Posted by Frosty

Finally up is the Director of Red Eye, Wes Craven. This was the first time I have ever heard him speak about one of his projects, and he seemed really happy to be doing the promotion, as the reviews have been good. Also, I enjoyed his stories, as he was honest and open about what attracted him to the piece, how the casting really went down, and what they had to do when the film originally came in really short. Hope you enjoy this, and a big thank you to Ben Lauter, for some amazing transcribing.

How you doing today?

Wes Craven:  I’m good.  Everybody seems to like the movie, so I’m happy (laughter all around).

Very officious piece of work.  Just boom-boom boom-boom.  It’s well-paced, really enjoyable.

Thank you.

So what attracted you to this piece?

A lot of things.  I had been looking to do a thriller for a long time, just so everybody wouldn’t [think], “Oh, yeah, he makes horror movies.”  I liked the script a lot, I think it’s really well-constructed.  Obviously it is.  We were looking to do something at a different studio, the Dreamworks guys were big fans of my early films, so, you know, it felt like they would give me a lot of support. 

You know, the resistance was I had just finished, actually I wasn’t even finished with Cursed.  I had been on it for two and a half-years, so, you know, my first reaction was “I just want to get some sleep.” (laughter all around).  But it was so good, I said, “Okay, fine.” and it kind of took on its own energy.  It was great, you know, but kind of did everything in the middle of it.  I got married on a weekend during shooting.  It was kind of wild, but, you know, my editor and I, when we watched it for the first time, I turned, I said “how long is this thing?”  He said “seventy-two minutes.”  So it was like seventy-two minutes long, and the only thing we had taken out was one… I can’t even remember what the scene was… how long was the scene, it was forty-five seconds.  Not gonna help us (laughter all around).  So we literally said, “We gotta have really long tail credits.”  And we didn’t know, you know, what is the legal limit you can give to a studio?  Nobody had ever thought that it would come out that fast, but my editor and I have a very fast editing style, and we just took all the fat out if it.  We didn’t take scenes out, but we took moments out of scenes.  It was, you know, a long time during takeoff when he was asking her about her family and then her brothers, it’s like, “let’s get all that shit out of there.“ (laughter all around) 

That happened a lot.  There was a time in the bathroom when she was sobbing a lot and, you know, crying up “somebody help me!,” ‘cause now she’s passed out.   So it’s just like trimming out the fat, and you end up with kind of a racehorse and it’s a great ride.  The studio actually had a, for their television contract, apparently, I don’t know what network it is, or do they have their own, they had to have us go out and shoot this little Q&A thing for eight minutes to get the thing up to enough time that they could say “here, well, give me the movie and we also have this little thing that you can fill your time with,” (laughter all around) but, you know, the studio was just not used to a movie this short and they weren’t used to a movie actually being made this fast.  We made it, especially in post-production, so much more quickly than anybody there thought was possible.  My director’s cut was five days, you know, and director’s cut, minimum, is twelve weeks, so it’s like we just… it was like, “okay, to pull this one off we have to be, like, at the top of our game from beginning to end” and we all just went into like this challenge.  So it turned out well.  You know, initially there was great, on the studio’s part, great concern about Flight Plan.  I don’t know whether I’m not supposed to talk about it, but you know, that was a big film, it was Jodie Foster and it was going to be coming out very soon so we had to go go go.  So they waited a little bit for me to get off of Cursed, but then we decided to go like bandits.  At a certain point it became clear that we were going to be out long before they were, but for a long while it was… that was the big bugaboo, is that they would come and kind of take all the audience for airplane pictures.

What attracted you to Rachel McAdams?

It was a combination of seeing the two films she had out at that time, you know, The Notebook and Mean Girls.  Notebook, obviously she was a good actress and she was beautiful, but then Mean Girls, to me, was very significant because she was so different in that and was able to have comic chops and, you know, just be somebody totally badass, and I thought that was really impressive.  And then the other thing is, we just… and this all done… we had to cast this movie in a week.  I had a meeting with her while we were mixing Cursed, she flew in from someplace so, where she was doing a show or something and we had about 45 minutes in the room and I just… I loved her face, you know it’s like one of those… she has these incredible eyes and she’s beautiful, and then you know, just talking about who she loves, where she came from, that she had spent a lot of time on her grandparents farm when she was a kid, so I knew that she kind of could have a very down-to-earth quality, somebody who had actually seen life and death and lots of other things in between.  And that she had been a championship skater, I don’t know whether that’s in her press materials, but it told me that she was… that she had a great discipline and that she was physically strong, you know, that she would be coordinated for that third act, and that she, you know, would be tough.  You can’t get to that level of being a championship skater and, you know, falling down 5,000 times and getting back up and that sort of thing, so it was just, you know, it’s one of those things after directing for 30 years, you just go on your gut instinct and a quick meeting and say “okay, let’s go” and hope it works out.

