Article originally published in Fangoria #241 (March 2005).
The Cursed Is Over?
by Marc Shapiro
Wes Craven spills his guts about a production that would make anyone howl in frustration.
So you think the much-troubled werewolf epic Cursed is finally complete, now that it's set for a February 25 release? Even Wes Craven is not that sure.
"I hope it's over," says the director with a laugh more sadly ironic than humorous. "I talked to [Dimension chairman] Bob Weinstein recently, and he's talking about making it a PG-13 movie. I can't win at this point, so I'm just going to walk away. I'm way past what my contractual obligations are to this film. If Bob wants to spend the rest of his life making this movie, that's fine. But I'm going to go on and do other things."
Cursed's final rating had yet to be determined at presstime, but Craven has, in fact. moved on. He's talking candidly about the troubled lycanthropicture during a break on the DreamWorks thriller Red Eye. And he's having the time of his life on this film. "It's nice to be a fresh studio with a completed script that's ready to shoot," Craven says. "Nobody is telling me, 'This is how we have to cast and this has to be rewritten.' I'm just being treated with more respect."
Craven has always been a good soldier, and he's not about to "poison wells" by taking a cleaver to Dimension and a film that has consumed him for two years. "I did the final day of mixing on Cursed the other day, and it looks terrific. It's a solid little film. And Dimension is still a great place to get released from. It's a good movie, but it took a long, long way around to get to that point."
The 65-year-old director is obviously torn: He wants to put the best possible face on Cursed and makes no bones about wanting it to do well, but there's an air of frustration and candor in his voice as he takes Fango down he film's long and bumpy path.
Things weren't always so bleak in the world of Cursed; when this writer visited the initial shoot back in 2002, Cursed was an upbeat, potentially envelope-pushing project. The vibe on the set was good. Craven stopped filming to talk up the project to Fango, and seemed legitimately excited at the prospect of adding new teeth to the werewolf genre. Scripter Kevin Williamson, who at the time was cramming to finish the final episode of Dawson's Creek, stopped by the set to chat about his latest collaboration with Craven, following their success with the Scream films. On set, some taut, emotionally draining moments were unfolding. But what was seen then is moot at this point -- because, over two years later, that scene and a whole lot of others are nowhere to be found in the finished movie.
Wes Craven spills his guts about a production that would make anyone howl in frustration.
Cursed tells the story of two teens and a young adult who are bitten by a lycanthrope in Los Angeles. The trio return to their normal lives, but find themselves changed by the experience. It was with this premise that Dimension chairman Weinstein boasted, in an October 2002 Variety interview that "Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson will reinvent the werewolf genre," with Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg and Skeet (Scream) Ulrich starring. Craven, in hindsight, felt he had a clear vision of what Cursed would be.
"I definitely went into it thinking we were going to make a movie about werewolves in Hollywood," he recalls. "That was kind of interesting to me. By the time we got to the second version of the film, Cursed was definitely not about two ordinary people, a sister and a brother, who have been mildly bitten and are turning into werewolves. How it would impact their lives, how it would make them feel and the complications that would come from it -- that was an intriguing idea. That's what we set out to do, and while it took a while for us to get there, I still believe the premise is funny, likeable and warm."
Cursed was originally announced as an August 2003 release (with Weinstein telling Entertainment Weekly that "nothing is going to move us" off the date), but by February 2003 the media was abuzz with stories that the debut had been bumped to summer 2004. By June 2003, news began to leak out that Cursed, 11 weeks into filming, had suddenly ground to a halt and the production was on a reported four-week hiatus. The problem was reportedly with the screenplay -- in particular, a perceived weak third act that Dimension executives picked up on once they began to review the dailies.
"We had a completed script going in," Craven notes. "But it was a script that we all felt needed a lot of work and wasn't ready to shoot. And it was not the first time this has happened. From Scream 2 on, there has always been script development while we've been filming, due to the fact that Dimension always insisted on going forward before the scripts were ready. Part of the hallmark of dealing with this studio is that you're always having to be desperately writing while you're shooting. I don't think that's the best way to make a film at all."
