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.
Interpretation
Understanding audience expectations can help create surprising and impactful work.
Wes Craven emphasizes the importance of recognizing audience expectations in creative endeavors, suggesting that true artistry involves not just meeting those expectations but subverting them to create a powerful surprise. This approach can lead to more engaging and memorable experiences for the audience, challenging their perceptions and delighting them in unexpected ways.
In practice
During a film festival, discussing how a director completely flipped the script on traditional horror tropes.
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.
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.
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.
I wish you didn't have to design so often. Try to do quality and cut down on quantity. I think fashion is very, very important.
I've loved the opportunity to learn about the fashion world and appreciate it as an art form, and I look forward to my continued education, but I never want it to take over my acting.
Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.
An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends.
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