I couldn't find an actor to play Freddy Krueger with the sense of ferocity I was seeking. Everyone was too quiet, too compassionate towards children. Then Robert Englund auditioned.
Interpretation
Wes Craven expresses the challenge of finding an actor with the right intensity for a character like Freddy Krueger.
Wes Craven highlights the difficulty he faced in casting the iconic role of Freddy Krueger, noting that most actors lacked the ferocity he envisioned for the character. This underscores the importance of finding the right fit for creative roles, where intensity and unique interpretations are crucial to bringing complex characters to life.
In practice
In a film studies class discussing character creation, this quote could illustrate the importance of actor-director chemistry.
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.
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.
If something comes along that is totally outside of horror, fine, but I find there's an immense amount of freedom within the genre.
You have to be aware of what the audience's expectations are, and then you have to pervert them, basically, and hit them upside the head from a direction they weren't looking.
I was paralyzed from the chest down when I was 19, so I kind of put my head together about dying, and I think I've come to terms with it.
Looking back now, if I went to film school, it probably would have helped knowing what the best of the best of foreign films were, but that wasn't the case. In some ways, I think that led to my originality, because I hadn't seen anybody else.
When I don't have a story to tell, I'm a terror to live with.
The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.
I'm big on having a blistering pace. That's one of the hallmarks of what I do, and that's not easy. I never blow up cars and things like that, so it's something else that keeps the suspense flowing. I try not to write a chapter that isn't going to turn on the movie projector in your head.
As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin.
It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.
People ask me: βWhat is punk? How do you define punk?' Here's how I define punk: It's a free space. It could be called jazz. It could be called hip-hop. It could be called blues, or rock, or beat. It could be called techno. It's just a new idea. For me, it was punk rock. That was my entrance to this idea of the new ideas being able to be presented in an environment that wasn't being dictated by a profit motive.
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