Remaking classic films—even those from the recent past—is a favorite Hollywood pastime. It's not every day that the original filmmaker is on board to oversee the remake of his own work, but that's exactly the position producer Wes Craven found himself in when he first considered revisiting his 1977 cult fave The Hills Have Eyes. Then again, Craven is no ordinary filmmaker. As the mastermind behind the wildly successful Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream series, Craven needs little introduction: The filmmaker personifies modern horror.

French director Alexandre Aja signed on to Hills after meeting with Craven about a separate project. The Sorbonne-educated director is something of a prodigy—he made a short film that was viewed at the Cannes Film Festival when he was just 18 years old, and he made his first feature at 20.

Actor Aaron Stanford may be better known for his role as Pyro in the X-Men series, but here he takes a very different turn as one of the leads in The Hills Have Eyes, playing a domesticated entrepreneur traveling cross-country with his wife, infant child and in-laws who, by circumstance, must become a "reluctant hero," as Stanford describes him. Stanford shot Hills for two months, right before going directly into shooting X-Men 3.When you decided to remake Hills, what made you look for another filmmaker to take the helm this time around?

Craven: I think it's interesting to see another filmmaker take a path on the same basic material, and see what this guy does with it. It was important to me who the filmmaker was. We showed this to several people even a year or two before we were thinking [about it seriously], but nobody ever really came up with a concept that we thought was original or doable at a budget.Until you met with Alexandre Aja.

Craven: Yes. [His idea] was very doable, it was original, and it wasn't just remaking the original picture. It's the way I think the best films are made—when the people who hold the rights are not dictating how it must be done, but rather let a young auteur just take it and run with it, once you feel confident in the vision.As producer and co-author of the script, how involved were you in the day-to-day?

Craven: Very involved. I never overruled him, but I put a lot of pressure on him from time to time. I wasn't there during the shoot, since I was in post-production on Red-Eye, but I thought I would be an 800-pound gorilla in the room if I was there. Was it hard to let go of your baby and entrust it in the hands of someone else?

Craven: You have to try to objectify your thoughts, to the extent that this is just another way of doing it, rather than think, "This is not right because this is not the way I did it." Sometimes that's easy, sometimes that's not. The original Hills was one of your early films. What do you recall of that experience?

Craven: In those days, we were just in survival mode. That was my second film. We were grownups—both Peter [Locke] and I were in our early 30s, so it's not like we were 20-something kids; we knew we were making films on the very edge of the filmmaking world, and we didn't have any pretenses about being Hollywood filmmakers. There was no thought that any of these films would have any life beyond playing that summer. I think in some ways this is what gave them such vitality. We didn't imagine them being seen for long, or for anybody outside a certain audience. We just kind of made your own art film within the genre of horror.How do you perceive the horror genre has changed over the past few decades?

Craven: That's a very complex question, really. I think in some ways it's stayed the same, and in some ways it's changed with the new horrors, if you will. There are ancient horrors, vulnerability of the human body, the threatening father figure and the abyss, fear of darkness. All of those things have been around for, you know, at least a million years of human conscience, and probably go back beyond that. And then there are things like science, and things that are just completely new on the horizon that are happening. Atomic energy is one that Alex explored quite a bit in this film, just that sense of the horror of it and it's so immense, and that it's on a very, very flimsy leash. In that sense, horror films have tried to adapt to that. But a lot of them are very—just about the primal vulnerability of the human body, and the wildness of the human spirit and the ferocity of it, really.

I think it's ironic that today bombers can drop smart bombs from 30,000 feet or 50,000 feet or whatever it is and put a bomb through a window, and our enemy are people [equipped] with a kitchen knife, and they're doing quite well, thank you. Those kinds of ironies and surprises are the kinds of things that make you wake up at night in a cold sweat.That sounds very much like an answer from someone who has a master's in philosophy. [Craven received his masters from John Hopkins University.]

