Wes Craven, David Arquette & Hayden Panettiere Interview For ‘Scream 4′

Ten years have passed, and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), who has put herself back together thanks in part to her writing, is visited by the pesky, stab happy Ghostface Killer as she returns home to Woodsboro on the last stop of her self-help book tour. Check out what legendary director Wes Craven, Scream regular David Arquette (Dewey Riley), and Scream newcomer Hayden Panettiere (Kirby Reed) had to say about the film below. ‘Scream 4′ arrives in cinemas April 15th.

There’s a lot of expectations with this project.

Wes Craven: Yeah, you have to come back with something worthy of coming back. You are addressing a whole generation of new fans, but also a whole generation of people who have gone with you for three films, and then seen a decades worth of other films. So you have to be as good as, or better than all those films. You have to also, in order to live up to the standards of Scream, sort of analyse that decade, you have to come up with something meaningful to say. Being able to see through to the essence of the last decade of work in the horror film genre.

How did the idea of a script come up after 10 years?

Wes Craven: Bob Weinstein of the two Weinstein brothers is kind of a godfather of Scream, he’s the man who bought the original script from Kevin. I think he and Kevin were talking and he felt it was time. He originally told us….I think, after Scream 3 that there were not going to be any more for a long time, that he didn’t want it to feel like we were just knocking them out to make money. Of course there was the Scary Movie series, so we needed to get some distance from that.

I think at the end of the decade there was a feeling that this was the perfect time to turn around and look at the first decade of the 21st century, it was quite distinctive from others, with 9/11, that’s hovering over things, and certainly the presence of the electronic media being brought down to the people to the level where everybody is online, everybody can Facebook, people are tweeting all over the world, all the time, it’s totally different now. So I think it was time to take that into account. At the same time the cinema was changing very much. You weren’t just watching movies in the cinema. I have a step-daughter that’s 20 years old, she’s watching movies on her computer or her phone. The whole business is changing dramatically as well, the way fans follow the movies and participate in the movies and make their own movies to emulate those movies is profoundly different. It felt like this is time to make a screenplay that can reflect all this newness going on.

What was the draw for you Hayden? Were you a fan of this franchise, are you a horror fan in general?

Hayden Panettiere: The franchise is an exciting thing to be a part of. For four years I was on Heroes, that was in the sci-fi, and at times horror genre. Horror movies can really go one way or the other, they can go amazingly, or they can go terribly, and it’s generally an extreme, in one way or the other, so you have to be very careful. Then a film like this comes along, I love how long it’s been since the last film. It’s a sequel, but at the same time it’s a re-boot, it’s sort of a a combination, it’s cleverly remembering where it comes from. It really uses the cliches to our benefit and has grown with the audience, as generations go on, they just get smarter and harder to scare. It’s a very cool movie and a fun thing to be a part of. Who wouldn’t want to be in Scream? I was sitting on set thinking, ‘Aren’t I supposed to be watching this movie? I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.’ (Laughs) I never could have imagined myself on screen with Neve Campbell screaming. It just didn’t make sense.

What are the challenges in bringing the story to a newer audience? You’ve got a long-established fan base but you’ve got this new audience now.

David Arquette: It’s really interesting, we’ve done these for 15 years, we’ve made such a connection, and that this fourth film is bringing to life the first one, and having fun with it, and there’s been 10 years in between with different horror films and technology changes. It’s just really exciting. I think with the new cast coming to this, it was really interesting to see because they’re reflections of us when we first got there, it brings an electricity that I felt on the first film with this and I think that people in that generation are going to discover the old stuff. I was talking to my friend’s girlfriend the other day, and she was nine when she snuck in to see the first Scream and she’s horrified of horror movies now. She can’t even see the next one. This is a 20-something year-old woman. It’s so wild, the way time flies.

Do you think horror movies will always be bound by rules?

Wes Craven: I think the very essence of the Scream films is that we break the rules. We establish or state what the rules are and then we immediately break them. That started right in Scream 1 when you say, ‘If you say I’ll be right back, you’ll die,’ and the person that says that is one of the killers. ‘If you have sex, you’ll die.’ Neve’s character has the first sexual encounter of her life and she’s one of the survivors. We like to establish what the rules are, but they’re really the clichés, as soon as they’re stated in the Scream films, we almost always break them. It makes the audience not know what to expect next. If they think they know what the rules are, we immediately say, ‘No, you don’t.’