Ves Krejven: dva intervjua

Dok se oporavljamo od nenadoknadivog gubitka Vesa Krejvena, jednog od najznačajnijih horor reditelja svih vremena, odlučio sam da sa vama ovde podelim dva značajna intervjua/članka vezana za njegov najbolji film, Strava u ulici brestova. Oba su višestruko zanimljiva, i oba su iz FANGORIJE.

Prvi je članak posvećen Stravi napravljen u vreme kad se film još snimao, i pre nego što je svima postalo jasno kakva se genijalnost (i kulturni fenomen, i fama, i pomama, i ludilo) tu krije. Zabavno je ovu najavu čitati iz današnje vizure, sa svom naknadnom pameti koju imamo, znajući šta će da znači Fredi za horor 1980-ih, znajući u šta će Strava da izraste, a s njom i karijera Vesa Krejvena. Recimo, rečito je da čak ni FANGORIJA nije slutila šta će od ovoga biti – ovaj članak nije zaslužio koricu, niti neko udarno mesto, nego je zabačen negde pozadi. Ipak, ne zaboravimo da su prethodna dva Krejvenova filma bili ćorci, osrednji DEADLY BLESSING, i srednje-žalosni SWAMP THING i da skoro niko nije od STRAVE očekivao bog zna šta. Zvuči bizarno, ali Fredi je svoju koricu na Fangoriji dobio tek sa nastavkom (drugim delom)!

 Pomalo je čudno da Krejven tvrdi da jedan od najčistijih horor filmova ikada snimljenih nije zaista horor, ali uprkos tome, vredi osmotriti šta je ovaj reditelj imao da kaže u vreme snimanja svog masterpisa – pored ostalog i zato što se vidi da je i on shvatao da radi nešto posebno.

Evo njegovih reči, izvađenih iz članka objavljenog 1984. godine u FANGORIJI br. 40:

  Wes Craven on A Nightmare on Elm Street  

"But this isn't horror, really," he says. "It’s more of a fantasy, an impressionistic thriller. It's really a departure for me. I really feel this will be a landmark film for me, my watershed film. It's not an ordinary, run-of-the-mill little film. There's really something quite extra-ordinary about it. It's going to be a nice piece of work."

"It's a premise which has interested me for a long, long time," Craven says. "In some of my earlier films, I played with dream sequences where you weren't sure whether the person was dreaming or not. I found that the idea intrigued me so much I wanted to do a whole film around it. It was the first thing I wrote that I wasn't commissioned to write. It was a departure for me.

"This movie is not based on everyday reality," Craven continues, "it has a prosaic quality. I'm standing conventional scenes on their heads. A lot of scenes start off normally and then, all of a sudden, you don't know what the hell to expect next. It takes place as much in dreams as it does in reality. It's about a girl [Heather] who learns that, in order to save her life, she must go into the dream-world and confront the monster in its own cage."

"That's what I like about horror," he says. "It's an area much less hampered by rules and conventions. And in this, which is about dreams, there's very little limitation on what I can do."

"I don't think of it as dragging myself away from horror. This is firmly rooted in what I do best but it's different in kind. It's more entertaining than a film that assaults you. This is more of a roller-coaster ride than a graphic horror film."

Osim Krejvenovih reči, zabavno je čuti šta je o filmu u to vreme imao da kaže i mladi junoša, debitant koji je od svih u njemu najdalje odskočio: Džoni Dep. I njega, i još poneke stvari (kao npr. retke fotke sa stvarima koje se ne vide u filmu, kao unakaženi leš Nensine majke, ili ranija, svedenija verzija ikoničke Fredijeve maske) imate u odabranim skenovima koje sam na Mediafire samo za vas okačio. (Us)kliknite s ljubavlju svetitelju Ghoulu, i čitajte: Fangoria 40

            Druga stvar je znatno novija: u pitanju je poslednji intervju koji je Krejven dao FANGORIJI, krajem 2014., i stoga to je i jedan od njegovih poslednjih uopšte. Pošto ste pročitali šta je Krejven imao da kaže o Stravi pre punih 30 godina, pogledajte kako izgleda njegov osvrt na svoje čedo tri decenije kasnije, na samom zalasku svog života. Ovde je samo moj izbor iz znatno dužeg intervjua koji inače nigde nemate onlajn.

  Wes Craven looks back on a "Nightmare"  

Is Nightmare a gift or a hindrance to you now?