It’s interesting for a movie of this kind that so much is happening in the faces of Cillian and Rachel and the eyes, and it seems to me that both of them have, that… they were both in here earlier and also on the screen they’ve got these eyes that just…

Yeah, it was funny because we met her first and then Cillian, you know, I thought “god, he’s good, but he sounds like a guy out of an Irish pub, I mean, he’s supposed to be an American,” and so “well, talk to him.”  So we had this conversation by telephone, he was in London, I think, and I said “well, he sounds like a guy in an Irish pub.”  So then they say “well he wants to meet you.”  I said, “I can’t fly over there, I’m finishing Cursed.” “No, he’s got to fly over.”  So, two days before his marriage, he jumps on an airplane, and my producer and I went out to LAX and we had lunch with this guy, comes bounding up the stairs at that restaurant that looks like a big spaceship, and the first thing you see out of these… just blue eyes that are like headlights and I said “my god, two sets of blue eyes, how bad can that be?” But, you know, when he was talking, he was very kind of boyish and exuberant and you could see that he could be very charming, but also his face this angularity to it and he looks like he might have, you know, boxed for five years of his life, and he looks like he’d be really tough.  And, you know, I checked out his resume, and there’s Shakespeare in there and I just thought “this guy’s really interesting,” and he’s got a huge enthusiasm for the role, you know, I thought he was terrific in 28 Days Later and it was one of those things of “okay, let’s go!”  And it wasn’t even like we could get him and Rachel in a room together because we had already met her and she was back in Canada, so it was just going on gut instinct, and we hoped that they would have chemistry.

So they didn’t meet until…

No, that was pretty scary. (laughter all around) I’ll tell you something funny that’s not in the press materials is the film that he was completing he was playing a transvestite so he had just, like, spent twelve weeks in a dress and high heels, and the first day on set he had plucked eyebrows and then we were just “Kelly, can we just dial down the feminine side?”

And did he show up with an American way of speaking?

There was a lot of work on that at first, you know, he had a dialogue coach that was with him all the time, and honestly, the first couple weeks of shooting I had grave misgivings because I could tell that, even when he was getting the accent kind of voice-coach perfect, it was affecting his performance, he was speaking much more slowly as a way to not make mistakes, and there was a point where we literally, my producer and I, gave him a bunch of dailies and said “look at this, this is boring, and you’re not coming off good.  I don’t care if you sound, like, Irish, I no longer care, just be yourself because you have to be spontaneous and charming.”  He went off and looked at that stuff and he came back and said “I see what you mean,” and I said “just go in there and just relax.”  It was one of those cases where suddenly he just came in and just nailed it, you know?  We actually went back and reshot his close-ups… his medium shots and his close-ups.  And I would say, probably 75% of his performance was in that one day of reshooting the stuff where he just loosened up and a lot of the sort of affectations and a lot of the sort of very careful pronunciations disappeared, and suddenly he became a real person.  And you would never know it happened if I didn’t tell you, but you know…

So is that, like, when the movie took off for you as a person to production?

It’s the first time I knew that, you know, because… Rachel was doing terrific stuff from the beginning because, obviously, she was not doing that other whole thing of learning to speak a totally different way.  As soon as he started speaking easily and freely, the chemistry was amazing.  It was quite amazing.  I can tell you I breathed a huge sigh of relief, ‘cause to make those snap decisions and then you get to look like a total idiot for having made a snap decision, no you look like a genius, and it all depends on what that actor does.

With this being such a tight film, what do you have in mind for the DVD?

