Q: So, sadistic horror movies, a good trend or bad trend?  The Hostel’s, the Saws…

Craven: Bad, horrible. (laughs) Those people should be taken out and shot. (laughs) We’ll have less competition.  I don’t know why it’s going that way, I do know that it occurs to me that we’re in very violent times.  In a way, it’s quite personal, you know, what isn’t?  You know, someone cuts their head off, that’s pretty basic stuff.  These issues about the others, the other people who are curious… it’s dramatic, so that might be part of it.

Q: Where did The Hills Have Eyes come from?

Craven: Well, it originally came from an article I found in a book in the New York Public Library on the Sawney Beane Family.  The book was called Murder and Mayhem in Britain I think, which I just re-bought on the web, it’s still being published.  There was this family called the Sawney Beane Family in the 1700’s in Scotland, and there was this area with a road running through it that went from one of the big cities in Scotland to London, it was the fastest way to get there but nobody used it because they thought it was haunted.  People would go in there but wouldn’t come out the other end.  Then this one couple was riding through and they were attacked by these wild people, and one got away, while the other and the horse were gone.  So, he was somebody who knew the court, and he told the story and they hardly believed him, but they sent an expedition which resulted in finding a cave along the cliffs of the English Channel that part of the day was submerged, so they didn’t think anyone would be in there.  They searched the whole area up on top and found nothing, but a dog was baying, and they found this… there was a narrow little path they went down to the base of the cliff, and there was this whole gaggle of these people, all pretty much naked and wild, feral.  So they took them back to London, and tried them and did the most excruciating things imaginable to them.  And when I read it, it was like, “Oh, these are the civilized people.” (laughter) So, it seemed to have the aura I’m attracted to, where the nice and civilized do horrible things, and horrible people have a human side too.

Q: I’m wondering if you could talk about some of the differences in making the film in 1977 and making the film now vis a vi the budget, more money, studio backing and all that.  What are the benefits of that?  What are the drawbacks as well?

Craven: Well, the benefits are, they had a lot of things, but you know it was a very rough shoot.  I wasn’t there, I was doing other stuff.  You know, it was 120 degree heat routinely, very powerful sand storms, so everything was grit, you know, scorpions, all of that.  For the original, we had $325,000 to do what was my second film, so I almost knew nothing about film.  I learned something from Last House, but since I hadn’t gone to film school I was still kind of making it up.  I think it was just half Peter Locke’s money and half of some distributors could get to me.

Q: Was that in Joshua Tree?

Craven: No, that was the second one; we shot in Victorville.  This one I think had, you know, enough, just barely.  That’s one of the reasons they went to Morocco.  I don’t know, I think it’s always tough to make a film.  Probably had more equipment, more money, more crew.

Q: What were your thoughts regarding having this movie remade?  What was your involvement, as opposed to saying “just take it”?

Craven: It’s one of two movies that I co-own with the producer.  Two different guys, Sean Cunningham for Last House, Peter Locke for Hills.  Everything else I’ve done has either been for hire or sold as part of getting to make a movie.  So this is something I could control, and that’s the way I wanted it, so it really made sense.  It was a chance to see some old piece of material that has proven to have pretty good legs remade by a young guy just to see what would happen.  The horror genre has been blossoming, so it was frankly very easy once we had the concept.  I think, I know over the years we had been asking various guys that we thought might be able to do something to come up with something, and nobody really did that was either interesting or doable.  Some were just huge or complicated.  One suggested doing it at like, Burning Man Festival, with thousands of people. (laughter) So, Alex’s idea of the miners and the testing made it original, and I’d seen High Tension and I thought this guy is really into it, and he has a great passion for his gore and his work.

Q: Did you like Victorville when you shot there?

Craven: All I remember is the Hilton where we crashed at night (laughs).  I just remember it was boiling in the day, and then freezing at night.

Q: Were there any pleasant surprises when you got your first script (for the remake), or when you got the first rough cut that you just weren’t expecting?

Craven: I didn’t expect it to be so beautiful frankly.  The cinematographer (Maxime Alexandre) in fact I used the cinematographer a movie we did in Paris, did such a wonderful job.  So it has a composition to it that’s cinematic, that’s striking.  The original was fine, but it was done very crudely, it was very limited budget, 16mm, no crane, we had a dolly for like, a week, the rest was just sticks in mud.  So, that to me was unusual, and then just the whole thing of the mysteriousness of the test buildings and how haunting that was.  To see this place being bombed, places that you and I would live.

Q: Were you surprised to see how Dee Wallace from the original became?