It's both. When you look at all the films I've made, the two really big ones are Nightmare and Scream, and there are a couple of clunkers in there too. It certainly was successful for me, intellectually, and for the audience, and I'm sure it'll be on my gravestone: "Father of Freddy Krueger" or some such thing.

It's great to have done something that is still so much a part of the public language. It has become part of the culture out there. It's pretty amazing to have something that you struggled to pull out of your brain still around in the conversation. When you look at the whole pile of stuff I've done in 40-odd years, it's the most significant film I've made, and the most personal one.

You say it was successful for you intellectually; can you expand on that?

[Pauses] Coming up with the movie, and the idea that somebody was having a dream they had to wake from or they would die, came from a story I read in

the newspaper. His situation was that he had to stay awake or he would die, and when he eventually did fall asleep, that actually happened. That was a true story.

But what do you do with it? The whole situation was profoundly moving to me, but I struggled with what type of story comes from that. My decision to base it on a metaphor of awareness of reality and the willingness to face reality —as opposed to living in denial— and constructing that around a young girl whose parents had done something horrible and [she's suffering] as a result of that, without knowing why, because the parents were keeping this horrible secret —that process was something I just hammered and hammered away at in my head. The final thing was to figure out how to avoid what happened to the guy in the newspaper article: How do you either stay awake long enough, or how do you take the enemy and bring him into your own territory?

That process was really arduous, and I wrestled with it for years. It was very hard, and I believe I came up with a really good solution based on the writings of a Russian philosopher who was a mystic and wrote about pain as facing reality, and how it was similar to whether you were awake or asleep: A person who is awake faces reality, but it becomes increasingly painful as you become aware of what reality is, and most people will back down away from that and go into sleep.

While writing it, did you realize how big an impact the film could have, not only on your career but on the genre?

No. I believe Bob Shaye did, but I didn't. I thought it was a really good story, and when I told it to friends, their eyes would light up and they’d say, "I’d love to see that movie." I should have put two and two together a little bit more, because I would have hung in there and followed my agent’s advice and not have signed the contract I did, because I basically signed everything away for the rest of my life and all of eternity. I lost an immense amount of participation in profits and everything.

The idea of making a sequel, I kind of had a stick up my butt about that and didn't like the idea of it... not that I had any control over it. Bob Shaye knew it was going to be very big and make lots of money, but I had no idea that was going to happen. I was very, very surprised. I had done a bunch of pictures, and some of my earlier ones —Last House and Hills— had seen success, but I had done pictures that hadn't done well at all, so the idea that I was suddenly going to make a hit picture was just. . . My mind was already telling me I should go back to teaching. You've said the ending wasn't exactly what you envisioned. That was Bob. We had a very interesting relationship, very friendly. I was trying to get the picture funded, and he was not able to raise the money and I wanted to make it for more. Now, the figure seems minuscule. I think I had it budgeted by a friend and it came in at $2.5 million, and we made it for far less than that. But there was a part of Bob that wanted to be a director. He had directed one film, and there's always something I call "pissing on the post" in the film industry, where the studio people want to somehow put their imprint on the film creatively, and they'll do it in various ways.

So why is it that in 2014, we're still talking about A Nightmare on Elm Street? Why didn't it become like so many other slasher flicks and fade from memory?

I think it's eternal. It's classic. In my best films, I've tried not to make them about the moment and what gadgets people are using or what words they’re saying—it’s ordinary language. I just wanted to make something that could be true for all ages and that anyone in any culture could relate to, with sleeping and dreaming and nightmares being an eternal subject. It's about a very primal, transcultural, trans-time sort of thing, and I believe that what it takes to make a great horror film is to take the medium seriously and aspire to go beyond just scaring or titillating people, and do something that really makes your brain work and that will hold up for a long time. Those of us who are horror fans can feel proud that we love the genre, because it does things that have significance.

Are you done with Freddy?  

           

The intellectual-property thing is in the hands of whoever has that. There's a part of me that would love to do it again, to do something with Robert as Freddy. That would be fun, but I don't see it happening.

Eh, da... Taj film sad sasvim sigurno nećemo gledati...

Inače, ovaj 337. broj FANGORIJE imao je ogroman temat o Krejvenovoj Stravi, pa pored celog intervjua s njim tu možete pročitati još grdne neke lepe i zabavne stvari – konkretno, ovo:

A sve to obezbedio, odabrao, na Mediafire okačio i sa vama podelio – dr Ghoul! Kliknite ovde i uživajte: Fangoria 337