But as Craven gritted his teeth and waited, Williamson not only rewrote the much-maligned third act but, ultimately, pretty much the entire script. Which resulted in changes to the feel of the film as well as much of the old storyline. "In many ways, the tone did change," Craven says. "In the first version of the story, three strangers met after being infected by the werewolf. They were all individuals. It was very difficult to do, because while we were trying to develop a love story between Skeet and Christina's characters, Jesse's character was moving totally separately from them. It was kind of like he was in another movie. So when we changed things around and went with the idea of Christina and Jesse being brother and sister, it all just kind of flowed together."
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| Christina Ricci now gets a taste of lycanthropic values. |
By September 2003, the four-week hiatus had turned into an 11-week vacation. Once Craven and company began to deal with the script problems, other stumbling blocks surfaced, centering largely on the creation of the lead creature. "It was a crazy shoot from beginning to end," he says. "Rick Baker designed the werewolf and built the early forms of it. But then, about the time the production shut down, Rick just stepped back and decided not to work for a while [amid rumors of burnout brought on by the accelerated preproduction schedule and largely resulting from the undeveloped screenplay]. At that point, KNB jumped in and took over. All I can say is that any film based around a monster is going to be tricky, because monsters are hard to do."
Well into September and October 2003, the ripples from the reworked script were spreading like an oil slick. At that time, Craven indicated during interviews that many scenes were being reshot and numerous roles were being recast or written out. In a story on the Cursed website, the director finally admitted that "90 percent of the existing footage had been thrown out." "It just wasn't working," Ricci stated on the same site during this period. "We're almost reshooting the entire film."
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| There's a bad moon rising over Ellie Hudson (Ricci) and her brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg). |
Part and parcel of the Cursed screenplay changes and shooting delays was the juggling of actors in and out of the film. In no particular order, and by no means complete: Out -- Ulrich, Omar Epps and Corey Feldman. In -- Scream 2's Joshua Jackson and Portia de Rossi, and Freddie Prinze Jr. Remaining -- Ricci, Eisenberg and Shannon Elizabeth.
For Craven, the departure of past collaborator Ulrich was a particularly bitter pill. "The character Skeet played in the film's first version was changed so much in the rewrite that Skeet really didn't want to come back and do it again," he says. "And it's sad, because he gave a beautiful performance in that first version of the film."
Cursed finally began lensing once more in November 2003 with yet another promised release date: October 2004. Craven recalls that the already dizzying experience of making this werewolf epic had been all the more complicated by the fact that, shortly before Cursed began production, Dimension had pulled the plug on a project he had been especially excited about: a remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Japanese chiller Pulse.
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| Oh Mya! The pop princess is one of Cursed's celebrity victims. |
"It was all a cumulative effect on everybody's head," says Craven. "We were already kind of dislocated and not confident in the script the whole time we were doing the first shoot. Then everything shut down for five months, and we went back to film a totally different version. We were able to salvage a few scenes of Jesse from the first round, but the nature of Christina as a single person was different from Christina as a sister -- and so, in many cases, everybody had to make these adjustments to footage that already existed. We ended up with four major shoots on the film, and each time we were trying to accommodate continuities that had already been established. The entire process was extremely difficult."
As the reshoots and release dates continued to change, Craven's frustration grew. "I swear I've got gray hair from this film," he says. "I've got to tell you, the idea of shooting for 11 weeks, getting great performances and ending up having 10 weeks of that just thrown away is really hard. It's like a death in the family. It's wrenching. There's so much I could have done with my time. There were so many other offers. After a while, I just felt that the film was eating up my life."
Cursed ultimately wrapped in early 2004. Months of postproduction and reportedly positive test screenings scattered throughout the concluding days of last year seemed to indicate that all the prolonged hard work may just have resulted in a decent film. But by this time, websites and genre mags were standing in line to tag Cursed as a movie in trouble. Craven, who finished up his final day of mixing on the film in December, is happy with the completed product, but concedes that his ego is taking a bit of a beating with all of the negative press that has been dropped on the movie. As a result, it's painful for him to discuss Cursed on any level.