Craven: [Laughs.] Well, it's somebody who has thought about it a lot. I think the master's of philosophy was just part of that process, of trying to figure out just what the hell is really going on. Those answers are not easy to get. The answers are so frightening that people don't want to even go there. A lot of finding that kind of truth is to try to find forces for it that aren't focused through a million filters or gussied up to make us more comfortable. And philosophy is one of those ways. When you look back at the varied projects you've worked on over the years, which ones stand out in your mind?

Craven: I would say The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, only because they are things I wrote, directed and cut, and in that sense they are unique in my body of work, that they are almost entirely, as far as the film goes itself, a product of my own hand, with, invariably, close collaboration with a close friend, Sean Cunningham with Last House and Peter Locke with The Hills. Those were the only two films that were done that way, with that kind of freedom. And then the films that I did for studios, I think they were so original that I really enjoyed imagining them, like Nightmare on Elm Street. They were a lot of fun also, and still were my own writing. And then there's films like Scream or Red Eye, which I didn't write, but they were still terrific scripts, and I think I did a good job as a director.Initially, this movie was given an NC-17 rating. What was involved in reigning that in so you could get an R rating instead?

Craven: Part of it was just increasing the pace of some of these really horrific moments, especially the attack in the trailer—[they] just go on and on. Not that they wouldn't happen that way necessarily in real life, but you kind of walk that line between trying not to throw things away, but having them happen in such a flurry that the rating board doesn't think that you're just dwelling on it for perverse pleasure, I suppose. So it was just about cutting the repetition of blows or slashes or whatever violence was going on. [Director] Alex Aja really liked to hammer it home. There's always a combination of cutting acts or instances of violence, and trying to pull back a bit on the intensity to make it a little bit shorter. Very often it doesn't hurt the picture at all, and I don't think that Hills was harmed by [these cuts]. But all of your originality, all of your auteurship, all of your passion and everything else is put through this anonymous group. Will the original, complete cut be available at some point?

Craven: Yes. For those who like that sort of thing, there will be a DVD version that will have the full cut.

Alexandre Aja, Wes Craven says that the fact that you're from Europe brought a fresh sensibility to the remake of Hills. What do you think?

Aja: It's about not being scared to talk about real people, not cliché characters. And maybe he's talking about violence and how we bring the violence [to life, as opposed to Hollywood]. I tried to make all of the effects—all of the blood, all of the gory stuff—so believable that you just can't watch it. I think I also tried to bring to this script a kind of background story about nuclear testing in the desert, which, even if it's not the point of the movie, it provides a kind of a political background to the movie.

The Hills Have Eyes was the perfect next movie for me, because it allowed me to really develop and improve what I tried on my [last film], High Tension. It allowed me to make a real survival film, like a slasher survival movie. The goal on the new Hills Have Eyes wasn't to try to do another dark humor movie, but to do a real shock-and-awe picture. You've been a horror buff since your youth. What is it about horror that you find appealing as a filmmaker?

Aja: It's very open, and even if it's a very specific genre, you can express a lot of different artistic stuff within it. Look at the best horror movie ever made, like The Shining; it was very highly artistically made. That's what the genre provides—freedom to go further than you can go in regular movies.And personally?

Aja: I am filmmaker, but I am also part of this core audience. I run to see movies on a Friday night, and run to read the fanzines, and go to the conventions—that's still my life today. I love movies—the more movies I see, the more movies I want to make. The Hills Have Eyes was really a dream come true for me, for that reason.What was it like collaborating with Wes Craven on this project?

Aja: It was a big challenge. I loved the original when I grew up, and very early in the process I was thinking, "OK, so the original still exists. It's here. It's not like we're going to try to redo exactly the same thing." We had to do our own movie, but respecting the spirit of the original The Hills Have Eyes, which is a very specific spirit you can only find in the '70s. The movie was made with so little money, with such a low budget, I think [Wes was] not able to do what he really wanted to do with the movie. Today, we had the possibility to redo The Hills Have Eyes, but at the same time to improve the original picture and make it more scary, more about tension. And to increase the [level of] horror in a general way, because we were working with a very different budget [from the original]. We tried to be as real as we can. The enemy was the mutant in the hills; I tried to do more to develop all of the characters, and to improve the fear, improve the tension.