Oh, you mean extra materials or something, there are no extra materials (laughter all around).  No, we’ll just do funny commentaries.  I don’t know, there’s a bunch of funny… you know, one of the, not dirty little secrets, but fun secrets about this film is that there’s a lot of extras that are either crew members or producers, it’s just ridiculous.  I mean, the irate woman in the hotel, I don’t know whether you know this, is Terry Press, who is the head of marketing for… And we went into a marketing meeting to talk about the movie while we were in preproduction and there’s this woman in there who was just “you go over there and give me that!” and I said to Marianne, my producer, “that’s her.” “That’s who?  That’s Terry Press.” “No, that’s the lady in the hotel.”  And we went over after and I said “we want you to play…” and Marianne’s, you know, looking at me like you’re crazy, “I want you to be the lady in the hotel” and she says “yeah, right.”  I said, “no, I’m serious,” she says… then I knew I had her ‘cause… (soft voice) “you really think I could do that?” “Just be yourself.”  There was a funny moment at the end scene which was a scene that we went back and added where they tell them to stuff things up a certain part of their anatomy and she says, “you know people have been wanting to say that personally in my work life for years and years and years and now they gotta see somebody saying that to me and they’re just gonna be laughing at me” (laughter all around).  The terrorists, let’s see… the terrorists are my one producer Jim Lemley, my first assistant director, Mark, the guy with the mustache.  The guy who hauls the thing out of the water, the blond-haired kid is Skip Crank, who is my second prop master, it’s like ridiculous, the girl, the ghost car girl with the rifle is my script supervisor and the guy next to her, the African-American guy, is my prop master, J.P Jones, who’s been with me for years and years.  Marianne’s on the first class section as you walk onto the plane, so it’s like all these people are salted in there from our daily life.   Part of it was that we didn’t have time to cast some of these roles (laughter all around). “You’re gonna be a terrorist.”  And there’s actually a moment for the DVD…

Are they all credited?

No (laughter all around).  ‘Cause SAG would kill us.  Skip Crank, you know, the blond guy on the boat, is actually sitting at a table in the airport.  There’s a shot, Cillian’s basic point of view of her when he spots her for the first time in the airport.  You’re looking through this little corner of the restaurant and there’s two guys at a table… well, actually the first time, and the film time is like 20 seconds, first time you look the table’s empty, the second time you look, there’s two guys having coffee, and that’s Skip Crank and my camera operator, and they’re having a conversation.  And then the next time when Cillian runs through, the whole table in there, gone!  (Laughter all around)  We’re hoping people don’t notice that the terrorist is having coffee with our… (laughter all around).  But I guess that’s what the DVD will be, ‘cause we took about one tiny little scene, I don’t even remember what it was, and it was 45 seconds long, so… we actually went back and shot some material.  We shot three extra days that were based on test screening notes and, just, getting a little bit more time with them to film, and I wanted to get a little bit more time at the house and in the chase.  I wanted a moment when Rachel got to get some licks in, as they say, and there was nothing like that.  The way it ended before was he crossed the hallway after she got out of that bathroom and he was looking at the doorway where he thought she was and she comes out of the other doorway and tries to hit him and he grabs her and throws her against the wall and she says something, and he throws her down the stairs.   And I was looking at the cut and I said, “god, we have to get some hand to hand, she has to get some punches in, you know?”  So, when they gave me a couple of days to shoot some stuff on (inaudible), we had some things on (inaudible), I said “give me a day in the house” and so Bruce Miller, my production designer rebuilt those three rooms that were from the actual house onstage for, like, $20,000.  The studio couldn’t believe we made it, on a budget like that.  And we shot that whole business of her finding the thing and not knowing where he is or running back and forth and the phone call and all those things and the big jump with him behind the door.  Which is me just going back to my horror film roots, you know (laugher all around), in a fun way because I saw her walking by the shower and I said “oh, everybody’s gonna think he’s in there, so close the curtain and we’ll play that whole card.  Just have fun with it.”

What do you have coming up next?

Not that much because I had been on Cursed for two-and-a-half years and we had actually prepared another picture before that, and then gone right into this, and I’d gotten married, we hadn’t had a honeymoon, so my new wife and I just went to… I have a house in Martha’s Vineyard and we just went there and cooled our jets for two months.  I felt so strongly about this picture, so positive about it that I kind of wanted to see if that change of perception would happen, where I could be talked about as a director who could do a thriller or could do suspense or could do, maybe, romance or whatever, and I didn’t want to commit to anything until, you know, I was being offered a couple of August thrillers and I thought it would be really smart not to get engaged to anything and just be available for what fate brings down the road next.

