-Hi, everybody. This is Wes Craven and... -Kevin Williamson.
-I'm the director and... -Writer.
-And this is Scream. -Scream.
And we're here to, sort of, fake our way through this.
This was the first five days of shooting, on a little--
Brand-new house, actually, about three years old,
and it looks like it's been there for 20 years.
Built on a 30-acre vineyard.
Drew Barrymore, introducing our picture,
and in a kind of Hitchcockian way, wouldn't you say?
-Yes, very much so. -Since you wrote it.
Yes.
I'd always, in my head, imagined that
if you could get, sort of, a lead name
to play this part, it would be really shocking.
And I'm so glad that it turned out that way, and that we got someone
like Drew Barrymore, whose performance, I think, is phenomenal.
-Right, she was great. Terrific. -Yeah.
And the house is kind of a star too. I mean, it was a--
It wonderfully typified the rooms inside
with the windows looking out to the outside,
so right away, we're always reminding the audience
that there's a big world out there.
And showing the little swing there creaking.
You wrote that, didn't you, Kevin?
Was there-- No, there wasn't a squeaking swing, was there?
I think that was one of Wes's little touches.
So, we had a lot of fun sort of vamping on a really great script,
which is what Kevin gave us.
And this was a script that caused a huge bidding war in Hollywood,
and I think over one weekend it was sold for a gigantic amount of money.
-Originally titled Scary Movie. -Right.
Which we all loved, and when Miramax changed it to Scream, we all thought,
"That's really a stupid title." And now we all love Scream.
Yeah, it's amazing how that tide turns, isn't it?
But, yeah, I grew-- I've come to love the title, Scream.
Me too.
I can't imagine it being anything else at this point.
Now, cinematically, this is the introduction of themes here,
with the pulling up the knife and the expanding clock here.
We'd use the popcorn holder as the clock to the scene,
going from sort of normal expansion into overkill.
You also wrote some wonderful lines here,
which at one time I took out, about, "The first Nightmare was great, and...
-"The rest sucked." -...the rest sucked."
"Cause I thought that would make me look like an egomaniac,
since I was directing the film.
But Kevin reminded me that I'd directed the seventh,
and that was included in the films that sucked.
This is also the point at which the dialogue becomes self-referential
and self-aware, and it sort of lets the audience know
that we're aware that the horror movies do exist in our film.
-Right. -And...
Which was one of the breakthrough things of the films.
We talk about actual films and a lot of different films,
and a lot of different film actors.
I always thought that if you actually had a movie
about kids who have seen every horror movie ever made,
then that may be the end to scaring the audience.
In the way that the whole world--
These people actually live in a world where all these horror movies have played,
and they grew up with their VCRs, and they're aware of all this stuff.
And what do you do if you get a phone call in the middle of the night
and you're in the middle of nowhere? What do you do?
And this is definitely an homage to When a Stranger Calls,
which was, I think, one of-- Had a very shocking opening.
Right.
-Listen, asshole! -No, you listen, you little bitch!
Now this is also-- This moment is very, very important in the telephone voice,
which we cast for weeks and weeks and weeks. We finally found...
-I remember that. -...this wonderful guy, Roger Jackson,
is it? Who is--
Does a lot of narration and radio voices out of San Francisco, I believe.
And he just did the voice to a tee,
and got that very chilling sense to his--
You know, it's very hard sometimes to find people to play evil,
because they just don't want to go quite that far into their dark side,
but Roger really was able to get there really wonderfully,
and puts a great tone in the whole movie.
It was really amazing watching it,
"cause we were all outside in the rain at this point, while this was being filmed,
and Roger was outside in the rain on a phone, talking to her.
Right. We never let Drew see Roger at all. She never met him.
-That's right. -She didn't know who he was.
We also had to do these calls over a real telephone.
And, I think, about 3:00 in the morning, we got a call
from the Sheriff's Department, demanding that we say who we were,
because they thought there was an actual killer tormenting somebody.
I enjoyed using that very special blue of the television screen behind Drew...
as sort of a theme of, you know--
The sort of tape-ness as a way So many of us see movies,
and the way that color suggests we're about to see a film.
Or else my boyfriend;ll be here any second,
and he'll be pissed when he finds out.
I thought you didn't have a boyfriend.
I lied! I do have a boyfriend,
and he'll be here any second,
-So your ass better be gone. -Sure.
This also had a great, I think, introduction of a cellular phone
as an instrument of a demented Killer,
which is-- was pretty new, I think. And it's so much a part of our lives.
That's one of the things this film did, again,
was take things that are parts of our lives that aren't used--
Hadn't been used yet in a film, and say,
"Here's a phone that can put a man anywhere. Right outside your window,
but whether he's out front or out back, you don't know. And he can be moving."
And, of course, the huge tease of...
-One of the great things... -...turning the light back on again.
...for me, was to watch you work with Drew,
and how you brought her to this level on repeated takes.
Take after take after take.
And she was always there. It was really--
For me, it was a great learning experience to watch you in action here.
Yeah, well, it was a matter of Drew putting an enormous amount of trust in me,
and we had a couple key sentences,
or key situations that we would refer to.
The night before we started shooting, she told me a horrible story of
a newspaper article of a dog being burned by its owner and set afire.
And she started crying as she was telling me this,
so every time that I needed her to get over that edge
into complete, you know, tears,
I would just say, "Drew, I'm lighting the lighter,"
and she would just burst into tears, you know?
So not everybody will tell you a story that's so close to their heart.
Drew is very much of an animal lover.
So that allowed us to just get to that place of ultimate horror,
where people are doing things you can't comprehend
why they would ever do such a thing.
This is, incidentally, one of the areas that was censored
by the Motion Picture Association of America.
The-- Kevin's entrails coming out.
Kevin is the actor outside who--
-Not your entrails, but... -I know.
...the actor outside, playing Steve,
who was one of the very last contenders for the part of Billy.
A great actor who has gone on to do a lot of very interesting roles.
So we gave him this tribute to play in this.
I don't know whether it was really a tribute,
"cause he got to sit out in the cold all night
with his intestines hanging out.
But sipping coffee, which-- That image is embedded in my brain.
Right. Yeah.
Now this is also a great thing.
I've sat in many audiences, watching them respond to this quiz, you know,
and she gets the answers right and then she gets this answer right, you think,
and then you realize, "No, no, this killer really knows his movies."
Then you should know Jason's mother, Mrs. Voorhees, was the original killer.
I've always thought that the scariest killers
are the killers that are really smart.
And this one, like, gets you on your SATSs.
That question--
I was in a bar one night where they were having movie trivia,
and if you could stump the audience, you got a free drink.
And this is the question that I stumped the audience with.
Here we go.
Here it was. The MPAA censored.
Right. And a lot of times the MPAA just said to me, in this film especially,
"It's just too intense. Take the intensity back."
And we went through this protracted battle of me sending back various cuts.
I refused to take anything out, and they would say,
"Well, you still have an NC-17 then."
-That went on for some time, didn't it? -Yeah, it went on about a lifetime, yeah.
Please leave me alone.
It's very difficult now, making a film of this sort,
where you're really going into the dark side of humanity,
because the MPAA sort of looks at every film as...
I don't know what. Sort of propaganda for the good life.
And if you go really into the dark side of the way human beings often are,
they get very upset and say,
"Well, this is going to push some kid over the edge."
Which I don't believe.
I've really found the audiences respond to truth in films.
Well, this is also breaking the barrier here--
To go back to the themes we've established, all this house,
with glass everywhere, and when he throws the chair through the window,
you know that there's no longer any barrier of safety whatsoever.
Another thing I did here with the camera
is have her backing up in the standard horror film way, where--
In every case, if somebody backs out of a door in a shot like this,
you know they're gonna back right into the killer.
And we didn't do it.
So, you know, going from your script,
which so often set up the cliché situations,
and then stood them on their head.
You know, nothing you did, Kevin--
What's difficult, is you wrote this part for a masked Killer,
but you never accounted for how nobody could guess who he was
-by looking at his feet or hands. -I know.
I mean, one of the first script meetings I had with Wes, Wes says,
"Well, he's wearing a mask, but what else is he wearing?
I mean, we're gonna be able to tell who the killer is
just by the other clothes on his body."
And I just kind of looked at him and said, "Not my problem."
-I'm the writer. -Right.
So, we went through many, many costume permutations on this.
And for a long while, because Kevin had said in the script it's a ghost mask,
that we were going with a white figure.
And at the last minute, our producer, Marianne Maddalena said,
"I think black would look a lot scarier."
So we went with black, and there we were.
The mask itself, we found in a house that we were location scouting at,
and it was just an off-the-shelf item
that, you know, is available in just about any dime store around Halloween time.
This is another MPAA moment.
They wanted this shot out of the film in the worst way.
And I just claimed this was the only take that we did,
because Drew was so riled up over it.
Which, of course, was a bald-faced lie,
but Il do anything to get my shots in the film.
It is a huge moment of intensity, you have to admit.
-No, it is. -Which is so shocking. It's so great.
Yeah, people can't believe it's happening,
and they think, "Well, maybe she was just stabbed in the shoulder.”
And then you see her a moment later, and she's clearly mortally wounded.
This is about the time the audience just starts to...
sit there with their mouths open, feeling raw terror.
"Cause at first you think-- Well, the idea is that, "Her boyfriend got killed,
but it's Drew Barrymore, So she's gonna live.
-She's gonna make it." -Right.
And here she goes. She's still alive. She's still trucking.
Then maybe she'll be discovered by her parents-- Nope.
I'm too busy talking about the flowers and the fish at dinner.
And then there he is.
This was kind of a little added moment.
I just said, "Let's have her pull his mask off
and just stare, like she knows who it is, but she doesn't say."
