This is a pretty amusing Q&A Rooney did with PopStar while on the NOES set. I like her wit!

Rooney Mara looks exhausted, and that makes sense. Last June, the pettite actress was on the set of A Nightmare On Elm Street, then in production at a bookstore in Chicago. Mara, the sister of Kate Mara and a rising star in her own right, plays the sleep-deprived Nancy Thompson, who’s on the run from the infamous and decrepit Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley), a serial killer who worms his way into people’s dreams and essentially slays them from within.

The April 30 release, of course, is a remake of Wes Craven’s 1984 horror flick of the same name, which cast Heather Langenkamp as Nancy and Robert Englund as Freddy. Johnny Depp played Nancy’s boyfriend in the old film, while Kyle Gallner has that role in the reboot. ScreenStar was among a handful of visiting journalists on the Elm Street set that day in June, and here’s some of what Mara had to say.

Have you been doing the sleep-deprived thing to help yourself get into character?
Yes, I have not been sleeping. The other boys don’t let me sleep. When we have really-really intense scenes I do try and limit my sleep to three hours. It helps, though. It really does help.

What do you do to fill the time? Wii?
No, I don’t play videogames. Actually, Thomas Dekker has been making me watch pretty much every movie possible. We’ve been watching all the John Cassavetes films. He’s been making me watch a lot of Michael Haneke films. He’s been making us watch every film possible. We watched Martyrs (2008). We’ve been watching a lot of scary movies, but also just old classics. So that’s what we do. We just watch movies.

One of the elements of the old film was that Nancy was a bit of a cross between Rambo and Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. Any of that here, too?
There’s definitely some Rambo, definitely some Rambo. But it’s definitely a lot different from the original Nancy.

In what ways is your interaction with Freddy different from the older version?
I don’t know how much I can talk about that without giving stuff away. I think the Freddys are very similar, but also Jackie is bringing his own thing to it. I think it’s less comedic and more creepy-serious, but there’s still definitely comedy in it, in the Freddy in this.

Up to this point in the shoot, what’s been the most intense scene for you?
I don’t know about the most intense, but I know that the most painful was we had to do this scene with a motion-control camera, which was just awful. We had to do it in two different locations, for the nightmare part and then the reality part. (It was) crab-crawling backwards, and my arms were just bleeding and bruised. It’s definitely really hard when you have to be terrified of a sticker.

If you had the opportunity to go back and do the first film with Johnny Depp, would you trade Kyle for Johnny?
Oh, that’s mean! You know what? I love Kyle. I wouldn’t trade it. I wouldn’t.

But you’d want to work with Johnny?
Oh yeah, I’d work with Johnny on anything, on a Metamucil commercial.

Did you reach out at all to Heather Langenkamp?
No.

Did you want to?
I would definitely love to talk to her after we finish, for sure. But I think it’s so different that… not really. But definitely after. I would love to sit down and talk to her.

How are you enjoying working Jackie?
Jackie is the sweetest man I have ever met. He’s so easy to work with. He’s so giving as an actor. He makes it fun. We’ll just make it really creepy and intense, and then he’ll just say something totally inappropriate to break the ice.

In the original film there’s not a lot of Nancy-Freddy shared screen time. How about in the remake?
Yeah. I think there definitely is more. I don’t have as much as the other kids in terms of cool nightmares, but I have more with Jackie. I definitely do. We have a lot together.

In a perfect world, what will this film lead to for you? Some people become scream queens and embrace it. Heather basically got out of the business because she was being stalked.
Oh, God. Well, none of that!

She’s actually happily married to a movie makeup artist.
After this I just want to keep working. I want to do a bunch of different things. I’d love to do a period piece, get on some pretty costumes, a corset. There are a lot of people I’d love to work with, and I just want to keep working, traveling, learning.

Source: PopStar