So might you also consider something in the vein of Music of the Heart?

Yeah, well certainly something that’s far away from the genre.  Right now there’s three films that I’m interested in doing.  One is literally a romantic comedy, Susan’s Last Letter, about a guy whose wife dies and a year after her death he gets the letter from her and it’s based on her knowing him so well, she knows that he probably wouldn’t be seeing other women and so she sets him up with a woman… she knew she was dying.  Anyway, I don’t want to go into that, but that’s that and there’s a little road picture with an 11-year old girl and then there’s a costume drama, so you know that’s based on a novel that was an Oprah Winfrey choice called Drowning Ruth, so those are the three things that I know we’re putting out there.  And also I’m in early talks on a, believe it or not, a Las Vegas show called Magic Macabre which is being put together by the people who did Riverdance, and it’ll be an illusionist show, but in a very macabre setting.  It would be Wes Craven’s Magic Macabre… I think that’s just such a hoot to think of doing a Vegas show (laughter all around), so that’s kind of what I’m up to, and I’m just going to enjoy the release of Red Eye, you know, so… I must say I’ve never done film that’s had such, kind of a positive and fun response from people, everybody just seems to be happy that they saw it, and it feels really good, you know?

Is there any discussion as to making the target, you know, getting a pro-American rah-rah thing or the family connection because you settle for him having a…

Well, there was definitely that, not rah-rah, but certainly a sense that… you know, ’cause when I pitched how I wanted to do the movie, in the something that I saw there, it was definitely post-9/11 and it was definitely our troops in Iraq getting, you know, beat the shit in return by just being in the place where they don’t know the culture, and, you know, don’t know the roads, don’t know the alleyways, and so the pitch to the studio was I want that final moment not in dad’s new house that she’s hardly seen, but I want it to be in the house that they all grew up in, I want her to know that like the back of her hand and that’s going to be instrumental in her beating Rippner, you know, that he blundered by not just walking away after the airplane and disappearing, but going to her house for emotional reasons ‘cause his manhood was threatened and getting his ass kicked (laughter all around), because he, you know, he came into somebody else’s turf.  So that was very important and in fact I suggested this last night to Terry Press, I said I would go to Iraq with this film, show it to troops, because it’s like, my heart goes out to them and I just felt like, all of us need kind of a, if not as rah-rah moment, at least a moment where if we were fighting on a level playing field we could kick their ass (laughs).  And it goes beyond politics or religion or anything like that, I think there’s a sense in the country right now, sort of grief-full frustration, losing our kids and getting whacked so hard all the time, so that was my pitch and they went with it, so… and I think that’s part of the resonance to the picture and certainly all the interplay between them, it has to do with having to fight that kind of an enemy where in order to exist or survive in his world, in Rippner’s world, and the people that he’s working with, you have to make a deal with the devil, you have to be willing to say “okay, leave my dad alive, but I’ll help you kill this guy,” which is, there’s no innocence after that and we worked really hard on that character change once she’s been forced to do that and then it’s compounded by the fact that he’s traveling with his children, so that in the final moments before she stabs him she is a changed person, totally, from top to bottom, and, boy, I just scoured her for any hint of tears or anything like that, I just said “absolutely, no, you can not go there.”  I did the takes until I got that steely look where you just felt like she is down to the bare-bones fighting stage, you know, and I think that was a great thing for her to be able to find, you know?

But you had to push her to get her to get…

Yeah, I think a young woman like that doesn’t think about that, you know, I mean it’s not something that normal people think about, you know, I happen to have read a lot of accounts of what’s going on over there and read things about troops that are there  that’ve killed people that they didn’t even intend to kill or they, you know, a car full of people they thought it was a bomb ‘cause they want to stop it and they shoot and they find it’s little kids, you know, that kind of stuff where, even though you think you’re still doing the right thing, you realize there’s such a horrible human price to any action like that.  I wanted to get to that place with her and it was important to me to be able to find that so it wasn’t just an amusement park ride, you know, that it was talking about real issues.