I felt for that character, that would be the most profound moment,
when she knew who it was and had no explanation
-for why it was happening. -And also, it begins the mystery.
Right.
I thought that was a great...
beginning.
We used probably more Steadicam in this whole sequence
than we did in the rest of the picture,
going for that, sort of, very fluid--
"Nothing's-locked-down-anymore," sort of feeling.
Casey, baby?
-Where is she? -She's here.
-Mom. -Oh, my God, I can hear her.
And she will just not let the phone go.
Right.
Which gave that last tenuous contact between parent and child.
And then coming up with the final shot of this sequence
is where the MPAA really went berserk,
and we ended up having to cut frames out of every shot
and, you know, really shorten it much, much more than I would have cared to.
And that line there, of course, is lifted from Halloween.
Right.
The "Mackenzies" line.
Here we go.
It's a real time shot.
In the film, we had to cut every other frame,
so it was 50% faster.
Now you think things are going to be peaceful,
and then immediately we introduce the sound outside
and the audience is thinking, "Oh, my God, they're gonna kill somebody else."
They just caught their breath, and now here we go again.
It's just me.
-Billy, what are you doing here? -Sorry, don't hate me.
-Oh, my God. -You sleep in that?
This is the introduction, of course, of Skeet Ulrich's character, Billy,
and throughout the film, he goes in and out of being
the killer in the minds of the audience, I'm sure many times.
And it's a tribute to his skill that he's able to appear
very suspicious at one moment, and win your heart back the next moment.
Oh, well. I'm hitting the sack.
My flight leaves first thing in the morning.
Now, the expo runs all weekend, so I won't be back till Sunday.
He also wrote into the script this very weird thing of one door opening partially
and blocking another door, which we searched for endlessly
throughout Northern California, and never found a single house that was like that.
The bedroom I had growing up had that thing where
if you open the closet door and someone opened the bedroom door,
it just jammed the whole mess, and you couldn't get in or out, or anything.
We ended up having to build a whole wall in this house
just to make a closet that had a door like that.
I've never snuck through your bedroom window.
Right. And now that it's out of your system...
I was home watching television.
The, uh, The Exorcist was on.
It got me thinking of you.
It did?
Yeah...
What's funny, I've had numberless people say
this must have been a tip of the hat to Johnny Depp,
because he was in his first role in Nightmare on Elm Street.
But it really wasn't. I felt Skeet was very much his own man,
and he didn't even remind me of Johnny that much.
I think he's, really, a very subtle, very skilled, gifted actor.
And this, I believe, is one of his first starring roles.
Although, he had already shot Paul Schrader's Touch
just before he came on to our set.
So you thought you would climb in my window
and we'd have a little raw footage?
And, of course, we're also introducing our leading lady.
I shouldn't neglect Neve,
who was at the end of a long, long search
for somebody that would have this kind of character
that, at once, was innocent, and yet had tremendous strength.
And I think part of it was just that Neve has a long, long history of dance
and training in dance.
So she has a great physicality.
Very, very great physical strength and stamina,
which she would need entirely for this role.
Here's where we also, story-wise, set up "the virgin."
Right.
Right. Even their kisses, and they did this themselves,
were very tentative and sort of awkward.
They try to hold hands and don't quite make it.
And of course, she rebuffs him here.
Okay. Okay, okay. Time is up, stud-bucket.
Which is just one of the standard clichés of the genre.
The whole idea of the virgin being the heroine,
the good girl, the girl who lives.
And so I wanted to set up the idea, "Well, what would happen
if you had a woman in one of these movies who actually did go all the way.
Would she live? Would the audience think for a second she's going to die?
She's going to go on? What's going to happen?"”
It was just one more way that I wanted to take the rules of the genre
and sort of spin them.
In fact, later you have a character, Randy, saying what the rules are.
And, "You must never have sex because that means you'll be dead."
And of course, at the very moment, that's the moment that Sid's upstairs
having her tryst with Billy.
Hey, Billy.
Would you settle for a PG-13 relationship?
What's that?
I have heard many groans in audiences from young men here
when we didn't show this.
Again, it's sort of that tease of the virginal character.
And also the idea-- I was really happy that you didn't,
because you always see T&A in these type of movies,
and I think it was a refreshing change that--
And also, I think, it provoked-- It sort of added
to what we were trying to do with the whole genre.
Right. Wait, I have to talk about this shot.
This is our trick shot, a big crane shot coming down,
but the cameraman is standing on the crane in a Steadicam,
and he just steps off right here and continues the shot down the sidewalk.
...are doing drugs they buy in the classrooms
and that they are involved in the occult.
There's Linda Blair in the background talking about things of occult nature
happening in the school.
-She was great. -Yeah.
There's the introduction of Gale Weathers.
Right. Courtney actually had found a pack of gum
that had gum exactly the same color as her suit.
She was very disappointed we didn't stay in the shot that long.
And then we start to introduce the other characters in the film.
-Tatum... -Rose McGowan.
...who dyed her hair.
We were dyeing everybody's hair in this movie
to make them sort of contrast each other.
Oh, my God. Do they know who did it?
I was talking to somebody at dinner the other night,
who said this was his favorite line in the whole movie,
when Neve says, "She sits next to me in English.”
And Rose says, "Not anymore, she doesn't."
Which is that cynical, sharp edge to this film that runs throughout.
Yeah, I wanted it certainly--
It was never meant to be anything but a wicked film.
That's true. And I think it's very unusual in that sense,
that a lot of the kids are very uncaring, very centered around their own lives.
And in some ways, it sets off Neve's character even more so.
-Who's up next? -Sidney Prescott.
This moment always get a chuckle and amazed response from the audience,
when they see the Fonz up there.
And Henry is represented by my agent,
and we met about a year ago,
and I was really astonished when he said he wanted to be in this film.
But he played it with a sort of malicious glee,
which I thought was really amazing.
He's just about over the edge here on touching a bit too much.
Even the sheriff sort of gives him a look here.
Which the actors just instinctively went to. It was really great.
Yeah. It's sort of the beginning of the red herrings.
Right. Exactly.
And that's also introducing David Arquette's character, Deputy Dewey.
Now this scene with the dialogue was one of the reasons
that we were thrown out of the high school in Santa Rosa.
When the school board read the scene, they gave us a huge "no."
"We cannot have a movie in which teenagers are sitting around,
talking about bodies being gutted and emptied out."
And this resonated for about a month on location.
Everybody getting riled up about it, and finally we were--
All the letters in the news--
Everyone was writing letters to the editor and all the local newspapers
were up in arms
and the whole community sort of jumped onto the bandwagon.
Right, like kids never talked like this before.
One of the great ironies of it was that in the middle of all this school board
saying, "You're showing the wrong thing to our kids
and setting the wrong example,"
one of them was arrested for beating his wife,
which I thought was a wonderful, ironic touch.
Yeah, it was really-- I find it interesting
that the high school wanted us there. All the students had signed a petition.
The local community seemed to support us for the income
that was brought to the community as a result of filming there.
And then you've got--
You know, the morality--
The prudence of five people was deciding the fate of our movie.
It was really scary.
Yeah, it was. There was a definite undertone to it
that was about two steps from starting to book burn, you know?
I didn't kill nobody.
Nobody said you did.
Thanks, buddy.
Besides, it takes a man fo do something like that.
Yo, I'm gonna gut your ass in a second, Kid.
Tell me something.
Did you really put her liver in the mailbox?
"Cause I heard that they found her liver in the mailbox
next to her spleen and her pancreas.
This scene was important for me also, because I sort of introduced the idea
that the character of Stu had dated Casey,
which, ultimately, when you go back and you say,
"Why did they kill Casey?"
-Right. No, exactly. -And there's your answer.
That was also the introduction of Jamie Kennedy,
who, I think, had only done Romeo + Juliet just before that.
He was the guy with the pink hair, but--
And it also was the first case where I had actors coming up
saying, "Can I try one take for myself?"
And he came up with that Jerry Lewis imitation. It was so great.
I also liked this, because she goes to the mailbox
right after talking about putting the liver in the mailbox.
So she sort of has to check.
What a location.
Yeah, a fantastic location.
This is all shot in the wine country around Santa Rosa,
in Sonoma County, California.
I want this house. It was for sale, wasn't it?
Yeah. I think we just about bought it,
between the rental fees and the repair fees.
There's a little boom shadow on that railing there.
If anybody caught it, it's the only one in the movie.
This is, again, playing with the in and out.
You hear the dogs barking way back in the background,
and suddenly she doesn't feel quite so safe.
Even though she doesn't know why, she ends up behind glass
very much like the glass in the opening scene.
Another cliché situation where we're bringing down the music,
and sort of building-- And then she opens the closet door,
where so many villains always lunge out.
Nothing happens.
Trying all the time to keep the audience kind of off balance,
as you did in the script.
There's a little cameo coming up from our casting agent.
Lisa Beach.
The bodies of 17-year-old Casey Becker
and her 18-year-old boyfriend, Steven Orth,
were discovered late last night by the girl's parents--
The Woodsboro double murder case.
Authorities are baffled by the lack of clues and the savage--
The town's in shock, and no one can quite believe what has happened here,
although this is not the first time this small community
of Woodsboro has endured such tragedy.
Only a year ago, Maureen Prescott, wife and mother,
was found raped and murdered not far from this peaceful town square.
This is where we start to create the backstory.
Right. Which made this such an interesting character.
This whole theme of Sidney's mother.
Sidney as the victim.
The mother, of course, as the original victim.
And the mother's sort of kept as this wonderful, pure mother that was lost.
And the whole course of the movie is kind of
Sidney's readjustment of her reality
based on other people's information about the mother.
