have all that inside. It's a distancing thing, you know, 'It can't be in me, so it must be in him.' It can be very rigid and confining and there's just the business fact, at a certain point, your name becomes synonymous with a certain thing."
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"What I'm trying to do is kind of inch out of it, put some comedy into my thriller, but it's still scary."
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