Marianne Maddalena

"I was working in Hollywood with the goal of being a producer. A friend of mine was producing a movie called Deadly Friend, and told me that Wes Craven was directing and needed an assistant. He asked if I would be interested in the job. I said, of course, I would love to come in and meet Wes. So, we set the appointment, and I went to Warner Brothers to meet him. He was very funny, and we clicked. The wonderful thing was that having said that I wanted to be a producer, Wes took it upon himself to include me in every aspect of filmmaking. He took me into casting sessions, to the horror of Marion Dougherty, the casting director, who was a huge casting director at the time. Assistants didn't normally get to be in the room for casting sessions. I was included at the scoring sessions, locations scouts, and he mentored me through the whole movie. We did Deadly Friend and then went on to The Serpent and the Rainbow. While filming on location in Haiti, we had so many emergencies and horrible production problems, and we got through them well together, and I think Wes just felt I had the right stuff. Then he gave me my first producing gig on Shocker."

"It was just natural. It wasn't even a discussion. He was attracted to telling stories from a female POV, I think because of me and his daughter, he was very interested in stories about strong powerful women getting through difficult situations."

"Absolutely, I mean, don't forget we had just done New Nightmare, and that was very much about Heather Langenkamp's personal journey, and it very much mirrored her personal life. She obviously was, and is, a very strong woman, and with Kevin's script, it was everything we wanted. We loved the story of Sidney, and it had every element that we were attracted to in general."

"We were working with KNB Effects Group on the mask design in LA before we flew up to Santa Rosa to prep and shoot. As the script described the killer as only wearing a ‘ghost mask' with no description of the mask or costume, we had to come up with it. KNB had a lot of design sketches and sculptures, but we had not found the look, and it was getting late. We were scouting a house for Tatum, and I went up to this little bedroom upstairs, and I saw the mask. It was the mask, but it had a white shroud. I took it, and I ran downstairs and showed it to, I think, Bruce Miller, the production designer, Wes, and probably Nick Mastandrea, our first AD. I said ‘oh my god, you guys, look at this mask! How about this?', and they said, no, we don't like it. We don't like this mask – We want to create our own mask'. Wes was very much into owning it and creating whatever we were going to use, so I just felt like, ‘seriously, you don't like this?' ‘You're not even going to consider it?' And he said, ‘no, no, no, not at all.' I don't like it.' So, I begrudgingly put it back in the bedroom."

"A couple of weeks went by, and we still couldn't come up with anything everyone could agree on, and we were getting very close to shooting – it was getting very tense. So I said, ‘why don't we call that lady and see if she's thrown away the mask or still has it and at least see it again?' I thought, who knows, maybe she cleaned the house and threw it away! Bruce Miller sent the location manager over there, and sure enough, he came back with it and I got Wes to take another look at it, and he said, ‘let's go with it,' and we finally made a decision! Of course, we had to call and get the rights from Fun World. It was a mass-produced Halloween mask, and the rights cost some money. Cary Granant negotiated the deal with Fun World, and we got the rights. Even at this point Wes still really wanted to make his own version so he said ‘okay I like it, but I want to change the shape just a bit', so we did and KNB did make their own sculpture of it with a few alterations. We started shooting the opening sequence with it and realized very quickly that the original mask was perfect so then we went back to the original mask."

"Yes, he did, and originally the larger windows didn't have the stained glass, but he found a few doors in the house that had small panes of stained glass above them, I think, and decided to bring and expand that element to add more character to the interior and exterior scenes of the house."

"Yes, he was very much involved, and in fact, we had actually been developing The Haunting with Richard and Bob Weinstein, and I don't really know what happened with that… I think Wes finally just passed on it and said to Richard, ‘look, I really want to work with you, but I don't think The Haunting is the one.' So, of course, Richard then kept Wes in mind, and when Scream came along, we all still wanted to work together, and eventually, Wes accepted the job. But, yes, Richard was a huge part of it creatively and really pushed Bob Weinstein to option the script and lit his hair on fire to get everyone to read it very quickly at Dimension. Sometimes you have a studio executive that you don't want anything to do with and don't want to have them on set, but we loved Richard, and he was so helpful and respectful to Wes and had such good ideas. We were lucky to have him with us."

"Wes was very prepared. He always came up with a shot list and was very meticulous. Wes, in his own life, loved to write manuals for everything in his house. So he was very mechanical in this way, and he made really great shot lists. I mean, when you're working fifty, sixty days straight, you don't always have time, and of course, if the director comes in without a shot list, the AD, the cinematographer, the line producer, and everybody else freaks out. But he usually came prepared with his shot list, and of course, we'd look at it and freak out if it was more than about twenty-three shots. It could, at times, be a little too ambitious."

"As far as directing actors, he was very respectful, quiet, and never impatient. Actors really responded to Wes. He really was an actor's director. I remember when he was directing Drew in the opening sequence, they had spent a lot of time in prep, and Wes knew how much Drew loved animals, as she's an advocate for animal safety. He said something really graphic and terrifying to her about, I'm sure you've heard this, an article about a puppy who was mistreated because he had seen what an emotional response this caused her, just talking about it, and that was one part of how he got the performance out of Drew. I remember that night, shooting the exteriors of that home, and I remember the night he did that. I didn't know at the time what he had said until an hour later. It really worked! Obviously, we know that scene is so heart-wrenching, so he knew what to say. He really got to know the actors and figured out how to get the right performances. It can be a manipulative job, being a director, and he would figure it out."