Relax, It’s Only Magic: An Oral History Of ‘The Craft’

Filardi: At the time, I was immersed in the world of teen Satanism and that volatile cocktail of hallucinogens, metal and magic. I knew a lot about how magic worked and where it came from. I had become fascinated by Ricky Kasso, a pioneer in teen Satanism.

Wick: I started trying to figure out how to do a story that would be [about] very real teenage emotions expressed through witchcraft. In that heightened world, we could really explore the longings, the fears and the wants of teenage girls just as they sort of come into their power — the power of their sexuality, their power in the world. I started talking to different writers about how to approach this, and I talked to several people who were way too “genre” and didn’t really understand. This seemed like a great petri dish for examining young women. Then Peter Filardi came in, and he instantly had great ideas.

Filardi: Doug and I spoke for hours about magic, mushrooms and ecstasy. I remember telling him that magic is historically a weapon of the underclass. It was originally practiced by people of the heath, or “heathens” — poor people without the power of a king, army or church behind them. Our characters could not be popular, beautiful overlords of their school. For real magic to work, they would have to be outsiders with more than desires. Real magic requires need. Doug agreed. He had young daughters at the time. He was a great collaborator and advocate for the project. 

Wick: We set it up pretty easily at Sony, and Peter wrote a really good script. It was always about the incredible longing of high school, the fears of high school and what would you do if you were empowered? What would go right and what would go wrong? And what would be unexpected? The script evolved — got very good, and the studio was interested. But it was a very strange movie for a studio, because it was way before young-adult movies and it didn’t exactly fall into a normal category. It was still a lot easier to get movies about teenage boys made than teenage girls.

Andy Fleming (director): [The script] came to me — I think it was a rewrite job. Or maybe they were looking for a director. I read it and I thought, “Oh, I know what this is.” So I went and met to do a rewrite on it.

Wick: We were looking for a director and Andy Fleming had done a good horror movie and then he had done “Threesome.”

Filardi: When I heard Andy was coming on, I ran out and watched “Threesome.” It’s a great film with great characters. I knew that Doug had chosen a very smart, character-driven director for the project. I was psyched. I remember Andy called and introduced himself. He asked if I had any thoughts not already expressed on paper. I told Andy that, for me, this was not a “hocus pocus” film. It was about the power of adolescent pain. Andy agreed and off he went.

Fleming: It was the process of personalizing it. I just got invested in it. At one point, they said they were happy and they wanted to go out to directors, and I said, “I want to do this.” I’d spent too much time with it and I felt like I knew those girls.

Filardi: When I read his draft, I was excited. There was no collaboration once he took over the screenwriting and directing duties.

Fleming: The tone was there and the idea was there, but my experience from high school was not “Pretty in Pink.” It was a very serious, gothic, heavy-duty experience. Everybody was under a lot of pressure. So I liked that part of it a lot. I brought to it the idea that the main character had committed suicide. The idea that the Rochelle character was black and that she’d been experiencing racism, that was my idea. The idea that Bonnie had been burned, that was my idea. There was a girl in my dorm room who tried to kill herself and I found her with her wrists cut. There was a girl in my dorm who had burns like that, and I was intrigued by her. There was a lot of weird bigotry in high school. I think I personalized it. I also liked the idea that it was witchcraft, but that it felt real. All the witches you’d seen in movies heretofore had been in black pointy hats with green skin, and weirdly a few years before, somebody in the business, I guess I upset them. It was this woman. I don’t want to go into details, but she said, “I’m a Pagan. I’m going to cast a spell on you and it’s going to fuck you up.” I was really freaked out.

Wick: Andy also always said that he had a tortuous experience in high school, so he brought his own sense of reality of high school being a haunted place, with real villainy and danger and the occasional exhilaration.

Fleming: I did a lot of research and it was just so interesting because there were so many misconceptions about Paganism. It was the idea of showing it in a more realistic way and showing how people practice it. If magic happens, it’ll make it more believable. It was starting from a place of reality and making the girls feel like they had real-world problems. That was what I went in with.

Wick: We had an expert. We did a lot of Wicca research. The girls, to a different extent, were entranced — FairuzaBalk the most. Certainly Andy did a lot. He’s a really talented guy.