I thought that up to this point, we've created the present,
now we sort of introduce the past
and hopefully it'll just propel the audience to want to know...
-Right. -...what's gonna lay ahead.
Long day's journey into night.
Hello?
Practice ran late. I'm on my way, okay?
Here comes the line that I get harassed about
more than any other line in the movie.
-The Tom Cruise line? -Yeah.
Well, that one and one other one that will be popping up real soon too.
I'm gonna swing by the video store.
[ Was thinkin' Tom Cruise, All the Right Moves.
You know if you pause it just right, you can see his penis?
-Whatever. Just hurry, okay? -Ta-ta, Sid.
-Tatum, just get in the car-- -Hello, Sidney.
Hi, who is this?
You tell me.
Well, I have no idea.
Scary night, isn't it?
With the murders and all, it's like right out of a horror movie or something.
Randy, you gave yourself away.
Are you calling from work...
There's plenty of great, I think, lines and little speeches coming up here
where she dismisses the entire horror genre
because of its kind of predictability.
What's your favorite scary movie?
Oh, come on. You know I don't watch that shit.
-And its depiction of women. -Right.
No. It's just, what's the point? They're all the same.
Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can't act,
who's always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door.
It's insulting.
Are you alone in the house?
Randy, that's so unoriginal. I'm disappointed in you.
Maybe that's because I'm not Randy.
This is a great setup. I mean, at the same time, you're saying,
"This is not a movie you're watching.
This is real life talking about movies."
She's ending up doing the things
that she's even aware of that you should not be doing.
For instance, going out onto the porch, you know, when you hear the voice.
I just love those audience members,
"Just don't go out there!" And they're yelling at the screen.
Oh, yeah?
Well, I call your bluff.
I love that music cue. I think Marco--
Yeah, we should mention Marco Beltrami.
First-time composer of a feature film.
He's done some television work. Very young man.
Was found by my assistant, Julie Plec, when she was on the Internet.
And in a thing called Hollywood Café, she was asking who they knew
that was new and fresh and wonderful as a composer,
and somebody-- Several people mentioned Marco's name.
And I sent for some music from him, and just heard it and loved it.
And we hired him. He did a fantastic job.
Incredible job.
-Can you see me right now? -Uh-huh.
Uh-huh, okay.
What am I doing? Huh?
What am [ doing? Hello!
Nice try, Randy.
Tell Tatum fo hurry up, okay? Bye now.
If you hang up on me, you'll die just like your mother!
Do you wanna die, Sidney? Your mother sure didn't.
Fuck you, you cretin.
Now, of course, here we pay off the way we said,
"No, nobody's ever going to come out of the closet."
And here's where we also learned that Sid, you know, can handle her own a bit.
-Head bash. -Ouch.
No!
She can't get the chain off the door, so what does she do?
She has to run upstairs, just as she said one never should do.
Oh, no. We set up the doors.
There was always a fine line in staging these scenes
between making the killer very scary or making him appear dumb
because he could hit her over the head or smash through the door or something.
So we actually had a shot there of him
being hit over the head with a picture and falling back down the stairs.
But it started to make him look too much like a clown.
And also in this moment is where she types in her location,
which is 34 Elm Street, which we cut out
-for, I guess, time. -Yeah, time.
He's in the house.
He's in the house. He's got a knife.
He's gone. He's gone.
It's all right.
What?
Sid, what?
Wait, wait. Wait, Sidney, wait!
Wait, wait, wait, wait! What's going on?
Sidney, come back! Sidney!
It's a great moment. I think it gets a big jump out of the audience.
And it was David Arquette just improvising madly there.
I just said, you know, "Scream as loud as she does,"
and he did this whole thing that seemed just so natural.
It's a-- It's a very funny and very human moment.
And of course, now Billy is the suspect, and everybody's convinced that it's him.
-I caught him, Sheriff. -Who is that?
-Billy Loomis. Sheriff, -Sheriff, call these guys off.
There's a note on this actor.
Joseph Whipp I've worked with many times, and he was the--
Kind of a sergeant in the original Nightmare on Elm Street
that appeared at the house at the end
and was noticing that Nancy was locked into her house.
So the backstory there,
I put in that he was so upset by the events of Nightmare on Elm Street
that he moved to a small town in Northern California.
Here comes Tatum in her appropriate red Bug.
Tatum, you can't be here. This is an official crime scene.
It's okay. Her dad's out of town. She's staying with us tonight.
Does Mom know?
-Yes, doofus. -Let's get you out of here.
Established that they're brother and sister.
Right.
Creepy, huh?
I think a nice moment for Rose McGowan too, just--
She had a great comedic flair that's wonderful to watch.
Here. Even though we've seen Gale Weathers before,
-this is pretty much her introduction. -Right.
And also Earl Brown, who plays her cameraman.
I was very important that I wanted to nail her in one line,
and it's coming up.
Yeah, you're a real pain in the ass.
Leave Sid alone.
Where's she going?
-Look. Kenny. -Yeah?
I know that you're about 50 pounds overweight,
but when [ say "hurry,”
please interpret that as "move your fat, tub-of-lard ass now!”
There's no mistake who this woman is at this point.
So now we can build from that, change it and...
add a layer to it.
The art department had a great time with Dewey's desk here.
They had hats-- A hat on top of his monitor
that said "boob patrol” with two big breasts on it
and everything about it was just totally wacko.
It's like this guy has the mentality of--
One part of his mentality, at least, is a 16-year-old.
But he also rounded the character with a really, kind of,
beautiful understanding and reliable self too.
Let me ask you this. What are you doing with a cellular telephone, son?
Everybody's got one, Sheriff.
I didn't make those calls, I swear.
Check the phone bill, for Christs sake.
Call Vital Phone Comp. They got the records of every number dialed.
Thanks, Hank. We're on fop of it.
What were you doing over at Sidney's house tonight?
[ Wanted to see her, that's all.
And last night? Sidney said you crawled through her window last night, foo.
You went out last night?
[ Was watching TV. I got bored.
I decided fo go for a ride.
Did you happen fo ride by Casey Becker's house?
No. No, [ didn't
Sheriff. I didn't kill anybody!
The idea here, for me,
was that I point the finger at him so blatantly
that the audience immediately knows-- No, he's not the Killer.
Right.
And then in the very next beat you spend--
Or you spend the rest of the movie challenging that.
Right, because there's something in his look here that--
You don't know whether it's somebody that's been terribly hurt
or whether it's really a killer.
This actor, Earl Brown here, I've used twice before.
He was the morgue attendant in the seventh Nightmare,
and he also was a cop with the dog in Vampire in Brooklyn.
"Hey, don't touch my breasts."
Tell "em. Come on, Dad. Tell 'em!
-Just wait for the lawyer, Billy. -Sidney!
Sidney, come on. You know me.
Sidney, look at me!
Come on!
Sid, we're gonna get you out of here, okay? Are you okay?
They sell this costume at every five-and-dime in the state.
There's no way lo frack the purchase.
Father Death.
What about that cellular phone bill?
We're pulling Loomis' account. We won't know anything until the morning.
Oh, come on!
That was my little misdirection.
Put the word "father" in there
and maybe everybody will think that it's her father, Sid's father,
who's mysteriously missing.
For the entire film.
Goddamn it, Dewey!
What did Mama tell you?
When I'm wearing this badge, you treat me like a man of the law.
I'm sorry, Deputy Dewey-boy, but we're ready fo go.
Now. Okay?
Take 'em out the back way. Avoid that circus out there.
-Come on. -Don't touch me!
-He's my superior. -The janitor is your superior.
That last little line was looped.
I'll take full credit for it,
which I had nothing to do with whatsoever.
All these people in the background here are not paid extras.
They're all the people of the town.
I just saw them standing behind our police barricades,
and I said, "Let's just use 'em as the spectators."
Free extras.
There she is. Sidney!
Hi, that's some night. What happened? Are you all right?
She's not answering any questions, all right? Just leave us alone.
No, Tatum, it's okay. She's just doing her job, right, Gale?
-Yes, that's right. -So, how's the book?
Well, it'll be out later this year.
Oh, 1 look for it.
I'll send you a copy.
My agent told me that the moment when I did this in the script,
that's when he knew the script would sell.
I don't know what he meant by that, but it's--
Courteney had a great time with that. She loved getting punched.
"Il send you a copy.” Bam! Bitch went down.
"Il send you a copy.” Bam! Sid, superbitch!
You are so cool.
Thought you might want some ice for that right hook.
Note the picture of Grant Goodeve in the background.
I love all these-- They had a nice time with the art design.
-Yeah. -A lot of fun making Tatum a little retro.
Bruce Miller was our production designer and did,
I think, just a fantastic job throughout.
Telephone, honey.
-Who is it? -It's for Sid.
My dad?
I also like the way Tatum, in this scene, actually becomes a little girl.
Whereas before, we've seen her as this tough little...
hard-edged girl in her-- in her world.
She's got a bunny rabbit and her hair is up.
Hello?
Hello, Sidney.
She's not safe anywhere.
Poor Billy-boyfriend.
An innocent guy doesn't stand a chance with you.
Leave me alone!
-Looks like you fingered the wrong guy... -Dewey!
Again.
-Who are you? -Hang up, Sid.
Don't worry. You'll find out soon enough.
I promise.
What?
I kept Dewey, of course, out of sight until the conversation was over,
so everybody could suspect it was Dewey in his room.
Exactly.
This town is Healdsburg, California, which is one of the small,
sort of, wine country towns up in Northern California.
Great, wonderful town, very open to us.
And everybody was really wonderful to us,
as opposed to some other towns up there.
Now the audience knows that whoever is Killing people
also killed her mother.
So now we've connected the heroine to the killer.