Craven: Yeah, she was the only person, well, Michael Berryman went on to something of his own, but she had done Ten, with Dudley Moore, and she was talking about her fiancé at the bar which made her a big star in our book. (laughs) No, I didn’t expect her to go on to such, none of us had any expectations, we’re making a movie.

Q: You’ve mentioned that this film has legs, and it does hold up very well over the years, now that there’s an assortment of similar films from the time, like Texas Chainsaw, The Hitcher, they’re remaking Friday the 13^th for no particular reason, do you feel there are some films that shouldn’t be remade?

Craven: Bad ones. (laughs) Somebody told me something interesting in a conversation years ago where someone said they were making a remake, and I asked what it was, and he said “The Maltese Falcon” remake, the third time.  I said, “Really?”  You know, I think it’s really a matter of whether the film’s good, and whether it has something different and fresh about it.  You can’t remake a film that’s badly done, if it’s crass, if it’s gross or something.  It all comes down to whether a film’s good or not; is it compelling, does it keep you on the edge of your seat, if that’s what it’s designed to do.  We’ll see how it’s done, the audience will be the judge in a couple days.

Q: Does watching Alex come in and work on a film like this, does it get you excited about this genre enough so you could consider going back to it again, it’s been a while since you made a movie like this.

Craven: I mean, well, there is Cursed. (laughs) That was a horror film. (laughs) And, you know, I’d written one called Pulse, based on the Kurosawa film, that’s kind of a horror film also.  So it’s not like I’ve gone off horror.  I’ve always loved horror, I don’t like an unoriginal horror film, it’s just, is it a good film or not?  28 Days Later… was a stupid zombie movie except it was done brilliantly.  I was thinking, ‘Wow, that’s great filmmaking’, that’s what it’s all about.

Q: Dogs are typically targets in horror films, what made you make one of them a hero in this?

Craven: Well, animals are kind of harbingers, they’re attuned to what we don’t see.  If I understand, we’re all keyed into it, but they’re always sensing something we can’t.  You know, it’s always the dog who knows the guy’s really a vampire. (laughs) I think it refers to, if you want to abstract it, the part of our brains with the cuddly, the cute, we see that, but they’re really tuned in, if you want to stretch a metaphor.  But I think that’s generally what they do.  I think in Last House on the Left I even put a dog barking while his master is away having these horrible things done.

Q: It seems that every week we get a new horror film pushing the boundaries of the R-rating, with the extremes, what these days can’t you show?

Craven: You can’t show a republican being killed. (laughs) That’s forbidden.  Can’t do anything to President Bush, or the flag. (laughs) I don’t know, certainly the films being made currently are really violent sorts of films, and I do think they are something of the times, just moving us away from contrivance.  Like Scream, it was a bit of a stab ‘em up, but it was also a murder mystery, it was also a soap opera, and reflective, there was a lot to it beyond the violence.

Q: Do you think there is a double standard in the ratings board?  I watched the NC-17 cut of this movie and I can’t figure out what in that is possibly worse than Hostel.

Craven: Well, as far as I understand, the NC-17 is good in the view of anyone like us.  It’s an organization based with very few people, people who have very basic qualifications, basically parents.  They’re what they think are a cross section.  So let’s say you made this film, and you get this random group, and they watch this film and they’re appalled.  They’ve never gone to a horror film, and the word comes down that you have to take the intensity out of this scene, and as much as you can bare to do it, you do it.  So then you take this other film, with no comedy, no dialogue and there are no standards, there is nothing they’ll tell you that will help you figure out what would pass.  So, you’re in this terrible quandary of wanting to make a terribly intense film, and this has happened on every single film I’ve made, and just a split second after you say “My god, that was fabulous”… shit, it has to pass the censors.  That whole scene, for instance, in Scream, when the two guys who are killers and there scheme to get themselves off is to stab each other like they’re victims, and they realize that it actually hurts, and they’re bleeding to death!  So when the ratings board saw that, they flipped out, they said, “God, you have running blood, teens stabbing each other, you can’t do that!” and then Bob Weinstein called up and said, “You don’t get it!  It’s a spoof!”  Then they said, oh, alright, and we got an R.  It’s that unpredictable.

Q: Has there been any kind of progress over the years?

Craven: No.  I remember when we did Deadly Friend all those years ago, and the nasty old lady gets her head knocked off by a basketball, and they gave us an X for that, so we very cleverly went out and made a collection of decapitations from films that had gotten an R like The Omen, with that glass sheet, and we sent it to them and asked ‘what do you think?’ and they said, ‘oh, we don’t care.’  So, you can ask any filmmaker in the genre, there is no criteria that we can define, it’s all just about the individual times it’s shown.  It’s very difficult.  Basically what they want to do is undo what you’ve done; it’s a real pain in the ass.