Filardi: I did not use a witch consultant on the screenplay, but I did a lot of research, both reading and first-hand, into earth magic and the things we experience when we are truly open to the forces of nature around us. I used Scott Cunningham’s book Earth Power as one of my touchstones. It’s an amazing text I still reference today. Goddesses in Everywoman by Jean Bolen was another. Joseph Campbell’s Power of Myth was my bible. Hole’s “Live Through This” was spot-on for me musically while writing “The Craft.” It’s that raw power of  adolescent pain. I still think of “The Craft” whenever I hear “Doll Parts’” or “Softer Softest” — apologies to Courtney Love. During the writing process, I had some interaction with Wiccans and their culture, but not much. My characters were sole practitioners. I believe that magic lives in each of us, and is accessed in unique and personal ways. That’s how life has worked out for me, and it’s how magic manifests and grows for the four young women in “The Craft.”

Fleming: [The consultant] on the set helped write the chants and incantations. Pat Devin, she’s credited in the movie as a technical consultant, but she was really there to try to make it real. I wanted Wiccans to see it and say, “Yeah, that’s not offensive to me. That’s what it’s like.” The whole idea was to make up stuff because the god that they refer to in the movie is something that we made up — because it might have been offensive to people if we had used people’s real gods. We created our own.

PART II. CASTING A SPELL

Once Fleming signed on to direct, it was time to cast the four main stars. The process would prove more difficult than expected. Films with one strong female protagonist — let alone four — weren’t that common, and the crew was dealing with relative newcomers to the industry. 

Rachel True (actress, Rochelle): When I was starting out as an actor, “Heathers” was on TV every day, like “The Craft” is now. I remember thinking, “I just want to be in a movie that’s cool and fun and everybody loves and they still talk about even though it was years ago, like ‘Heathers.’”

Fleming: The casting was really, for some reason, very difficult. I think it was a process for the studio to wrap their heads around finding four fresh faces and making a movie out of them.

Pam Dixon (casting director): “Paranormal Activity” hadn’t happened. None of these things had happened where you could do a small movie and it gets this big audience.

Wick: It fit in no category. It was before YA. There were very few female heroines like that, and there was no star who was exactly right.

Fleming: The casting took awhile because we didn’t have Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis. The whole idea of a girl-centric teenage movie that was dark, there weren’t really a lot of antecedents for that. It was pre-“Buffy,” and it was before “Scream.” There was “Heathers,” but that was a comedy. It didn’t feel like we were borrowing from any other movie.

Dixon: We did these tests and we tested a lot of girls, some of whom have become really well-known. We actually had a hold on somebody that we had to let go because she got offered another film, and we didn’t know if the movie was really happening. That girl was Angelina Jolie. She did “Foxfire” instead. Another person who came in was Scarlett Johansson, who was just 12 at the time. The other girl was Alicia Silverstone. This would have been ’95. She had just shot “Clueless,” but it had not come out. Alicia also got something between the time that we read them and the time we were really going to make the movie, so we couldn’t pick her up either and she went to do something else. They were all really for Sarah.

Fleming: At the time, there wasn’t a whole federation of teen actors like there is now. There was Winona Ryder and Claire Danes — that was kind of it. It took us a long time to find the right four girls. I think we made test deals with 85 girls. It took nine months. We did a lot of screen tests. I think we saw every single actress that’s in that age category. Rachel True was the first one. She just had a funny quality. She was beautiful, but there was also this kind of anxiety about her. She just reminded me of a girl I went to school with, and I liked this idea of that character, that she’s black but that she’s from this wealthy family and there’s a lot of pressure. Those are the kinds of kids I went to school with, so I thought it would be interesting to see that.

True: I go to my agents at the time and say, “I’d really like to read for this,” and they across the board went, “No, you’re not right for it.” I went, “No, no, really I am. I promise you I am.” I think I went in and read for just casting, and then I went back and read for Andy Fleming. At that point, the character Rochelle was Caucasian and bulimic. Luckily, they switched that up. I think that having the racial component in that movie added a really great layer that just wasn’t there in most teen movies. A lot of times, the roles I played, I literally say the words “Are you OK?” So this time I got to play a character who actually had something going on.

