Scream 8: Neve Campbell Is Giving Notes Now
A first draft of Scream 8 exists, and its star has opinions about it. Between Ghostface and 10 Downing Street, Campbell is quietly becoming the author of her own career.
The red carpet is the last place anyone expects a straight answer, which may be why Neve Campbell gave one. She was in London for the second season of Black Doves, Netflix's spy thriller from Joe Barton, working her way down a list of projects in the pipeline, and the one everybody wanted came out first as pure Hollywood vapour: there were "conversations" about Scream 8 at the moment. Asked what a conversation consists of, she dropped the euphemism on the spot. "There is a first draft. Yep, I'm giving notes, and that's where we're at at the moment."
That is a small sentence carrying a lot of freight. A franchise this size does not have a finished script unless somebody has decided to spend money on it, and the rest of the context explains the hurry: Scream 7 opened in February with Campbell back as Sidney Prescott after she sat out Scream VI in a pay dispute with Paramount, and under franchise creator Kevin Williamson it became the first film in the series to pass $200 million worldwide and the highest-grossing in its 30-year history. By late March, Lilla and Nora Zuckerman — the sisters behind Poker Face — were writing the next one, with Williamson expected to move from directing into producing.
Campbell did not name the writer, so the draft she is marking up is presumably the Zuckermans'. What matters is that she said it out loud. Leads are usually the last people to call a script unfinished, because a franchise star admitting she has notes is a franchise star admitting the film is not yet good — and this one has spent three decades as the fixed point of a series that kept changing directors, casts and rules around her. Days before the carpet she had told TheWrap, laughing, "I'll be in it." Reading the draft is a different job from saying yes to it.
Most of the evening belonged to Black Doves anyway, which returned to Netflix on November 5 with Keira Knightley as a government wife selling her country's secrets and Ben Whishaw as the friend who kills for a living. Campbell plays Cecile, who has, in her description, "come to Number 10 to try and influence our Prime Minister", and who handed her the kind of fun she rarely gets offered: "She's really annoying and very opinionated, very strong-willed, knows what she wants." Playing someone with no filter and no interest in being liked is a holiday for an actress who has spent her career being the reasonable one. "I don't often get to do that, so it was really fun."
She had been a fan of the show before she was in it, as she had been of House of Cards, and she had never worked with either lead: Whishaw she knew "from back in the day when I used to live here 20 years ago", Knightley from drinks about 15 years ago. London is home again — she moved back a year ago and, asked whether she feels like a local, said simply "I do" — which may explain her theory about why the British write better spies than anyone. "You're just really good storytellers and you're quite reserved. You don't like to give a lot of way," she said. "And quite discerning as well." A third season? "You never know."
Which is the pattern of her whole slate, and the reason a red-carpet aside is worth more than the film it teases. She has sold The Shore to HBO Max, from a book she found, and is developing A Bird in Winter at Dancing Ledge. Three decades in, the material starts with her now. Sidney Prescott's fate is no longer just something that happens to Neve Campbell; it is something she argues with on paper first, which is a stranger and better position to be in.