"You just don't want to be part of a movie that is being talked about so badly," he says. "It's very difficult to discuss, because there were personalities involved that contributed to these things happening. I'm not the kind of person who goes around poisoning wells, but it has been frustrating.
"I was very excited about doing Pulse," he continues, "and we could have done that film and at least two others in the time it took us to make Cursed. Bob and Dimension would have been fabulously wealthy. With Pulse, we were prepared to to make a film two and half years ago that would have been the equivalent of The Grudge. But to have to go through two years of constantly changing and going back and doing it again -- I mean, I've got maybe 10 more films left in me before they take me off to the old person's home. To spend two years on something that is still struggling seems obscenely wasteful of my time, everybody's talent and Dimension's money." Those final Cursed costs rumored to be in the $75-80-million range.
Craven says that in a perfect world, Cursed would have been in script development for at least a year, which would have avoided turning the first 11 weeks of lensing into just a dress rehearsal. But despite the debacle that Cursed may or may not ultimately turn out to be, Craven has not let the situation drive a permanent wedge between himself and Dimension.
"I don't think this is the end of my relationship with them," he says. "But I do know that I would not do another film there unless I had final cut and a definite budget, and the studio went away and let me make my film. After I turned in a cut of Cursed that he really liked, Bob sat down and told me that he had made a really big mistake on the film and that, if I still wanted to do Pulse, he would give me a budget and just go away. If I have a project and I wouldn't be interfered with, Dimension would still be a great place to work. The big problem with the studio is a lack of trust in the filmmakers to make the right film. With Dimension, the ideas and concepts change rapidly, and that's just not the way I like to work."
The current production of Red Eye is definitely an example of the way Craven enjoys doing his thing. No relation to the airborne zombie movie of the same name that George Romero was once attached to, this one's a thriller about a young woman (Mean Girls' Rachel McAdams) held captive on a plane by a stranger (28 Days Later's Cillian Murphy) who attempts to blackmail her into arranging a murder. Craven describes the film, scripted by Carl Ellsworth and tentatively scheduled for release this summer to fall, as more of a psychological drama than a straight-out horror film.
"There's not going to be a lot of gore and it's not going to be as high-concept as Scream," he explains. "It's real people in a real situation. The acting will definitely be a little more restrained."
A more explicit horror project on which Craven served as an executive producer is the third Project Greenlight movie and its first horror entry: Feast. The initial two films in this ongoing series, in which first-time directors and screenwriters are given a chance to make a feature (with their efforts documented in a six-part TV show; the third edition airs in March on Bravo), were failures at the box office. On their third try, the powers that be (including Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) figured that a genre feature stood a better chance of breaking even, and Craven seemed a logical choice to be brought in to consult. "It was a canny move to do a horror film this time," Craven says. "To get a first-time director to do a horror film is not as long a longshot. It was a smart move."
Over 4,000 screenplays were submitted, in horror and other genres, with a multitiered selection process narrowing the field down. The winners were Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, whose Feast script deals with a group of people in an isolated diner plagued by a flock of flying, flesheating creatures. At the same time, aspiring directors submitted short scenes on VHS, with their work also judged by different groups. The process involved interviews and internal discussions among the Greenlight team about which filmmaker was right for the script. Ultimately, John Gulager (son of Return of the Living Dead actor Clu) won the job helming Feast, which lensed in late 2004 for release this spring or summer.
"I went out to dinner with John," Craven says, "and told him some things I thought would help him -- things I had learned from mistakes I had made."
One can only guess how many of those life lessons were gleaned in the course of making Cursed, yet Craven still holds out high hopes for its success. Barring the potential slashing for a less restrictive rating, he feels strongly that the end product is a worthy film. Should Cursed go on to defy the bad vibes and become a hit, would the director be willing to let himself run the gauntlet of a Cursed 2? "If Cursed is a smash and they wanted a sequel," he concludes, "I would just tell them good luck. But at this point, I would not be involved."