Fleming: I think the next person was Fairuza, and she was a practicing Pagan. I just had coffee with her and thought, “Who else in the world could possibly play that part?” She was part of a big screen test, but she’d done “Gas Food Lodging” and everybody knew she was good.

Wick: For Nancy, obviously the villain sometimes takes the most chops, and to create a real high school girl who can seem accessible and relatable and then travel to far-off sociopath places and still [give] a coherent performance is a lot for a young actor to pull off. A few people were mentioned who were very attractive who didn’t have the chops, and Fairuza Balk at the time was a kind of actor’s actor. If you’d mentioned her to Neve Campbell, she’d say, “Wow, Fairuza Balk, she’s awesome.” She wasn’t so much known by the public, [but] she was a pretty clear choice to go after for the villain.

Dixon: I got to know Fairuza pretty well. I just really liked her. She was offbeat, and Nancy was offbeat. I think she just brought something to it that wasn’t actually right on the page. It was interesting. She was a little bit ahead of her time because she wasn’t the collegiate, clean-cut-looking girl. If you were in a hippie commune, that’s maybe where you would find her. Even though she looks funky, she’s smart. What we decided to do was screen tests. That’s where Fairuza Balk and Neve Campbell tested. I knew a girl in New York by the name of Robin Tunney, and I said to her, “I need someone to come in and read in these tests with the girls at Sony.” So she came, really, as the girl reading against the actresses we were testing. When everyone saw the test, they all went, “Wow, look at that girl.”

Wick: We really liked Robin Tunney, so we brought her in and screen-tested her, then screen-tested the girls together, and it was that screen test together — you know, it was made for $15 million — that made [the studio] finally say yes. 

Fleming: Robin came in and she had just cut all her hair off for “Empire Records,” and I thought she was weird. I think she was nervous. She was jumping around in the office and I couldn’t get a read on her.

Deborah Everton (costume designer): She had this really cute pixie cut that I loved. I thought she looked great. The studio wanted a wig — not sure why. Sometimes studios make decisions and the rest of us just scratch our heads and wonder [why].

Fleming: Robin was originally cast in the part that Neve Campbell played, but we wanted her for the lead. We had to talk her into playing the lead, which was weird. But she did it. She wanted to play Bonnie, and we said, “No, we want you to be Sarah.” It was like a reverse-Hollywood story where she wanted the smaller part.

Dixon: Neve was the most famous, by far. I think it was a selling point in that they were happy to have someone they did have promotability on. Assumpta Serna [who played the character Lirio] was well-known in her area. In her country, she was a star.

Assumpta Serna (actress, Lirio): I just think that Andrew saw me in something, then asked for me. I think he saw me in “Matador” and it was ’86. That was how I got involved. [Witchcraft was] something I had no experience in at all. I went to three or four shops and then [someone] gave me a list of four or five shops in Los Angeles, so I went there one by one, buying stuff. I always want the role to exist in my house, and also if there is something they like in the set, I like to provide it because then it’s something that is more mine.

Helen Shaver (actress, Grace Downs): I was in the original “Amityville Horror” long before there were visual effects. I was the psychic who crashes down the wall and sees hell. I played in this arena before, so I didn’t feel I needed to do research about witchcraft.

Wick: When we did a screen test of the girls, Andy did one great shot, which is the four girls walking toward you with a little bit of attitude, and there’s a shot like that in the movie that was part of the campaign. That really was what got the studio over the hump. [That proved] it was something they could sell. That sort of girl power of the group was all in that one bit of screen test.

Dixon: I think everyone was distinctive and everyone brought something to it in a different way. And you never got confused who was who. With the four different girls, you had someone that, no matter who you were in life, you could identify with.

Serna: When I met the girls, I remember that Robin really impressed me. It was so easy for her. And then Fairuza was absolutely someone that behaved like a character. I always remember them being very young and noisy.

Shaver: I just remember having a really great time with these four girls in the larger scenes, and having a lot of fun. Working with Fairuza in the scenes in the trailer, I was really impressed with what a fine actress she is. She seemed to be a very bruised human being, but she channeled all of that energy through the character and I was really impressed with her. To me, she has an old soul and a deep well of intuitive experience, and we had this mother-daughter relationship on screen and just a very easy relationship off screen.