We've upped the-- upped the stakes.
This is Liev Schreiber,
an actor who recently had a starring role in Ransom
as one of the kidnappers.
He was also in a lot of independent films this past year,
Walking and Talking one of them, which was a great movie.
His cellular bill was clean. He didn't make those calls.
We're checking every cellular account in the county.
Any calls made to you or Casey Becker are being cross-referenced.
It's gonna take some time, but we'll find him.
Here's Dewey being very real, I think,
which is fun to have this character have so many different sides to him.
We're coming up on a little Linda Blair cameo here.
Don't worry, Sid, it's school. You'll be safe here.
So how does it feel to be almost brutally butchered?
Hey, leave her alone!
People wanna know. They have a right to know.
-I eave her alone. -How does it feel?
She just wants to get an education. Turn that thing off.
That's a lot of fun. I worked with Linda--
The first television movie I ever got to direct--
The first time I ever shot 35 millimeter was a film starring her
called A Stranger in the House.
-I remember that movie. -In like 1979.
It was a television movie for NBC, I think.
Stop right there.
I'm not here fo fight. I just need fo talk.
-Kenny, camera, now! -Off the record. No cameras.
-Forget it. -Please. You owe me.
I had never seen Courteney Cox play a role like this,
and that was, I think, So nice to see her playing against type.
Certainly against the role she plays on Friends.
She ran with it.
Yeah, she really did.
I think a lot of people have said how much they like her
in this role, and how much they--
She's impressed them as a-- as a real actress.
Do you still think he's innocent?
Your testimony put him away.
That one little close-up of Kenny the cameraman
sort of throws him in the bag as a suspect.
-Have you talked fo Cotton? -Many times.
And has his story changed?
Not one word.
He admits to having sex with your mother, but that's all.
He's lying. She never would've touched him.
He raped her, and then he--
He butchered her. Her blood was all over his coat.
He was drunk that night.
He left his coat at your house after your mother seduced him.
I saw him leave wearing It.
No, you saw someone leave wearing that coat.
The same someone who planted it in Cotton's car, framing him.
No. Cotton murdered my mother.
You're not so sure anymore, are you?
Nice welt, sweetie. Let's go, Sid.
The killer's still on the loose, isn't he?
This is one of the charming things about the script, I should say, is that you--
You have such a complex backstory
that keeps changing the reality of Sid's world and her memories.
Jesus Christ!
An innocent man on death row, a killer still on the loose.
-Kenny, tell me I'm dreaming. -You wanna go live?
No, no. Not so fast. We don't have anything concrete.
This is huge. You can't just sit on it.
I know! That's why we need proof.
If I'm right about this, I could save a man's life.
Do you know what that could do for my book sales?
That's a great line. Great setup.
All right.
Hey, I haven't seen Billy around. Is he really pissed?
Oh, you mean after you branded him the Candyman?
-No, his heart's broken. -Stu!/
I was trying to get every movie reference in I could.
How many references do you think there are in this film?
I don't know. I'd have to check the Internet.
Someone's documenting 'em.
A guy named Bruce in Wisconsin.
Now, I haven't-- haven't mentioned Matthew Lillard yet,
but he did a magnificent job playing Stu.
Yeah. Which, I mean, I admit to being--
I think that was the most underwritten role in the film,
to my own, you know-- I'll critique my own work.
I felt like it was sort of a-- It was the underwritten role.
And he just came on board and ran with it
and turned it into one of the most memorable characters in the film.
Yeah, absolutely. Fantastic energy, great intelligence.
And later, I'll point out a couple of lines that he improvised.
-Absolutely. -That are absolutely showstoppers.
Which I take full credit for.
I love this location. This--
Because we were not allowed to shoot in the high school in Santa Rosa
because of script content,
we ended up at this beautiful little community center in Sonoma County
which used to be an elementary school with real wooden floors
and everything else that made it--
Gave it, again, that sense of just warmth and, you know, middle-American beauty.
My mom was killed. I can't believe you're bringing this up!
It's been a year.
Tomorrow! One year tomorrow.
Well, I think it's time you got over that.
[ Mean, when my mom left my dad,
I accepted it. It's the way it is.
She's not coming back.
Your parents split up. This is not the same thing.
This is great dialogue through here.
And it really just puts Billy right on the edge
between being sympathetic or being a total creep.
But you certainly get, for what you find out later--
You get an early glimpse of kind of his just emotional coldness.
What? Nobody said that. Sid!
Stupid,
There's a funny story with that scene.
Neve had a emergency
and she had to leave the set before we finished shooting the scene.
And Skeet ended up shooting many of his close-ups--
And with everybody from the first assistant to myself to--
Actually, he finally gave some of his best performance
to a microphone stand with an X put on it where Neve's eyeline would be.
This is a great moment for Henry too.
I love the way-- Whose idea was it to do the scissors?
I don't think that was mine.
...Tor the heartless, desensitized little shits that you are.
It's great.
That also-- That scene was--
The other one that Santa Rosa just had conniptions about.
The foul-mouthed principal. That's what he was referred to endlessly
for about a month in the newspaper.
He called students "shits."
Which has obviously never been done in the history of the world.
Ever.
What if Sidney killed Casey and Steve?
Why would she do that?
Maybe she had the hots for Steve
and killed them both in a jealous rage.
What would Sidney want with Steve?
She has her own bubble-butt boyfriend, Billy.
Maybe she's a slut just like her mother.
-You're evil. -Please, it's a common fact.
Her mother was a tramp.
Cut her some slack. She watched her mom get butchered.
This was a scene that at one time was going to be cut
because it was so isolated,
and I didn't realize how important it was till I saw what you did with it.
Yeah, we did take it out to--
Because it does cut perfectly to remove it.
But it tells so much about Sid and sort of her growing confusion
about who and what she really is and where she's come from.
It's also very funny dialogue, but very cold.
It's a very black humor you have in this.
And Neve's reactions to it, I think, were just wonderful for the character.
Yeah. I guess what I saw when I was writing I,
I just, sort of, saw the black, cold humor of it.
And when you're watching I, it becomes like a huge emotional moment
for your-- our lead character,
which I never anticipated when I wrote it.
And that's when I saw it just--
It's great.
Now this is a classic, classic scene of "who's under the--
Who's in the stall?" in scary movies in general.
I think the last time I saw it was in--
Gosh, I put myself into a blind alley.
-Copycat, I believe the movie... -That's right.
...where they had it coming down.
But it's been done many, many times. So we had fun, sort of, again,
pointing to one of the clichés of the horror films
and then sort of twisting it a bit.
In this case, having a costume
that virtually covers up the entire actor playing the villain.
One of the few things you can go by are the shoes,
so we ended up having to have most of the suspects
wearing black, large shoes for the rest of the shoot.
I loved what you did here-- The feet come down and then the shroud.
Yeah.
Very scary.
In what appears fo be a prank,
several students were seen wearing scary masks.
School officials have yet to comment,
but this is known fo be the same costume worn by the killer.
Seventeen-year-old Casey Becker and her boyfriend, Steven Orth,
have already lost their lives.
I like this shot for some reason. The light on her is beautiful.
These are all known newscasters in Northern California also,
so a bit more of the sort of reality we gave to it.
I know who you are, Miss Weathers.
How's the eye?
It's productive. Is there a problem on campus?
No, everything's under control.
Well, of course. You're here.
Now, David is a huge admirer of Elvis Presley.
I think you see part of his love of that in this scene
and in the couple of the looks he gives.
You look awfully young fo be a police officer.
I'm 25 years old.
You know, in a demographic study,
I proved fo be most popular amongst males 11 fo 24.
Guess [ just missed you. Of course, you don't look a day over 12.
Except in that upper torso area.
-Does the force require you to work out? -No, ma'am.
Because of my boyish good looks,
muscle mass has increased my acceptance as a serious police officer.
I need your attention now, kids.
Due fo the recent events that have occurred,
effective immediately, all classes are suspended until further notice.
The Woodsboro Police Department has issued a citywide curfew
beginning at nine o'clock tonight.
Looks like we've got a serial killer on our hands.
Serial killer's not really accurate.
Gotta knock off a couple more to get that title.
Well, we can hope, can't we?
I mean, we certainly don't have any leads.
-Have you located Sidney's father yet? -No, not yet.
Well, he's not a suspect, is he?
We haven't ruled him out as a... possibility.
-If you'll excuse me. -I'm sorry. Am [ keeping you?
If I may say so, Miss Weathers...
One of the things I was trying to do with the role of Sidney also is this--
The father, the mother, the idea that the mother might have been a loose woman,
and the fact that Sidney won't quite give in to her boyfriend.
And just to try to tie the psychosis of what her mother was to, you know,
how it's affected her life today.
And if, perhaps, she really did accept the truth about her mother,
then she might already know who the killer is.
Right.
The father is sort of the obvious suspect.
So you kind of almost rule him out because he is so obvious.
But one of things I was trying to do is establish her past.
Her father, her mother, her mother was a loose woman
and Sidney's a virgin, and that's-- And she's sort of--
Her sexual life is sort of guarded by this knowledge of her mother.
And, you know, if she accepted the truth that her mother, yes,
indeed was a tramp, so to speak,
then maybe Sidney would already know who the killer was.
-Right. -It's sort of a--
Her denial system at full force.
I was just trying to tie all the clichés together.
Cool. You guys bring food, all right?
This section here with the principal
came as a result of Bob Weinstein.
And after he had bought the script,
he felt that there was 30 pages where nothing happened.
And he called me up and said, "You gotta kill somebody, Kevin.
Someone's got to die, and you're having--
There's, like, a 30-minute gap where no one's getting offed."
So he said, "I don't care how you do it, just do it."
