Lee Marvin had a cardinal rule about the roles he accepted. Always get yourself killed off in a picture that looks like it's gonna be a success, sweetheart," he advised his fellow actors in 1972. David Arquette was hardly born then, but he must have thought he was on the right track when he took the comic relief role of nice-but-dim cop Dewey Riley in Scream, Wes Craven's smash hit revival of the slasher movie last year.
"Dewey was supposed to die in Scream," admits Craven. "But at the last second, I said let's do a shot of him alive, just in case. We cut it in and he stayed." Which is why Arquette is sitting here chainsmoking Marlboro Lights and talking to me about Scream 2, the sequel which Craven and hot-shot screenwriter Kevin Williamson have turned out in double-quick time following the success of the original.
Sequels, it is generally agreed, are no great shakes, and Scream 2 doesn't really buck the trend, despite Williamson's typically smarty-pants defensive strategies (he has his characters sit around discussing "why sequels always suck"). Arquette agrees with me that the new film is a little more muted. "Except for the first scenes, which are a bit harsher," he points out correctly.
It must be strange to come back to reprise a character who you think you've killed off less than 12 months before. "In some ways it's more comfortable - you've already done the back-story, so you're bringing the character back to life again. You can look at the last one, and see what worked. There's also a weird predicament, in that the first one was so successful, so nobody expects this to be as good. There can be a jaded atmosphere on the set of a sequel. There's more focus on it, and more hype."
As a character, Dewey offers a sort of comic punctuation throughout - a wide-eyed idealist among all the cynical movie brats. "I had a little bit more chance to do some more schtick, but this character is kind of schticky anyway," says Arquette. "My thing with him is that I just try to keep a little lightness in his eyes, a childlike quality, while always remembering that he wants to be Clint Eastwood."
At 26, he's the youngest of an acting dynasty - his grandfather Cliff was a TV regular in the 1950s, his dad Lewis (who played J.D. Pickett in The Waltons) appears in Scream 2 as the local police chief, and brother Alexis is also a character actor. These days, the Arquette name is most famously attached to his two sisters, however - Rosanna, star of Desperately Seeking Susan, and Patricia, who made her first impression starring in True Romance with Nicolas Cage (who is now her husband). "We all enjoy acting and entertaining. My mother was an actress in New York when she was younger, but she put that aside to raise us. My parents are really neat people. They inspired us all with their creativity and enthusiasm. My father taught us a lot about improvisation when we were growing up, so it was something that was embedded in us."
He admits that he went through a wild phase in his teens, before taking his sisters' advice and getting into acting. "It's really weird growing up in Hollywood, and it was difficult for my dad as a jobbing actor. We were Hollywood Boulevard kids rather than Hollywood kids. We were little trouble-makers, club kids, messing around with different stuff. That's a whole thing I had to get out of my system, turning that around and doing the right thing after all that. But you learn from those mistakes. I do like L.A., though - it's still home to me."
He has been building up his profile since his first roles 10 years ago, as disaffected adolescents in TV shows such as Parenthood. Since then his profile has risen steadily on the back of character parts in movies including Wild Bill and Beautiful Girls, and particularly his performance as a young L.A. hustler in Johns. "It's a weird business. You're trying to build your career, and people are always judging you, trying to figure you out. There's always the really good scripts that everybody wants, and it's hard to get those. So you're waiting for the bigger people to drop out of those parts, because they can't do four at the same time. Then there's the stuff that's left, and the big movies that are really shitty - sometimes it sucks, and you've got to compromise. Sometimes you do things that don't turn out the way you expect. But you try to choose on the basis of the best scripts and the good parts."
When I was talking to him last month in London, he was on a flying visit from Prague, where he is appearing in British director Antonia Bird's 19th-century war drama, Ravenous. "Guy Pearce and Robert Carlyle are in it, who are really great actors. I chose to do that rather than a big movie, because I really admire those guys. I don't want to be, you know, a huge guy. I've been lucky because I saw my sisters go through all this, and I saw my dad struggling, so I have some idea how best to go about it."
He has also been credited as a co-producer on the indie production Dream With The Fishes, so does he have an interest in moving behind the camera? "Well, I was just sort of involved at an early point and helped out with selling it." The credit is kind of misleading, he says, but such credits ensure you don't end up working on a film for nothing. "They give you profit points on the film, but they're points you never see, so the reason is to get points so that you'll see any money at the same time that they do. People don't really get paid the way they should a lot of the time for the work they put in. You need to treat people with respect."
The success of the Scream movies, and of Williamson's other hit screenplay, I Know What You Did Last Summer, has sent tremors through the Hollywood establishment. There seems to be a changing of the generational guard at the moment, with young stars such as Neve Campbell and Claire Danes supplanting the more established names, but Arquette isn't finding himself mobbed by teen fans just yet. "I think maybe people are a little bit more comfortable with me. They joke with me. I'm getting this Dewey reputation, which is kind of cool, but I don't want to get pigeonholed."
In fact, he seems much happier when talking about music, and the band he fronts, Ear 2000, which has a song on Scream 2's soundtrack. "You get to connect with people through music on a far more personal level. It's also intriguing for me to be myself on stage, rather than playing a character." The band, which he describes as "like classic Led Zeppelin-type rock 'n' roll with some beats thrown in", is releasing a CD this summer.
He accepts that it's hard to be taken seriously as an actor/musician. But there are advantages as well. "You can get an audience more easily. People are interested - they want to see me make a fool of myself, which is what I do anyway. If they have a good time, then great."
Like his sisters, he seems to have a particular talent for comedy, I suggest. "Totally, that's my other love, apart from music. You can slip comedy in to a lot of dramatic stuff, and I love doing that. I'd love to do stand-up, which is another way of being yourself on stage. It's an ambition of mine."
As for Scream, the third instalment of which will be coming our way next year: "I was one of the people who were always confident it was going to be successful. But I certainly didn't think it would be this successful. Wes is great, really supportive. He's really cool, really on top of what he's doing. One of his strengths is that he knows his audience, and how to build that rollercoaster ride for them."