True: I met Neve at the first read-through, and we just clicked right away. We just giggled so much during the shooting of the movie. I think it was a little harder for the others. Fairuza definitely had an intense vibe. You kind of just let her do her thing because you knew she was carrying so much of the weight of the film on her shoulders. Neve and I weren’t going to over and crack jokes around her when she’s trying to prepare for a heavy scene. And Robin had just come off “Empire Records,” so she was more accomplished already at that point. I’d only done one other studio movie before that, “CB4” with Chris Rock, so I was a little intimidated by the whole thing.

Dixon: “The Craft,” in all honesty, I believe, was one of the first movies ever to have the kind of range that it did.

PART III. MAKE THEM SEE, MAKE THEM SEE

With the cast in place, the characters came to life. Thanks in large part to the movie’s goth-inspired stylings, the studio finally saw the crew’s vision.

Fleming: I had this idea that older Los Angeles — the kind that was built in the ‘40s and that’s kind of decayed — is unique as a big city in that there’s nature everywhere. The whole premise was that there should always be trees or there should be skies or water or wind or fire — the four elements. So we were always putting in greens or adding animals or wind or candles. The magic comes from the earth. I bought into the whole thing.

Everton: I gave each girl an element, but [it was very] loose. The way Andy Fleming writes every scene is new. There’s very few scenes strewn together where they’re all wearing the same costume.

Filardi: The girls in “The Craft” were mixes and matches of girls I knew, but even more so, they were inspired and empowered by goddess archetypes and earth elements. Sarah is earth. Bonnie, with the power of foresight, is wind. Rochelle, the diver, is water. Nancy, of course, is fire.  

Fleming: We put them in these costumes that were kind of goth-y. That was my premise: What if those witchcraft girls in high school dressed like they were in The Cure? I just had this idea that they should have a punk element. At that point, goth wasn’t really a thing.

True: The costumes were kind of how we were all dressing in the ‘90s. Fairuza was like she was straight out of a goth band. When I moved to California, which was maybe two or three years before I got “The Craft,” I had come from New York where everybody dressed all in black. Everybody looked like Fairuza’s character in the East Village. That was the normal look for me. But the second I got off the plane in California, I was like, “How does everybody have on the exact same little flower dress?” So I just realized that’s the California take on all of this. The flower dresses we have in there are very specific to exactly what was happening in California casual fashion. Now it looks super specific and dated, but in a super cool way.

Everton: The first day of shooting was the first day the girls met each other, and Robin didn’t even have her school uniform yet. The studio flipped out and thought I was the worst costume designer and thought I was going to ruin their movie with how blah the girls looked. They all came down in a pack to my office. I was terrified. And for some reason studio executives always travel in a pack, it’s the funniest thing. They really thought I lost the plot, but fortunately, they didn’t fire me and let me show them what I had planned and they calmed down and we got the film made.

Fleming: We shot these scenes and it was in that moment that the studio said, “Oh, we get it.” It was the music and the clothes and the candles and the whole thing. 

Everton: I wanted the Robin Tunney character to be the most vulnerable so the audience had somebody as a protagonist. I wanted to keep her softer and more accessible than the other girls, particularly Nancy, who was much more hard-edged. Her clothes were almost like an armor because she was, underneath all that meanness, kind of just a broken child.

Shaver: For me, getting that wig to be right was a very huge part of creating the character. That’s just women I’ve observed in the world who clearly fell asleep on their hair, sweat, brushed the front and not the back, put on too much makeup over the makeup they still had on from yesterday because they didn’t wash their face, had another cigarette and hoped for the best, I guess. Had a drink and tried to make the world go away.

True: When we did the read-through, I had a scene with my upper middle class, stodgy parents. We shot it, but it ended up being cut from the film, which I was a little bummed about because I was like, “Wait, all the other girls get parents. I don’t get parents?” And this was 20 years ago, so then I said, “Listen, you’re black and you’re in the movie. That’s pretty good already.”

