Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 4, 2011, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Just when the people of Woodsboro thought it was safe to enjoy horror films, Scream 4 brought the iconic figure of Ghostface back to carve up more of the town’s residents. Also returning for the sequel (now on DVD, Blu-ray and assorted digital platforms) was director Wes Craven, updating his successful saga to address the significant advances in communication technology over the last decade while still indulging in good old-fashioned bloodshed.
Scream 4 sees Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) arriving in Woodsboro to promote a self-help book she has written, and reuniting with now-married Gale (Courteney Cox) and Sheriff Dewey (David Arquette). Her arrival seems to trigger a new set of murders, with Ghostface targeting Sidney’s cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) and her friends. Craven spoke to Fango about revisiting the scene of his past screen crimes, how the MPAA has changed since Ghostface first started spilling blood, the much-buzzed-about departure of longtime series scribe Kevin Williamson midway through the making of this installment and more.
One of the notable things about Scream 4 is how effortlessly you and the returning cast get back into character after 10 years. It’s kind of like you’ve never been away.
I know; it was pretty remarkable on the set. It wasn’t like I to coach anybody on, “You have to talk like this.” It just came back immediately. It was pretty amazing how we all fell back into it.
How easily did the newcomers to the cast adapt to the tone and approach of the Scream saga?
Well, they’re all really gifted actors and actresses, and everybody came in primed and ready, and they’d done their homework. Usually with younger actors, there’s a bit more directing and technical things involved, but by and large, all of them, because of the prevalence of TV programs now that are built around young people, they had their working chops up to a very high level already. Really, it was no big struggle to get them to hit the mark.
In the decade prior to this film, were there any serious talks about doing Scream 4; had anyone else proposed another storyline before Kevin Williamson came up with this one?
Not that I know of. I mean, I didn’t even know this one was underway until Kevin and Bob [Weinstein] had reached an agreement on this concept. Bob tends to keep it all very quiet until he actually has Kevin lined up with a concept he likes. So my first knowledge that it was going to become a reality was a call from Bob saying, “I got Kevin, I think he’s got something good. He’s not going to send it right away, but I think he’s gonna have a first act in two weeks.” [Laughs] That’s how it starts. Then you wait around till you have enough pages to know it’s really good. After reading the first act, I felt Kevin was in fantastic shape and signed up to do it.
Was it difficult to adapt the issues of modern communication into the Scream paradigm?
No, we’re all very familiar with all the technology, just by the nature of our jobs. I know Kevin and I, and Ehren Kruger, make it our business to know what’s going on in that area. I don’t think any of us are on Facebook all the time, but we certainly know what the procedures and various platforms are. Both Kevin and Ehren had a very firm grasp of what the world was like out there, and devised the script complications around those devices and that reality. It does become more and more difficult to create those situations where…you know, the classic horror film is, you’re in a house and the lights go out and the telephone doesn’t work, and you’re screwed and now you have to fight the killer. But we had to worry about, what if somebody has a cell phone? There are all these devices now that make it so easy to make a call or transmit pictures and things like that, so we had to dance a finer dance in terms of making it believable that people could be in the situations they’re in.
By the same token, there have been any number of films in the post-Blair Witch era that presented their events via first-person video footage. Was that something you were conscious of, trying to find a different approach to that sort of thing?
Yeah, but to us it seemed videotaping was obsolete. No one’s running around with little video cameras anymore; it’s like, the phone is everything. It’s all digitized. We liked the idea that you have a phone that’s a fantastic way of transmitting or recording images and sound, and getting information resources. That was kind of the richness of it, taking a step beyond Blair Witch or Paranormal Activity, where it’s just a person walking around with a camera.
You mentioned Ehren Kruger—how much did he contribute to the Scream 4 script?
He contributed a great deal. He’s very smart, he’s very technically acute, and from about halfway through the shoot he was very much the writer. He was the person solving the problems of the second part of the film, as far as the story goes—exactly what happens at the bar and at Hayden Panettiere’s house; who did what where, and who got knocked off and who didn’t.
Can you talk a bit about what led Kevin Williamson to depart the project?