So this is sort of--
So, Bob, this is for you.
You know, we should mention Bob Weinstein
in that little Fonzie moment with the hair.
-Yeah, right. -Gets a big chuckle out of the audience.
But Bob was such an enthusiastic supporter of this film throughout.
I mean, he really is--
He loves the genre. He wants to take it to its highest level possible.
And, you know, I think he really recognized
from the beginning how-- how much this script could accomplish.
That is true. I think he got it from the word "go."
-This is me. -Cameo. Cameo.
That's me wearing the original costume from Nightmare on Elm Street.
That's about as much as I should be on screen, I think.
I remember, before Wes would agree to do the movie,
Bob had to talk to some lesser directors about I,
and a lot of people were commenting on the humor and saw it as a comedy.
And Bob would call me and say, "No, this is not a comedy.
Tell me, Kevin, it's a scary movie, right?"
I said, "Yes, that's the title of the movie. It is a scary movie."
And so many directors saw it as a comedy.
And I'm so glad that Bob was in sync and got the right director to do the job.
I'm glad you finally agreed to do it.
Well, you know, it's a very tricky mix,
and I've done it badly in other films, I think.
You cannot be funny when somebody's dying, as here.
I mean, you really suddenly feel for this man,
and he's a human being.
But the tension in between is quite often dispelled from--
I love that shot.
That's a little optical that we did.
It turned out very well.
That was such a surprise. No one told me. I had to discover that on my own.
And speaking of Bob Weinstein, that was his idea.
"Why don't you go in and get a really tight shot of his eye?"
So I did that and then added the reflection.
Maybe your mom was Just a very unhappy woman.
If they were having an affair,
how come Cotton couldn't prove it in court?
Here comes the second line that I seem to get more flak for.
Right.
I actually had a call from an agent saying,
"You're never going to work again if you leave this line in."
But it's another thing, you know, that just makes the film real
because it's normally--
Nobody would ever mention these things in a film.
Well, I'm mean, you can only hear that Richard Gere gerbil story so many times
before you have lo start believing it.
And it puts that sort of cynicism on it that I think is a part of life today,
that, you know, like it or not, is just there.
Here's one of my other favorite lines, the Wes Carpenter lines.
You're starting to sound like some Wes Carpenter flick or something.
Don't freak yourself, okay? We've got a long night ahead of us. Okay?
Let's boogie.
It's alive!
Now-- What was--
-Is there anything to that that I- -No, it's just--
Obviously from the film Frankenstein,
and just one of the great classic moments in horror films.
And it's kind of a tribute, and it's also saying, you know,
in 20 years, any film made today has the possibility
of being considered a treasure, so don't trash it too much, critics.
There you go.
I had never asked you about that, the selection of that clip.
Yeah.
What's that werewolf movie with E.T.'s mom in it?
-The Howling. Horror. Straight ahead. -Okay, thanks.
-Oh, now that's in poor taste. -What?
This is a great scene. Again, I have to compliment the writing.
We shouldn't look like we're here patting each other on the back too much,
but it's really-- it's a great setup.
It plays with the audience's suspicions of who's guilty.
I think Matthew is great in this, and Jamie does a wonderful job too.
And the sort of awareness of films and how they are structured
and what the clichés are is a way of putting the audience off balance,
because they say they're aware that there are clichés,
therefore I bet this isn't going to be cliched.
There's always some stupid, bullshit reason fo kill your girlfriend.
That's the beauty of it all. Simplicity.
I love the extra. She takes off.
I went through three extras before I got somebody
that could give a decent reaction. That was a very important reaction.
-What, is she saving herself for you? -Maybe.
Now that Billy tried to mutilate her,
do you think Sid would go out with me?
That kills me.
No, I don't at all. No.
You know who I think it is?
You know, I think it's her father.
Why can't they find her pops, man?
Because he's probably dead.
His body will come popping up in the last reel somewhere!
Eyes gouged out, fingers cut off, teeth knocked out!
See, the police are always off track with this shit.
If they'd watch Prom Night, they'd save time.
There's a formula to it. A very simple formula!
Everybody's a suspect!
Prom Njghtwas very good.
I mean, it wasn't one of my favorite films by any means,
but it was certainly a film that really did
have a red herring-filled day.
And since we're having a little fun with that, I-
-It's one of the reasons it got thrown in. -Right.
Because there was the sheriff, the janitor,
all those characters were red herrings in Prom Night,
and we, sort of...
made fun of 'em here.
Now, here's a framing and a staging
that is very similar to the end scene in the film.
It's kind of an anticipation of...
Stu over Billy's shoulder in the kitchen later.
"Millennium." That was Wes Craven's word.
Very nice.
We had to acknowledge that,
even though it'll be out of date in four years.
I think, in a way, this is a millennial film.
There's definitely a tone, I think, that comes over a culture
towards the end of a century
and certainly towards the end of a millennium,
where you feel like nothing is quite in the right place anymore,
when you're sort of moving towards some grim, dark revelation.
Whether that's true or not, I think that tone creeps over a culture.
Is that where the word "postmodern horror" comes from?
-No, I don't think so. -What is postmodern horror?
God knows. I think it's like "existentialism" used to be.
It's one of those words that are just thrown in all the time now.
Because if this movie is postmodern horror,
that means that the next movie has to be post-postmodern horror.
We'll just call it P-2.
I think with the modern age, it was conceived to be--
It was, like, where everything is going to be all right
through technology.
And postmodern, in the loosest sense,
I think can be that that dream, that illusion is over,
and we're moving to something where we're having a much more realistic view
of the way mankind is going.
And it's not all going to be solved by technology.
And I think this film very much reflects that
in the young people's attitudes.
-In the cellular phones... -Right.
-...and the fax machines. -Right.
The technology is not bringing, you know, peace and love.
...your mother's untimely death. It's no big deal, Sid. You'll thaw out.
Yeah, but he has been so patient with me with all the sex stuff.
How many guys would put up with a girlfriend who's sexually anorexic?
Billy and his penis don't deserve you, all right?
I had to be careful staging this segment
to try to keep all the suspects alive, so I made sure that Dewey,
instead of going towards the station,
wandered off at the end of the previous scene
and comes back in this scene.
And--
This scene was one of the kind of fun inspirations I had on the set
when I was watching Joseph Whipp smoke.
Then I realized that Dewey had an ice cream cone,
that it'd be fun to coordinate them.
So I-- I told David just,
"Every time he smokes, you take a hit on the ice cream cone."
Of course, Joseph Whipp had quit smoking about ten years before,
so he was, like, dying to be doing this scene.
She's with my sister.
-You want me to bring her in? -Nah.
Not just yet.
Let's find Nell first, make sure he's our man.
And here's the misdirection. The famous shoe that--
The same as from the stall.
You stay close to Sidney.
Don't let her out of your sight.
Yes, sir.
This begins-- Kevin, I think in your script,
it was broken down to be scene 118,
which went on for weeks and weeks and weeks
on this cold, isolated farmhouse on the top of a hill.
And at the end, when we finally finished shooting this whole ending sequence,
we all had T-shirts made that we survived scene 118.
And that's where we had our cast and crew picture taken.
All the actors were harassing me
about writing the movie almost entirely at night.
That's almost always the case. Having done a career
making scary movies, you know, most of the time you're working at night,
in just the most miserable, cold situations imaginable.
I think it was Jamie Kennedy who said,
you know, if I really wanted to break a cliché,
I would've had the whole movie during the day.
Right.
There's the old beer bong, which I made.
-Is that the one that I-- -Yeah, that's the one you brought to me
and I-- 'Cause I didn't know what it was.
And I, of course, knew too well what one was.
So I went to the store and bought a funnel for 'em.
All of this end sequence was shot on location at this house.
It was a very interesting house. It had been built by an older couple
and just as it was completed,
they had both died within a month of each other.
So it was completely abandoned,
owned by the children who didn't quite know what to do with it.
So we convinced them it would be a wonderful idea
for us to shoot our movie there.
...never know when or where a story will break.
Not much of a story here. Just a bunch of kids cutting it loose.
Then what are you doing here?
Just keeping an eye on things.
I'm gonna check the party out.
-Do you mind if I join you? -Not at all.
Here, let me just get my coat. Thanks.
Now you start to set up another little piece of technology.
Right.
Yeah.
-How many Evil Dead? -Yeah!
-How many Hellraiser? -Hellraiser right here.
The Fog, Terror Train, Prom Night.
How come Jamie Lee Curtis is in all of these movies?
She's the... scream queen.
With a set of lungs like that, she should be. Yeah.
Tits. See?
Oh, Il get it
Hey, Tate, grab another beer, would ya?
There's more beer in the garage.
What am I, the beer wench?
-She got nominated. -Oh, yeah?
She was nominated for Terror Train.
You are not gonna believe who's here! It's that chick from Top Story!
-Gale Weathers? -Here. Yeah.
You're under age, son.
I'm kidding. Have a good time.
Watch the driving.
-Dewey.
Dewey.
What is she doing here?
She's with me!
-I'm just checking things out. -So you did.
Now leave, and take your media mouth with you.
Now, one of the fun things-- Neve will kill me for saying this.
In the editing room, we discovered that she has a habit of touching her hair.
So if you ever want to watch the film just for the fun of it,
keep track of how many times she touches her nose or her hair.
I told her about it, and she said, "Oh, my God,
now I'm going to be self conscious for the rest of my life."
It's true, though. I noticed that on Party of Five.
-Yeah. -She does touch the hair.
This is the favorite shot of many teenage boys.
And how did you feel? Does this film live up to the way--
I mean, the film-- The scene live up to the way that you had written it?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
The idea of putting the garage--
The dog door in the garage door actually came from my assistant.