Filardi: One of my favorite scenes is the “Calling of the Corners” on the beach. When the girls come together at the beach, it’s the climax of their united powers. Those moments of unity are my favorites in the film. The beach is a power location in earth magic. When you build a fire on a beach, all four earth elements are brought together. “Where earth meets wind meets water, we bring fire.” When you have four girls, representing four elements, four seasons, four directions, four evangelists, and unite them at a beach with fire, that’s when the shit goes down.

Fleming: There were some weird things. When they were calling the corners on the beach, the park ranger had said, “This is the highest the waves will go at high tide,” so we moved our circle of fire inland from there. But it was just this odd thing where, when the girls started the incantations, the waves kind of came up. And at one point, a wave came and wiped the whole set out. It’s actually in the movie very briefly. When the camera is spinning around, a wave wipes out the fire. It just seemed like every time we went outside, something happened. It was a spooky atmosphere on set, but I think people joked about it.

Wick: It’s all true. I can’t remember all the specifics. I remember at the time, everyone was kind of captivated by these occurrences. Whether they had really summoned Manon or we got lucky with a few power outages, I’ll never know.

Fleming: It was not a big-budget movie. Visual effects were much more expensive at that time, or they were harder to do. But Sony Imageworks was at the center of the cutting edge of effects work at the time. They created proprietary software to make those butterflies happen. It was a combination of real and digital. It was a lot of work, definitely. The snakes were all real, except for the one shot where Fairuza’s hair turns into snakes. At one point, the animal wrangler said we had 10,000 snakes. A lot of them were small, but we had giant buckets everywhere. Robin was the one who really had to put up with it. She was fine with the snakes. Oddly, she has a phobia of birds, so we didn’t have any birds.

Serna: I remember being very impressed by the effects. They were trying new stuff, Sony, and they were very pleased with the results. It was impressive to see. 

True: [“Light as a feather, stiff as a board”] was super fun to shoot, and also because it gave my character something to do. It took a long time because it was green screen and they had to do crane shots. It was very technical. I was basically on a hydraulic lift. I had some sort of metal thing that I laid in and they put my clothes around that, and I remember thinking, “Oh my God, this thing is making my hips look three times wider than they are.” But in the end, I think the scene came off really well. It’s not a comedic movie by any means, but there are elements of comedy and I liked that I was able to be the one to intersperse that.

Filardi: From start to finish, “The Craft” was made by many talented people who understood the story, gave to it and improved it. That’s how good films work.

PART IV. CONJURING UP A COVEN OF FANS

Despite mixed reviews, “The Craft” took on a life of its own. It wasn’t a runaway hit at the box office, but it quickly gained cult status. In 2015, reports emerged that Sony was developing something of an indirect sequel, which aims to explore the film’s themes with a fresh perspective. 

Filardi: It’s funny that the movie got an R, which I don’t think it deserves. It had darker stuff that I think was taken out so that it could be a PG or a PG-13, and I think it would have reached a bigger audience when it first came out. It’s crazy, really. The movie’s designed for 16-, 15-, 14-year-olds. Not an R. I think it was given an R because of the theology — I don’t know. I have no explanation.

Fleming: That was kind of a snafu. We were trying to make a PG-13, so we weren’t using the F-word or having any nudity. Then, right before shooting, the MPAA notified us, because I guess we’d sent the script to them, that no matter what we did, the movie would be an R rating. They said it was black magic and teenagers. And I said, “Hold on. Paganism and Wicca and witchcraft are not black magic. Black magic is devil worship.” We had made that distinction very clear and early, that it’s not about devil worship. They wouldn’t budge, so it was frustrating. If I had to guess, they wouldn’t do that now. I’ve never had much luck with the MPAA. They don’t like me. We had a huge fight over “Threesome.” There was nothing we could do about “The Craft.”

Wick: [The R rating] was very disappointing. It’s interesting, because now it would practically be G, but at the time, the issue of teen suicide — there was a lot of fear about that. Very little ground had been broken in terms of the more realistic exploration of teen agony. I think the rating people at the time were probably old white guys. Those things just seemed kind of dangerous to them, which in a funny way is almost part of the story — this sort of not understanding [was] why they burned witches in the first place, because they didn’t understand the mysteries of young women. Getting our R was the modern-day equivalent of having a few witches burned at the stake [laughs].

