Top 35 Wes Craven Quotes

I can see that I give my audience something. I can see it in their eyes, and they say ‘Thank you’ a lot. You realize you are doing something that means something to people.

A businessman can be as military as any politician.

How can you have ‘Scream’ without Ghostface? It’s like ‘Friday the 13th’ without Jason.

The ‘Scream’ series is unique in that it’s an ongoing murder mystery, even though it’s a different killer, so if you know who that killer is, then half of the fun of the movie is gone.

Within the structure of ‘Scream 4,’ there is the film within a film, but that’s been part of the ‘Scream’ franchise since ‘Scream 2,’ when you had the ‘Stab’ franchise.

I like to think I’m making films in the film business where movies are making enough numbers for the studios to let me keep working, but you also want those films to have content that makes you proud you made the film. That’s not easy, but it’s a fun puzzle to figure out.

It’s not an easy place to be – to write a horror film. You go down the stairs to the dark to find these characters. It’s not a place anyone can go, and sometimes it’s not a place that you want to go.

‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ was so important because it was such adult film-making – to see something that dealt with such an important issue and had such an enlightened outlook on the world.

That’s what’s great about the horror genre is that you’re getting a load of people together in the cinema at the same place and the same time, having them all experience extreme fear and come out alive at the end. It’s an uplifting experience, and there’s a sense of elation.

All of us have our individual curses, something that we are uncomfortable with and something that we have to deal with, like me making horror films, perhaps.

Hawks is great, ‘The Treasure of Sierra Madre,’ ‘The Big Sleep’… He could do the Salt-of-the-Earth very well. He was a very smooth director; a very good film architect in terms of his storytelling.

You want to give the person as much freedom as you can within the boundaries of being a responsible producer with a contract to a studio. It’s about giving as much freedom as you can, and the more the filmmaker proves he or she is on the track that you feel good about, then you just kind of watch dailies.

‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ wasn’t that big. Over a long period of time it did very well, but this was different. ‘Scream’ didn’t have a strong first weekend, and it went down the second, but then it kept going up.

In the ’60s, I was teaching humanities at a college in upstate New York and trying to publish a novel I’d written in graduate school. But nothing was happening. So I moved to New York City and got a job as a messenger at a place that made movies.

Everybody is afraid of the unknown. Everybody is afraid of the people that they’ve done terrible things to!

You don’t enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go into a theater dealt with and put into a narrative.

I’m the kind of director, at any given moment, an idea occurs to me, I’ll just do it.

I was always told that films were evil and such, but I started to realise what a load of crap it was that something this good should be forbidden. I had been allowed to read as much as I wanted when I was younger, so I recognised great art when I saw it; I just didn’t realise it would be at the cinema as well.

I don’t know, I always had an active dream life, and there’s something so profound and wonderful about a movie. It’s so alive. It’s so shared. The thing of sitting in an audience and going into a dream-like state with several hundred other people that are sharing exactly what you’re feeling is a profound event.

I had a musician friend once tell me that it’s not in the orchestra that you get the true test of the musicians but in the little trios and quintets where you really get to see if they’ve got the stuff. And the composer.

I come from a blue-collar family, and I’m just glad for the work.

I had been a college teacher. I had taught Greek mythology.

A friend, Sean Cunningham, who went on to do ‘Friday the 13th,’ was given a small budget to produce a scary movie, and he told me to write something. I’d never seen a horror film in my life; I’d fallen in love with Fellini.

A lot of life is dealing with your curse, dealing with the cards you were given that aren’t so nice. Does it make you into a monster, or can you temper it in some way, or accept it and go in some other direction?

I think the experience of going to a theater and seeing a movie with a lot of people is still part of the transformational power of the film, and it’s equivalent to the old shaman telling a story by the campfire to a bunch of people.

Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity. They’re devices for dealing with the chaotic danger of existence.

My mother never saw any of my films until she was in her late 80s, and that was ‘Music of the Heart’ with Meryl Streep.

In general, I don’t even have the luxury of rehearsal time on most films that I make. It is just a scene-by-scene full cast read through. It’s very much just doing the rehearsal sometimes the day before, at the end of the day, but just on the spot as the scene unfolds.

I have a lot of fans who are people of color. I think, if nothing else, I kind of understand that sense of being on the outside looking in, culturally.

There was a period around Columbine when horror films were being kind of assailed by the government. The studios got very afraid that they were going to be sued, and studios at about that time were all being taken over by corporations.

There will always be times where you think, ‘What went wrong? Why wasn’t that one more popular?’ You can’t always figure that out, especially if you think you’ve done the best job you can do and was interesting to you. I mean, ‘My Soul to Take,’ I thought should have done much better, and I still like that film a lot.

I never went to film school, so I never had the chance to be rejected.

My brother and I both used to worry about dying at 40 because our father died at 40. That probably wasn’t terribly rational, since my father led a rather unhealthy lifestyle, shall we say.

I think everybody goes off and does their own vision. And I don’t take responsibility for other people’s work, frankly. It’s bad enough taking responsibility for my own.

A big part of directing is being strong in certain circumstances and taking the gamble and hope you don’t get fired.