NEW YORK -- Wes Craven, a weary 60 years old now, spent 28 years waiting to make a movie in which heart was an emotion in the story and not an organ ripped out of a chest.

He is, after all, Hollywood's master horrormeister, the sultan of slash, a man who has made a career out of fear.

"The more you make a career out of scary films, the more you realize that people think of you as someone who is scary," Craven says in an interview. "It's pigeon-holing." And it paralyzed his career, limiting it severely to one genre.

From his debut with The Last House On The Left in 1972 through the launch of the Freddy franchise with the original A Nightmare On Elm Street and into the current three-movie Scream cycle, Craven has created some of the genre's most blood-curdling movies.

But the newly released Music Of The Heart, a true-life drama with Meryl Streep playing a woman who teaches violin to inner-city kids in Harlem, is the movie he always dreamed of making. The word 'heart' is not only in the title, it runs rampant through the film's inspirational saga.

"It was wonderful," Craven enthuses about developing and directing this movie, despite obstacles including the sudden withdrawal of Madonna from the lead role just three weeks before shooting. Amid the turmoil and panic and near collapse of the project, Craven persuaded Streep to step in.

In the end, Craven says, the movie was everything he thought it would be, "and more: It was a dream come true."

The warm and fuzzy feelings erupt for a variety of reasons, Craven says. "First of all, working with Meryl Streep, it starts from there."

SOMETHING AMISS

While the breakup with Madonna was "amicable" -- according to both Craven and Madonna's camps -- clearly something was amiss. She reportedly wanted more romantic action and less schoolwork in the portrayal of teacher Roberta Guaspari's life. Craven insisted on emphasizing Guaspari's public and not her private life in the movie.

"As it developed, I felt -- both of us felt -- we wanted to go different ways," says Craven now, politely. He thinks Madonna missed out on something special, and so did he.

"What a coup it would be if you could pull off Madonna's first truly dramatic role. I thought she could break her heart open in this and play her (true) self rather than her persona. It might have been wonderful, so I went along with it."

Finally, Madonna didn't. Streep saved Craven's dream.

"I wanted to do it to demonstrate I could do something more (than horror), where I was not dealing with the darker sides of humanity," he says.

EVERYDAY HERO

Guaspari's story is heroic in that everyday, down-to-earth American way that is rarely explored.

"There is something almost Willy Loman about her," Craven says, drawing on the classic play Death Of A Salesman and remembering Guaspari from the 1996 documentary Small Wonders.

"There is a shot of her just lugging violin cases up the back staircases of schools. She's great, a great character. And her fate is better than Willy Loman's. But I related to that image of her as the American archetype slugging it out in the wastelands and not being supported."

The story has heart, Craven says proudly. "And it stays in her body." The sultan of slash still has a sense of humour.


More Artists