True: There was a publicity junket that they were only going to take the other three girls to. At the time, 20 years ago, I was like, “Oh, it’s me, it’s me, it must be me.” And now I realize it wasn’t me — it was marketing. They didn’t really think it was going to get a black audience is my guess. That would never happen today. If you have four leads in a movie, you will take all four leads. But that’s something that people don’t quite understand. Its like, “Why do black people still whinge on about that?” Well, because that stuck with me all these years, that for some reason I wasn’t as important. Now I did eventually get added to that junket because one of the other actresses said, “You should really bring her.” Then, the next year, Fairuza, Robin and Neve were all on the MTV Movie Awards and I was not. Granted, those girls had all worked more than me. At the time, I just said, “Oh, it’s probably because Fairuza’s known and Neve is on a TV show.” I’m kind of 50-50 on it. It’s also that they were white.

Fleming: I think there was a lot of confusion about what the movie was until we had our first preview. When we did, I remember showing up and there were all these very serious gothic proto-punk girls, and I was like, “Oh, OK, I guess there’s an audience out there.” I just remember seeing the trailer and thinking, “This is a remarkably good trailer.” That was exciting. 

Shaver: It was a good opening, and I think we opened at Grauman’s and it was a big carry-on, good fun, good party, all of that.

Fleming: I remember Doug Wick telling me [“The Graduate” director] Mike Nicholswas there, and that made me really nervous. I was impressed by how many people saw the movie. Robin Tunney, a couple of years later, said she had a meeting with Sean Penn about a project and at the end of the meeting, she said, “How do you know my work?” And he said, “From the witch movie!”

Serna: I remember [the premiere] because my grandfather was there. It was one of the last things he did with us in LA, and he loved “The Craft.” He was so moved by it. He was like 78 or 79. Walking the red carpet for him was new.

Wick: In terms of the performances and working with the girls and the final shaping, Andy really did an amazing job. Because he was connecting to some real pain of his own, there was always an authenticity about the movie that is part of why it’s just had this ongoing following.

Dixon: It didn’t do fabulously at the movie theater, but in video rentals? Unreal. 

Wick: And it has this massive presence on social media, which was completely unexpected. At the Hollywood Cemetery, a few years ago, they had a showing of “The Craft,” and I went with my own daughters who were in their 20s then — they had done a cameo in the movie on the bus, those three little blond innocent girls with the witches sitting across from them. We all went together and it was so amazing. There were hundreds and hundreds of people all dressed up like their favorite character in “The Craft,” but all obviously in their teens and 20s. Andy and I went, and the actresses, except for Fairuza, who wasn’t around. Everyone [thought] it was so great, because you work hard on a movie and they rarely just have an ongoing life like that.

Fleming: I wrote a sequel and I wrote a pilot based on the movie, neither of which came to pass. At some point, I just needed to move on. I think years had gone by and I had made another movie, and I think they had been trying to get a sequel going. I had an idea for it and I had a few drafts. The idea was that it was the school without those girls. It was the legacy of what those four girls had done at the school.

True: I think we probably all had deals in our contracts for a sequel, but that was more about locking you in at a price. That way, if the movie exploded, you couldn’t ask for more. But nothing ever happened with it. I have a love-hate thing with “Charmed” because that’s clearly a “Craft” rip-off. They used the same song and the same font. Also, leave it to Aaron Spelling to make them all sisters so they didn’t even have to have an ethnic character.

Fleming: I hope the reboot happens. Nothing would make me happier.

Wick: It’s not so much a remake — it’s sort of saying young women exploring their power, what would that be like right now? Obviously it’s an incredibly relevant, exciting subject, so we hired a really great female writer/director, Leigh Janiak, who also has a talented writing partner. We were only going to explore it if there was an exciting way to go, and they came in with [something] very fresh — a new group of girls, much more of this era, who begin some explorations with power that they don’t understand. They had just incredibly compelling ideas for a way to make a new, exciting, surprising movie for teenage girls.

The above quotes have been edited, condensed and arranged based on individual interviews conducted by The Huffington Post.