A Change of ‘Heart’

It’s nearly Halloween--horror movie season--and a new Wes Craven flick is opening Friday, but don’t go to see it expecting a bloody fright fest. His “Music of the Heart,” as the title might suggest, is about as far away as one can get from the filmmaker’s signature works, movies like “Scream” or “Nightmare on Elm Street.”

With this inspirational true story, which stars Meryl Streep, Craven, at the age of 60, has broken out of the horror-movie dungeon in which he’s been confined since his first movie 27 years ago. He’s finally made a film for adults, the kind of entertaining but “serious” picture he’s aspired to since he set out for New York in the late 1960s with the aim of becoming a creative artist.

“It feels good,” he says, not only of the film but also the recent publication of his first novel. “I feel late, but better late than never.”

Craven isn’t alone this year in shattering expectations. “Breaking away” could be the theme of this movie season, for all the filmmakers who are releasing films unlike any they’ve ever done.

In addition to Craven, David Lynch’s new movie, “Straight Story,” has a surprising serenity and sweetness. The G-rated Disney movie--about an elderly man who travels hundreds of miles on a riding mower to visit an ailing brother--is perhaps the last thing anyone would have expected from the director of macabre thrillers and mood pieces such as “Blue Velvet,” “Eraserhead” and “Wild at Heart.”

New work from Sam Raimi and Mike Leigh of Britain also play havoc with our notion of what these directors’ movies are like. Raimi is best known for horror films such as “Evil Dead,” but his work has been varied enough to include last year’s well-reviewed “A Simple Plan” and the earlier Sharon Stone western “The Quick and the Dead.” But those couldn’t prepare viewers for the sentimentality of his “For Love of the Game,” the Kevin Costner baseball movie released last month.

Leigh, whose films include “Secrets & Lies” (1996), “Naked” (1993) and “High Hopes” (1988), is known for edgy social realist works that deal with issues of class. His new song-filled movie, “Topsy Turvy,” which will be released in December, is about the colorful musical theater world of Gilbert and Sullivan.

And the mold breaking doesn’t end there. While Craven and Raimi are wresting free from genre pictures, John Singleton is off making a private-eye flick--a remake of the seminal 1970s “blaxploitation” movie “Shaft.” His previous serious-minded movies have included a gritty coming-of-age tale (“Boyz N the Hood”), a fact-based historical drama about a racial massacre (“Rosewood”) and a look at tensions on a college campus (“Higher Learning”).

None of these directors’ new movies, though, is as startlingly different from their past work as “Music of the Heart” is from anything Craven’s previously done. There are no creepy doings in the new movie, no frightened damsels cowering from madmen, and Freddy Krueger isn’t even mentioned.

“Music” is the true story of schoolteacher Roberta Guaspari, who bucked school bureaucracy, racial distrust and low expectations of what poor black and Latino kids could accomplish to create a celebrated program to teach classical violin in East Harlem. Judging from early buzz about Streep’s performance, this could turn out to be the first Craven picture to be nominated for an Academy Award.

The film was offered to him after he finished directing “Scream” in 1996. Test screenings showed it would be a big hit, and on the basis of that, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the co-chairmen of Miramax Pictures, offered Craven a multiple-picture deal. (“Scream 3,” the third picture of the deal, will be released next year.) Knowing that Craven had long wanted to broaden himself, they sweetened the deal by offering him his choice of any of the studio’s available non-horror movies.

Craven chose “Small Wonders,” the title of an Oscar-nominated documentary about Guaspari that the Weinstein brothers wanted to use as the basis of a feature film.

“It was exactly what I was looking for--something completely out of the genre,” Craven says in a recent interview. “Before, if anybody would talk to us about getting out of the genre they said, ‘Yeah, you should do a thriller.’ That was about as far as anybody’s imagination took them. But Bob and Harvey just said, ‘We think that you’re a director. We think you can direct anything.’

“You lie awake at night sometimes hoping someone will say that to you some time in your career. So it was just one of those extraordinary strokes of luck, or 30 years of hard work--I don’t know what it was.”

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Sitting before a window overlooking the garden and fishpond on his hilltop Los Angeles home, Craven in person is the exact opposite of what anyone might expect of a man typically burdened in feature stories by such tags as “the Sultan of Slash” and “Guru of Gore.”

Eloquently soft-spoken and polite, he comes across more like the academic he once was than a cinematic “horror meister.” In fact, from his childhood in Cleveland, no one could have predicted his future. Craven was brought up in a strict Baptist household and saw his first non-Disney movie (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) when he was in college.

“I went to Wheaton College, Billy Graham’s alma mater,” he says. “I snuck to the next town. . . . And I would’ve been expelled if I’d been caught in the theater. It’s amazing when I think about it now.”

After graduation, he won a scholarship to the Johns Hopkins University master’s program in literature. It was the mid-1960s, and films by Truffaut, Bun~uel, Bergman and Fellini were popular on campus, as were avant-garde American films. “I was just knocked out,” Craven says, “just completely overwhelmed with it.”

Three years after his immersion began, he abandoned his graduate work to move to New York to break into the business. He’d written a novel by then but had been unable to get it published. “There really was a sense of despair toward the end of my 20s that I’d either missed the opportunity or that I didn’t have the wherewithal to be an artist,” he says. “There was a sort of terror.”

Little did he know that his first feature, the brutal, very low-budget “The Last House on the Left,” would dictate the course of his life for nearly the next three decades.

Immediately, Craven and Sean Cunningham, his friend and then-producer, tried to turn to more mainstream movies--”a comedy on an American beauty contest, a thing about a Vietnam vet, a piece about a divorced father trying to raise his kids, all of that kind of stuff,” says Craven--but they were imprisoned by the popularity of “Last House.”

“Sean went broke until he thought up the idea for ‘Friday the 13th’ and became a millionaire,” Craven says, “and I went on and made ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and a lot of other horror movies.”

He stayed in the horror field reluctantly, but he discovered he had a certain facility for the genre. He thinks his strict religious upbringing might have given him an edge.

“There’s a sense of rage that I find in people who were raised that conservatively,” he says, putting in that group the late comedian Sam Kinison, rock star Alice Cooper and filmmaker Paul Schrader. “When you get out of it, it’s like you have this sense of the bizarre nature of life. You need to blow out all the stops, I think, in order to establish yourself in your own mind as someone who’s separate from that and free to do whatever the hell you want to do. I think part of making horror films comes from that.”

“Music” is a huge leap from Freddy Krueger movies; it is his first work made with a broad palette. But despite the limitations of the horror genre, Craven says he found that he could be creative within it and explore subjects dear to him. His films have mostly been about the painful transition between childhood and adulthood, he says.

“We all experience this at a certain age,” he says. “It’s when our parents can no longer be parents to us in that sense . . . and you have to face your monsters yourself.”

Craven turned 60 in August, and he feels now that he finally is achieving what he set out to do 30 years ago--become an artist.

“This year I’ve had the chance to do this film and a novel too,” he says, referring to “The Fountain Society,” which recently was published by Simon & Schuster.

“It just seems to be one of those great periods where you say, ‘Thank God I lived long enough,’ ” he says. “For years I’ve been hoping to be able to do something like these two projects to demonstrate a greater ability than just to scare.”