The movie that convinced Wes Craven not to retire: “It saved my ass”
A job in a creative industry requires endurance and perseverance. It’s an exhausting and cutthroat world where the two have to work in tandem. A person not only has to have a thick enough skin to take critique, but they have to have the inner strength to simply keep working through it. But that’s easier said than done, and even big-league names like Wes Craven get knocked down sometimes.
Craven’s career followed a well-known and predictable pattern. In the 1970s and ‘80s, he came out of the gate racing. His unique eye for horror reinvigorated the genre. He wasn’t making tired, corny movies packed with cheap scares. Instead, his works were laced with satire, dark humour and thrilling slasher sequences that excited and entertained his crowds. He drew up the blueprints that directors ever since have followed. Not only have his films like The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left had modern remarks as a sign of just how great Craven’s stories were, but the Scream series is still going today as one of the best-loved slasher flicks in history.
But while there’s no denying Craven’s power, his career saw the inevitable dip that most creative experience. Decades on from his breakout, the mission to stay creative, productive and relevant is a difficult one. Crave began as an innovator, but he quickly saw a whole class of people taking from his teachings and threatening to beat him at his own game. So when his 1990s films like Vampire in Brooklyn and Scream 3 started to not perform as well at the box offices and not get the same praise that his earlier works did, it was a tough task to hold onto his passion.
The toughest moment came after the release of the 2005 movie Cursed. Starring Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg as two orphaned siblings attacked by a werewolf loose in Los Angeles, it was a complete and utter box office flop. It landed at number four on the box office ranking and failed to bring in anywhere near the profit Craven and the studio hoped it would. To the director, it felt like the nail in the coffin.
That was the point where he could have given up. “After Cursed, I was almost ready to retire,” he admitted. But with exactly the inner strength the film world requires, he decided to give it one last shot. He said, “Then I did Red Eye, and it saved my ass.”
Red Eye was his next project, starring Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams in a gripping and thrilling action flick about a hotel manager stuck on a plane, ensnared in an assassination plot with the handsome stranger next to her. It has all the things that initially made Craven a star; it’s funny, action-packed, violent, yet still somehow seductive and fun. With a run time of under an hour and a half, it’s a perfect bite-sized bit of hi-octane cinema. The audience thought so, too, as the film was a huge success in cinemas.
It was exactly the kind of invigorating result Craven needed. “I was really tapped out,” he said to Chud, “I was pretty damn tired after three years on Cursed.” But he stayed the course, and even he could admit, “I made a pretty damn good film, I think, and it changed a lot of things.”
It was a vital lesson that all creatives should learn from. Craven said, “The most important thing I learned is that you have to keep working.” To aspiring filmmakers everywhere, he passed on this advice: “If something happened that wasn’t quite pleasant, or a film wasn’t what you hoped it would be, you just have to move on.”