Because originally when I wrote this scene,
I just had her get in a fight with the Killer,
and the garage door came down and got her neck.
And--
This is a standard cliché shot.
In some ways, I'm working off of the clichés
that are used in this kind of scene
and then sort of twisting it so that doesn't go the way you think.
But my assistant, anyway, had a dog door in her garage door,
and she gave me that idea. And as soon as she said that,
-I just went, "Yes, that's it." -Yeah.
That is a very creepy little thing to get stuck in.
And most people don't realize, but they know, sort of instinctively,
that those doors are really killers.
Once they start up, nothing's going to stop.
I loved the day they were building it in the shop,
and everyone was crawling through it to see--
-To see if somebody could get through it. -Prove you could get through it.
It was very funny.
I found this to be very scary, actually, and--
Because she just turns around and there he is.
Right.
And up until now, the killer's sort of always lunged out and--
And I should mention somebody's name here.
Dane Farwell is the stuntman that played the killer most of time, I would say,
and he brought a really uncanny personality to it himself.
No, please don't kill me, Mr. Ghostface.
I wanna be in the sequel!
As well as taking some hideous falls and crashes into things,
and being smacked in the head with bottles, as you'll see in a moment.
Randy, what the hell are you doing?
Stop!
Fucker!
Those are two one-take-only shots.
The throw was my stunt coordinator, Tony Caesar,
who turned out to be a deadeye.
This scene was just excruciating for everybody involved,
as far as the door with its aluminum side, I mean, cutting into your rib cage.
The leverage was incredible, and Rose was really a game sport,
as well as the stuntwoman, of course.
-Was that another MPAA cut? -Yes, that was another MPAA cut.
They made us shorten that shot.
I always call that my Hitchcockian style scene
because there's so many different cuts and angles to it.
We shot all that for weeks, I think.
And going out and getting little pieces of it.
-Tatum, come on! -There's nobody here but us chickens!
-Do you know where she is? -No, I haven't seen her.
Billy. Hey.
One of the fun things in this film is making sure
that we had the people that turned out to be the killers
accounted for at all times.
So there was somebody that was gone that could be doing the mayhem.
And I think that's why so many audience members
go back and watch this over and over again.
Because they're-- It's such an elaborate construction,
and it does hold true.
I don't think you ever cheated in the script.
What was interesting is when I set out to write it,
I wasn't so concerned with that.
I just sort of was concerned about who the killer was,
what their motive was, how they were carrying out their plan,
and it all fell into place.
And going back, in retrospect, it was like, "Yeah, it did all work out.”
It was one of those sort of miraculous things that you just--
Because it could have been a very, very confusing...
-hole to work out. -Right.
To work through.
This is fun for me because you've got a situation
where you've got about four types of media working at once.
You've got the film, you're actually-- the audience is actually watching,
you've got people watching on video cams that are live,
you've got kids watching movies and talking about those.
And you know, it's like this wonderful sort of layer cake of realities
and various versions of the truth that, I think,
does make it kind of postmodern, if that means anything.
But we very much have a new way of constructing a film
where you acknowledge all of the different media
that's involved in our lives right now.
I think this also is a beautifully written scene,
and I think the kids did a great job with it,
where, you know, Skeet just takes you back and forth
between suspecting him, not suspecting him, suspecting, not suspecting.
And when you go back and look at it at the end,
after you know what happens in the film, all the talk that you wrote about--
"Life is a movie. It's all just a movie.
But you don't get to choose your genre"--
have wonderful sort of repercussions and echoes
to the different interpretations of the reality of this film.
Yeah, I think I'm really...
scared...
that I'm gonna turn out Just like her, you know?
Like it's a bad seed or something.
And I know it doesn't make sense.
Yeah, it does.
It's like Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs
when she keeps having flashbacks of her dead father.
Skeet was always thinking, too. He would tell me between takes,
"Did you notice I looked over towards where Stu's going to be coming out later?"
So he's always keeping his character, you know, right,
so that he knew, inwardly, he was the killer
and checking out, making sure their plan was,
you know, being arranged correct and the timing was going to be right.
But at the same time he's pulling off this very sympathetic,
very real character.
And one of the fun things is to go back and watch the movie again,
and you see all the little looks and the little nuances
-between the two of them. -Right.
Why can't I be a Meg Ryan movie?
I think this look that he gives over her shoulder
when she says the line about-- right here-- is a wonderful look.
It's very dark and yet, somehow,
could be interpreted as just a guy thinking,
"Wow, I'm finally going to get to home base," you know?
It's a very complex acting job he's doing here.
Are you sure?
Yeah.
I think so.
And you're breaking the cliché
because now the heroine is going to have sex,
-and that's just not done. -She's working--
In fact, Randy's about to give the rules downstairs.
She's working through the trauma of her mother.
She's going to have sex, and now the audience is left to question,
will she or won't she live?
Was Halloween one of your favorite films when you were a kid?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you'll notice that there was a girl
who was killed in a garage in Halloween,
and we killed someone in a garage on Halloween,
the girl's popping popcorn in Halloween, she's popping popcorn here.
Jamie Lee was always the virgin in horror movies.
I sort of sprinkled little Halloween moments through this film.
What'd you say?
That's why she always outsmarted the killer...
Here's the famous rules scene where we lay out
exactly what the rules are, of course.
As many reporters have asked me since,
"Aren't you showing
that your film is a cliché?"
And I said, "No, because as soon as we say the rules,
we start breaking them." We've already broken one.
There are certain rules one must abide by
in order fo successfully survive a horror movie.
For instance, number one, you can never have sex.
Big no-no!
And there's the knife on the screen from the kitchen.
You know, it's like this theme of the naked blade is throughout the film.
The way that you used the music
from Halloween and the videotape footage
through the course of this film, I thought was just amazing.
I'm getting another beer. You want one?
And here's somebody saying, "I'll be right back,"
which means he's going to be dead. But yes and no.
He's actually one of the killers, but he does die at the end.
Okay, I'll see you in the kitchen with a knife.
Only virgins can outsmart the killer in the big chase scene at the end.
-Don't you know the rules? -What rules?
You don't know the rules?
There are rules one must abide by in order fo successfully...
Boring.
The Sheriff just radioed.
Somebody reported a car in the bushes down the road. I'm gonna go check it out.
-Would you care to join me? -I'd love to.
This is, sort of, Dewey's last stab at being a suspect, I think,
when he puts the flashlight under his face.
Something David did on his own,
which I thought was a very nice little touch.
-Excuse me, ma'am. -Mm-hmm?
I thought maybe we'd walk.
It's such a nice night out. I got a flashlight.
You're not scared, are ya?
No.
-All right. -Great.
-Do you know what that constellation is? -No. What is it?
I don't know. That's why I was asking you.
So, what happened fo Tatum, Stu?
-She probably got pissed at me and bailed. -Bye.
No, I'm just kidding.
Kind of a repeat of their opening scene.
Look.
And she does push him away, but then she shows
that she's going to give herself to him. And we're paralleling,
as you did in the script, a scene in the movie,
and the kids talking about the gratuitous tit shot,
with our shot, which we blocked. And that was written into the script.
I think to, again, to sort of disappoint the audience in a way that--
We're not going to do what you think we're going to do here.
Hello? Yeah?
And now we're into John Carpenter's music, I believe.
Holy shit.
No... Listen up.
They found Principal Himbry dead.
He was gutted and hung from the goalpost on the football field.
So what are we waiting for? Let's go over there before they pry him down.
That was a problem in the script.
I didn't know how to get rid of all the partiers.
You know, we wanted to isolate our core group.
And then once-- When Bob came up with the idea,
and when Bob said, "You have to kill somebody else"
and I chose the principal, there was the answer.
And in addition, I got to carry on that hard-edged, cynical attitude
that children have today.
Yeah, it's funny and terrifying at the same time,
the way they run out.
So, is-- is Dewey your real name?
No, it's Dwight.
Dwight?
-I'm sorry. -No, that's all right.
Dewey's just something I got stuck with a long time ago.
Well, I like it.
I think this scene is so warm and genuine between these two.
They had a real affection for each other.
Became very close friends on the set and it really shows.
They enjoyed working with each other.
And I think by the end of the scene, you no longer suspect either one of them,
and they sort of swing over to being the good guys.
-I don't think you're that bad. -No?
No.
I think that's just cause you kinda like me.
I love his "freeze" ad-lib. It's perfect.
He does a couple of great ad-libs.
He does this thing where she kisses him and then looks over
and sees the car that they were looking for.
And she says, "Is that what you were looking for?"
And he just looks at her and says, "My whole life."
I'm sorry.
I'm on duty.
Is that what you're looking for?
My whole life.
-Damn/ -What?
-What is it? -This is Neil Prescott's car.
-Sidney's father? -Yeah.
Jesus. What's he doing here?
We gotta get back.
At this point, Neil Prescott is back being a suspect. The father.
And I don't think the movie stops in its sort of
headlong pitch from this point on.
It's just one hellish door after another, opening up to--
-The big chase scene... -Right.
...as Randy pointed out,
that only virgins can outsmart the killer in the big chase scene.
And now that we know she's no longer a virgin--
She's not supposed to be able to, but she does.
Well, I don't know, when you're arrested you're allowed one phone call,
so I was just curious. Who'd you call?
This is a great job of Skeet going back and forth
between sounding like a kid that's unjustly accused
and he must be the killer.
I think it was a great stroke that you had of building this kind of tension.
And then at the end, quote, "killing him" so you would remove him as a suspect.
You don't still think it was me, do ya?
I just want to throw in one more--
One little last bit of information that would sort of just throw you off.
Something that you haven't even mentioned before or touched on,
which was the phone call from earlier.