Well, the honest answer, as far as I know, is that his television show [Vampire Diaries] just became more and more pressing. He needed to be there, and I believe he was legally obliged to be there, and the writing of the Scream 4 script had taken much longer than he thought it was going to take. It went much further into the year than he thought it would go, and I think at some point the other studio even threatened to sue him if he didn’t get back and spend full time on the series—because it was already shooting, and he was trying to do all these things at once. Basically, at a certain point, Kevin’s schedule just made it impossible for him to stay on Scream 4.
There was talk when this one was announced that it would start a new trilogy, and that we might see Scream 5 and 6 at some point. Has there been any forward motion on those?
You know, I haven’t called Bob and said, “What’s going on?” My wife [producer Iya Labunka] and I did two pictures [My Soul to Take and Scream 4] back to back, and we just felt like we wanted to take this summer and fall off, and not pursue business and work, and try to be human beings for a moment. Usually, the process for me is that until Bob picks up the phone and says, “Look, we’ve got something going,” there’s not much I can do. Well, I could bother Bob with calls, but until he’s got it worked out to his satisfaction, it’s not going to happen.
To this day, some critics insist on referring to the Scream films as spoofs, when they’re really serious horror pictures that happen to have a satirical take on the genre. How do you feel about the fact that these movies aren’t quite understood in certain circles?
Well, they’re not Funny Games or Saw or something like that, where there is no humor and they’re merciless with the audience. The Scream series has always had humor and social commentary, and an articulate character or two who can speak about what’s going on in the culture of the time, going back to Randy and the video store. That’s what makes them enjoyable as well as scary. If I could cite one thing that creates a chance for that misperception, it’s the Scary Movie series, because that took the basic character of Ghostface and made him entirely comedic. Everything about him was being satirized for a number of years, so then when I came back and tried to do something serious again in Scream 4, I found myself having to pull back on Ghostface doing anything that could be thought of as cute or silly. I was always trying to outrun the ghosts of that other series, which was all spoof. We tried to make this scary and hard-hitting and seriously violent without going overboard.
On that subject, the original Scream had to lose some gore to get an R rating. Where there any scenes in Scream 4 that had the same problem?
You know, Scream 4 was one of those situations where I worried about it and worried about it, and when is the guy gonna call to say what we have to cut, and then we got the word that we had an R. So there was nothing cut.
It does seem that the ratings board has become more lenient toward blood and violence since the days when you were struggling with them. Movies like the Hostel and Saw films are getting R ratings for violence that would have been unheard of in an R-rated horror film 10 years ago.
Yeah, I think that has happened. There’s been a change at the head of the MPAA, and also, when a series such as Scream goes on for a certain amount of time and they see that it’s being hailed as something that’s making social commentary, and it’s funny and people like it and they’re not damaged [laughs], you don’t get that sort of craziness that can go on when the ratings board sees a film for the first time and they’ve never seen anything else like it, and they can freak out. It seems they have backed off a little bit and allowed more room to stretch with scary and/or violent films.
Are you working on any projects right now?
We’re in the final stages of making a deal for a series of three comic books that we would then have the right to make into a movie. I’m also finishing the first draft of a children’s book about nightmares. Other than that, as I said, we’re trying to relax and do things with our families and so forth.
Can you share any details about those comic books?
Nope, top secret.
You did quite a bit of television earlier in your career; would you ever go back to that?
If there was the right show, yes. I would certainly have to deal with the fact that I would not do anything else almost 24 hours a day. Television, because of the nature of essentially having to come out with a feature film once a week, is a tremendously demanding thing, but there’s some great stuff on TV now. I certainly would never feel, having witnessed what’s gone on with The Sopranos and everything that’s followed in the last 10 years, that television is a step down. I think, quite often, it’s better than what’s been in the movie theaters.
Any chance Williamson might bring you in to guest-direct an episode of one of his series?
[Laughs] That could be, I don’t know. The phone has not rung in that way yet. I think he’s got his hands full with his own work. We ended on very good terms on Scream 4, by the way; there was never any contention between Kevin and I.