As for the writing process, Wes was, from the beginning, "I did my movie; you have to do your movie now." And I had a lot of freedom to write exactly the script I wanted to do. And we were communicating back and forth with notes, and he was very respectful, he was really a gentleman. He was really far away from all of the clichés we could have in France, about an American producer taking over a project [laughs].What has been the reaction to the film at the audience previews you've already done?

Aja: In general, audiences have felt happy to see it. People that already know the original movie are very, very happy to see a remake that respects the original film, [as opposed to] some other remakes made recently that are really bulls--t movies.The shoot on Hills was short—just 45 days—but the casting process took a long while. What were you looking for from your actors?

Aja: I wanted the movie to be as real as possible, so I was looking for the opposite of the all of the cheesy, campy actors that you can find in this kind of film.

Aaron Stanford, you filmed Hills in Morocco, yes?

Stanford: We were at the tip of the Sahara desert. It was brutal climate. It was 110 degrees in the shade. We were trying to recreate the feel of the New Mexico desert; I've seen a screening of the film, and Alexandre did it beautifully. It was a great adventure, but it was also a very tough place to be shooting.What attracted you to doing Hills?

Stanford: I like horror film with a little bit of complexity. The script came to me and I gave it a read. I thought it was interesting, and I found out more about Alexandre. I thought his film High Tension was an artfully done genre film, and I thought this might be a chance to do something interesting in the horror genre, which I'd never worked in before. It's a great character study: It's a look at the way people behave towards each other in desperate situations, and how people turn on one another to become their own worst enemies. I like horror film with a little bit of complexity. How do you think the remake of Hills compares with the original?

Stanford: The remake is very, very different. It's the same basic story, but there are a lot new aspects to it that Alex brought to it, like playing with the idea of what would happen if there were miners in the deserts of New Mexico during these atmospheric nuclear tests who had refused to leave, and what would happen if these people had been victims of nuclear fallout, and they had babies who had nuclear mutations. What would happen if these people just stayed out there in the desert; what would they become? That was a new aspect that he brought to it that I thought was fascinating.Do you think it's harder to scare audiences today?

Stanford: Probably. But sometimes I think that going back to basics is better than resorting to some of the things that people do today, which are absolute blood-and-guts sessions. I think when you take it back to a Hitchcockian building of suspense, I think that stuff works as well today as it did back then. Sometimes we see too much in movies now; it's so gory that you turn yourself off to it and you're desensitized to it. But in this movie, Alex wanted to make sure that he developed the family of the characters enough that you cared about these people, that when something happened to them, it really hit home and it really was frightening, because you identified with them as human beings, not just as fictional characters.Yet this film has a lot of gore—such that the initial cuts were rated NC-17. Did you expect that?

Stanford: I wasn't that surprised. It's very, very intense—that's one of the reasons they slap NC-17s on films, it's one of the things they say it's rated for, intensity. When I first discussed the project with Alex, he said that, for one scene in particular, kind of towards the middle of the film where things really go wrong, he looked to two films for inspiration for that big scene: Straw Dogs and Deliverance. Both of these films have incredibly intense, horrifyingly unrelenting scenes in them that are very uncomfortable to watch. There are moments in this movie that are very much like that, which is why I think it originally was given NC-17. They ended up cutting a little bit here and a little bit there, but I think the overall idea and feel of the film that Alex had wanted still remains there.How would you describe Alexandre Aja's style, as a director?

Stanford: He was very concerned with the nuance of performance, which I was happy to see in a horror film. And also, he had an extraordinary sense of the visual aspects of the film—not just the sets, but the way that the background was going to work, the way that the setting sun was going to look in the very last shot of the film—he was just very hyper-aware of all that. I saw a screening of the movie, and it paid off; it looks beautiful. The movie looks like a foreign film, almost.