-Right. -At Tatum's house.
Just shows that she's smart and her brain's working.
Here's the threatening move. He leans in. It must be the killer.
And you think she's realizing he's the killer,
and instead she's reacting to this movement behind him.
I think at that point, the audience didn't know what to think.
Billy, watch out!
Sid.
Yeah, that was the best hit.
That's, again, Dane Farwell. Just a really remarkable stuntman.
I've been using him ever since Serpent and the Rainbow.
He did all the stunts in the fight scenes in there.
Help me, somebody! Help me!
Help me!
I should say we had some great female stuntwomen
on this shoot too.
A little bit of KNB magic there,
Building a body that looked incredibly real.
Watch out.
I think this is one of the most fun things you wrote for a director to do,
where you have him warning the character on screen,
and meanwhile, he's giving himself the--
You know, giving the very advice he should be following himself.
This actually was Skeet Ulrich playing the killer at this point.
This is the one time that we had him doing that.
Turn-- behind you!
Behind you, Jamie.
Jamie, turn around. God! Yeah.
Help me! Help!
He's going from Cheetos-- Now he's moved on to tortilla chips.
I think Earl put on about 20 pounds for this role.
Behind you!
-Oh, my God. No. -Oh, shit.
Jamie. Jamie.
-Behind you, kid! -Randy!
-Behind ya! -Look around!
Third MPAA moment coming up here.
-Shit -What?
We're on 30-second delay.
Oh, my God.
In the feature film, we had to cut out that moment
when he looks back up into the killer's face,
which I thought was such a telling moment because it was so human.
And it's one of the examples where I think censorship
can really make things more impersonal,
rather than having the reactions of what happens when somebody is hurt.
-We tried to make that argument, it was. .. -Yeah, it's impossible.
...a lost cause.
The MPAA is just a much larger version of the school board in Santa Rosa.
Yeah, very similar mentalities. Very similar.
I love the way Courteney runs in this. She looks like she's jogging.
Gives that wonderful sense of a feisty woman
who's gonna stand up to anything to get her story.
Lock yourself in it Call the Sheriff for backup.
Be careful!
I think this is one line of description in the script,
then you turned it into an incredible moment here, where--
All that credit goes to David, really. He just he made it so human
because the guy's doing this, sort of, standard,
you know, thrust of the gun towards target,
but he looks scared shitless, and that's just a great--
-But your lay in of the Halloween music... -Yeah, that's true.
It's just-- It's perfect. The timing, the cue, it's all right on.
You know, we got that on the second take, I think.
It was just one of those lucky moments. Person falling down the stairs,
on the television in the background, right on cue.
Jamie Lee, thank you.
Kenny!
This, I think, for Courteney was the hardest thing to do.
I don't think she'd ever done anything like it.
And, as you know, in films of this sort,
there's a lot of reactions to things that aren't really there.
So we had this tremendous sort of rapport going over the walkie-talkie
where I was screaming all the time what was going on off-screen for her.
-911. -What's going on?
Oh, God.
You know, it was pointed out to me that-- by someone--
That if you're going backwards and you slam on the brakes,
-a body would not fall forward. -Mostly-- Actually, he was--
By her starting up backwards very suddenly,
he was just cut loose from being caught,
and it just happened to be the moment when he fell down.
-Exactly. -Okay, so I flunked high school physics.
This is an example of a stunt gone wrong that actually worked rather well.
It was supposed to go off the road and flip and roll down the hill, flip,
and instead, it refused to flip and headed straight for the trees.
We all thought, "Oh, my God. This is end of this stuntwoman."
But fortunately, she was in a five-point harness,
and just came out and said, "Okay, time for my coffee."
That's the Sissy Spacek moment of the script,
where the blood-drenched prom girl stands in the middle of the road.
I was nervous with that stunt.
-I was there that night. -Yeah.
It was my first stunt that I'd ever witnessed on a set.
This shot we must have done ten times
because the knife kept falling out of his back
till I was just furious at the damn knife.
One of the things I love that you did is that you gave the killer this habit,
or, you know, this sort of ritual of wiping the blade clean,
which became very scary.
Yeah, very methodical.
I'm not so sure that wasn't Dane, again, that thought of that.
He, again, was always thinking in character,
even though he's, you know, just doing stunts.
This scene actually existed in an abandoned script
that I first started writing when I was in high school
of the car with the killer outside,
and she's trapped in the car and he's got the keys.
And then I just--
When I sat down to actually write Scream--
-In it went. -In it went. A great moment.
It just sort of--
It was a scene that almost was lost because it was--
It could have been taken out and the action would have been continuous,
but struggled very hard to keep it in the schedule.
I think we got it in a very short period of time.
Sidney! Sidney!
Jesus, we've got fo get the fuck out of here!
Stop right there!
Don't shoot. It's me! I found Tatum. She's dead.
-I think Stu did it. -Don't listen to him, Sidney!
-Stay back! -Stu did it.
-He killed Billy. He killed my Tatum. -You did it!
Jamie had a rock the size of a hen's egg in his shoe
so he could get his limp right. I didn't know until the end of the evening
when he practically had to be sent to the doctors.
No, I didn't. Sid, he did it!
He did it, Sidney! Please, I didn't do it He did it Please!
-Please, Sidney. -Fuck you both!
-Please! -No! No! Sidney!
Open up! He did it!
Help me! He's going crazy!
-Sidney! -Go away!
Sidney?
Leave me alone.
-Sid. -Billy.
Now, did the MPAA ever-- Did they object to the fact that--
The intensity of these two killers or that--
Or was it the fact that, also, they were teenagers?
It wasn't that they were teenagers so much, but it was--
One thing they said, "It's so imitable because they're just using a knife
that you can find in the kitchen." Like, hello?
I think, you know, I think they're really more comfortable
with the, sort of, Rambo-ish murder and mayhem
where people are machine-gunning and stuntmen are flying off air rams
and it's all kind of unreal.
But it's when it's so personal and intimate as this film was,
and so many times, especially in that ending scene,
they feel like, "Oh, my God. That's too real.
We can't show that to people. They'll go out and do it."
Which I think is really a gross underestimating
of the audience's intelligence and integrity.
I agree with you completely.
Corn syrup.
That transition there was very tricky for him,
to fall down the stairs and still be alive after being stabbed so viciously was,
I think, a very tricky thing for him to sell,
but he did it somehow, you know, saying, "It's okay.
Bleeding like a stuck pig, but I'm okay."
Which he just threw in there.
But of course, this is the big revelation
that it's not a single killer, that it's two.
The reveal of the two killers was--
It always concerned me because I thought people would figure it out.
Because there's no way, if you go back on a second viewing,
you realize that one person couldn't have done the killing in the first scene.
-Right? -Or, you know--
I think maybe the audience just assumed you're being sloppy.
-Yes. -And at the end of the film,
they'll be able to say, "You know, it wasn't possible
for that guy to have done it."
But at this point, they suddenly went, "Oh, my God."
It's again in one of those, I think,
subtle realizations on the part of the audience
that whoever wrote this is smarter than they are.
Well, I just knew that satirical edge that was, sort of,
weaved throughout the script
suddenly becomes almost the entire motive,
suddenly becomes what the film is all about here in the final moment.
It's certainly what these two guys are about.
Right.
Here's the over-the-shoulder business that was set up in the video store,
and these guys did it pretty naturally on their own.
Here they start to reveal the motive, which--
There were two camps when I sold the script, who felt--
One camp felt that there should be no motive,
feels scarier without one.
And then another group of people felt that there should be a motive.
So I took that note, and the end result was both.
Yeah, it leaves a wonderful sort of ambivalence about it all,
because everybody is looking for one interpretation or another
of what scary films do to an audience.
You know, those that think the more scary the picture is,
the more the audience is going to go out and duplicate that.
And then others that-- which I would include myself among--
That think that they're a great release of a lot of things,
including pent-up fear rather than pent-up violence.
This just leaves you hanging,
which I think is the best you can say of any of these things.
You can't say definitively what the reason, why a person Kills, is.
Right. But I also-- I definitely wanted to make a point.
All writers have something to say, even if-- How trivial it may be.
And I definitely wanted to plug the idea
that no, you cannot blame the movies for violence.
But by doing-- By sending out that message in a very violent film,
I think that, sort of-- I guess it created the ambivalence that you're talking about.
Yeah, you're gonna love this one. It's a scream, baby!
Hold on a sec. I'll be right back.
That line was added after the name change,
-which was halfway through the shoot. -Right, yeah.
We had hats that said "Scary Movie” and T-shirts that said "Scream.”
We killed her exactly one year ago today.
Attention! Oh, what do we have behind door number three, Sidney?
-Daddy! -Whoa, hold it
That's enough.
Another surprise here-- Jamie set up in the video store
that the father would probably come popping out in the last reel somewhere.
But he didn't have his teeth knocked out.
This scene, from the MPAA's standpoint,
was sort of the definitive reason why this film must be an NC-17.
In fact, that's the first response I got from them,
was, "It's a wonderful film, completely compelling.
And what a wonderful example of an NC-17."
Which is their way of saying, "You're going to die."
But this moment coming up here,
I think, is the moment which--
I have never seen anything like it in a film whatsoever.
And it's where their entire plan,
based on their casually taking a hit like this, comes falling apart,
because they have no clue what actual violence does to somebody
until they feel it themselves,
which I think is the most moral thing that could be said about this.
My turn.
It's also a wonderful shifting of Stu's loyalty to Billy
when he realizes that Billy is not the sort of prince that he thought he was.
Fuck! Fuck!
Fuck! God damn it Stu!
Sorry, Billy. I guess I got a little too zealous, huh?
-Give me the knife. -No.
I've been at a dozen audiences watching this,
and there's just this stunned silence that comes over an audience at this moment,
like they can't believe they're seeing what they're seeing.
I think it's just a wonderful, real moment that takes the whole film
completely a million miles away from any sort of
cliché situation into something that's just extraordinary.
...these days, ya gotta have a sequel!
You sick fucks. You've seen one foo many movies.
Now, Sid, don't you blame the movies.
Movies don't create psychos.
I thought, again, it was a great moment where you see Billy's just out of control.
He's not Mr. Cool anymore.
He's just acting off of pure violent, sort of, impotent rage.
And that little-- That line, "I'm feeling a little woozy here"--
That's Matthew's line, isn't it? Was it in the script?
-It was in the script. -It was in the script, I'm sorry.
That was one of 'em.
Houston, we... we have a problem here.
-There's an ad-lib. -Yeah, that's his line.
-What? -The gun, man. The gun.
I put it right there, and it's not there.
-Where the fuck is it? -Right here, asshole.
-Man, I thought she was dead. -She looked dead, man.
-Still does. -I've got an ending for you.
The reporter left for dead in the news van...
comes to, stumbles on you two dipshits...
It's a great moment here for Courteney and she really pulls it off,
where she's suddenly no more Mr.-- Ms. Glam.
You know, she's just totally real, covered with mud and blood,
but she's extraordinarily tough and real...
except she just doesn't know about safeties on semiautomatic pistols.
You were pointing out with that shot that every time we shot it,
they would start giggling as soon as she fell on top of David
and we had to shoot about ten times.
This is a little improvised moment where Skeet cracks his neck,
which I thought was great.
We put a sound effect in there to make it real,
but it just gives that sort of sense of incredible tension
that this character is under right now.
Babe, you're gonna love this!
Shit.
I like the way they've slowed down.
They've been stabbed repeatedly and they're not quite moving
as fast as--
Right?
Yeah, it's where reality is settling in to these kids.
Fuck.
Should I let the machine get it?
-Hello? -Are you alone in the house?
A couple of moments coming up here that were either totally improvised or--
Actually, no. One was...
you know, Skeet telling her--
Stu to keep-- Matthew Lillard-- to keep her talking,
and he improvises a couple great lines here,
which just stopped us in our tracks
and we could hardly stop from laughing while the take was going on.
But his mixture of dying from bleeding
and trying to keep a certain amount of dignity,
or where he crosses his legs, I think, are just...
Oh, Stu, Stu, Stu. What's your motive?
Billy's got one. The police are on their way.
...I think, amazing.
Peer pressure. I'm far too sensitive.
I'm gonna rip you up, you bitch, just like your fucking mother!
And when Billy throws the phone, it stuck to his hands
because it was so bloody sticky.
So, instead of hitting the counter, it hit Matthew right in the back of head.
He just improvised this line instead of coming out of character.
I love that.
Did you really call the police?
And this also is his improvisation, I believe.
My mom and dad are gonna be so mad at me.
Bitch!
Yeah, that's an ad-lib.
Now here's an inside story in this.
Skeet, when he was ten years old, had open heart surgery.
And there's one place in his chest where there's a stainless steel wire
where if you touch it, it's excruciating.
And we had him completely padded up on this
so that when he gets stabbed by this collapsing umbrella,
he would be protected. And, of course, the stuntwoman,
because the mask is so difficult to see through,
stabs him right on the spot, missing the pad entirely.
Here, you see she's right off the pad there.
So it's a very real reaction.
I always had a thing for ya, Sid/!
That was an improv.
Bitch.
In your dreams.
That was an improv too, wasn't it?
"In your dreams"? Probably was, yeah.
I'm sorry. It's all right.
Oh, my God, Randy, I thought you were dead.
I probably should be. I never thought I'd be so happy to be a virgin.
I think that's such a great example of your balance between fun and fear,
the fun and fright.
The way you staged it and the way you--
Yeah, this finger-in-the-wound business, I don't think that was in the script too.
Just trying to think of the most, you know, sort of,
intimate reverse lovemaking you could have,
is for her to be sticking her finger into him, you know, into his wound.
Just thought it was really incredibly perverse,
and at the same time,
just this sort of street fighting that they've been reduced to here.
This next line I think I gave Courteney, which worked pretty well.
Yeah.
It's okay.
Guess I remembered the safety that time, you bastard.
Wouldn't you say this is-- Some of the most difficult parts of a script to write
are the very ending moments, the last few acts?
Well, particularly in this genre, because of the Boogeyman syndrome.
How are you going to give them the final scare?
...for one last scare.
I know there must have been ten versions of that ending
and what she said, and whether she actually shot him,
or whether she didn't.
And that was, I guess, our way of having our final scare.
Right.
Are you okay?
-Are you okay? -Yeah.
This shot of Dewey was added at the last second.
When we were out there and had the thing lit,
I said, "Let's just shoot one shot of him alive,
just in case the audience loves him so much."
And sure enough, we used it and everybody's very grateful for it.
In this shot here, I think we had a chance to do two takes,
and if I'm not mistaken, this might have even been the first take.
Courteney had to get it right or else we would miss the sunrise.
-She did a really good job with it. -Yeah.
And this is all dialogue that was fed to her, like, two seconds before.
We were all sitting around writing it, remember?
-The boom guy, the-- -This was actually sunset
and just before our last night on this location.
You know, I think we should mention-- I've been thinking--
Sitting here thinking of all the people that we didn't talk about
because they're not visible, but certainly Marianne Maddalena
and Cathy Konrad, the two producers.
Really, just added a remarkable amount of material to what's on screen
with choices in wardrobe and just a governing hand
and all the set dressings and everything else
to make these characters really ring true as women.
-They're a lot of fun to work with too. -Yeah, right.
-Great fun. -Actually, Dixie--
All these credits we're looking at here, they bring back memories--
Mark Irwin, a fantastic job.
There's Bruce.
The great design by Bruce.
This was the first film I had ever shot in an anamorphic format, which was great.
Patrick Lussier has been working with me for about four films now.
Very young editor. Fantastic.
Excellent. I'm going to try to steal him for my first directing debut.
Right.
In fact, after seeing his work,
I think Miramax immediately stole him on to Mimic
and put him to work right again.
Been a long time since we've seen picture credits.
You know, I did it in my first film, The Last House on the Left
I ended up with that and I felt it was a wonderful way
to both give tribute to the actors and to sort of bring the mood up.
It's fun to go through a film and try to choose
the four seconds you like best of a character, you know.
Lisa Beach did a wonderful job.
-Fantastic. Great casting. -Right.
Craven did okay. You know--
This was actually one of my favorite films of all the films I've made.
I should mention Cary Woods also, our other producer,
working with Cathy Konrad, from Woods Entertainment.
Originally, they found the project, I believe, didn't they?
Yes. They're the ones who took it in and sold it to them.
And I might want to add also, this is my favorite film that I made too.
It is my only film, but definitely my...
But not only for-- But only for a little while longer.
Yeah, we're now, as we're recording this,
in the first weeks of preproduction on Scream 2,
which is the fastest sequel I've ever had on a film.
It's still playing in theaters, and we're in preproduction on the second.
And they're out scouting locations and moving the production forward.
And I think I'm on page 75 of the script.
Yeah.
I think it's interesting because, as a sequel,
it will be quite unique in the sense that it has a continuing character.
The character of Sidney will be followed in the next couple of years of her life.
David Arquette comes back and Courteney Cox.
Liev Schreiber will be in it, and Jamie Kennedy.
And it also will have the same writer and director, obviously.
So it's going to be, I think, a very lovingly cared for sequel,
as opposed to something that might be just knocked off.
It's also a lot of fun.
I'm having a lot of fun just taking these characters to their next chapter.
And... I don't know. The first--
It was such an experience for me because it was my first film
and I got to work with, you know, one of my idols, Wes Craven,
who actually, you know, has become a good friend,
and it's just been like a love experience for me.
Everyone I work with, it's just been a great time. I've had a ball with this.
I couldn't have asked for a better first foray into moviemaking.
It was one of those, I think, charmed films.
Just everything seemed to come together fantastically well. It was a great script.
Miramax was wonderful in supporting us all the way.
The DPs, actually, are Mark Irwin and Peter Deming. Both did fantastic jobs.
Patrick did a wonderful job editing, and the producers were great.
I mean, you just go down the whole list.
Everybody seemed to work together really well.
We all liked working with each other,
and despite all the blood and mayhem, we had a great, fun time shooting,
and I think it really shows in the product.
Looking at all these names, I just remember all these people
and all the late nights and all the trips to the craft service.
Yeah, one of those drivers--
I did one untitled cameo in this picture
where I did a shot where the ghost character gets hit in the face
with a telephone at the very opening because we missed a shot.
And we had a driver do the off-screen hit where she reached--
You know, she had to hit me in the face with a telephone
and she damn near knocked my head off when she did it.
Taught me my lesson for trying to be a stunt person.
We have to comment on our final little "no thanks whatsoever," don't we?
Yeah.
"Don't Fear the Reaper," which, by the way, I guess, was in Halloween.
Is that right? I didn't even know that.
It was in the scene where they're--
Laurie and her friend are driving on Sunset to go babysit.
The long day's journey into night sequence.
Yeah, I thought it was really a beautiful cover of that song.
Very, very haunting use in the second scene,
the first time we see Billy.
I guess I have to add that, to my knowledge,
nobody's ever not thanked somebody,
but we had to say, "No thanks whatsoever to the school council at Santa Rosa."
Everybody else in Santa Rosa was wonderful,
but the school board gave us a terrible, terrible time.
Well, nice talking to you.
Nice talking to you.
I'll see you next time.
All righty. It's a deal.