David Arquette says he had a 'cathartic experience' acting alongside ex-wife Courteney Cox in the 'Scream' reboot

• David Arquette and Courteney Cox star in a new "Scream" film in theaters January 14.
• Arquette said it was "cathartic" to work with Cox, his ex-wife, once again.

David Arquette discussed his experience shooting the latest "Scream" sequel with his ex-wife Courteney Cox during a new interview with The New York Times.

The two actors, who met on the set of the original 1996 edition of "Scream," married in 1999 and then split in 2010, share a 17-year-old daughter called Coco.

Cox — who joined Arquette for the interview with The Times alongside the rest of the "Scream" cast — said she had "no apprehensions" about accepting a revived role in "Scream."

"I was just so happy to be working with (Arquette and Campbell)," she said.

The Times reported that Arquette, however, acknowledged the initial awkwardness that he felt about working with Cox once again when he was first offered the role.

"It's been 25 years of our lives," he said. "We've grown up together. We have a child together," Arquette said.

Yet, Arquette couldn't pass the role up and said that the experience of working with Cox later proved to be healing.

"It's a cathartic experience to just be able to act opposite Courteney," he said.

Cox later added that Arquette became tearful during their first scene together on set.

"He got very emotional while he was filming it. He said the next day the crew didn't look at him," Cox said.

"Scream" is currently scheduled to hit theaters on 14 January, with Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett taking over director duties from Wes Craven, who died in 2015.

Late last year, it was reported that Craven was almost fired from "Scream" because studio executives didn't like footage of the film's now-famous opening scene with Drew Barrymore.

In the scene, teenager Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) answers a phone call from a mysterious person while home alone. While the caller is initially flirtatious, he subsequently reveals that he's holding Casey's boyfriend hostage, and demands that she answer trivia about horror movies in order to save him. Both Casey and her boyfriend are eventually killed by a masked figure.

"The first sequence that was shot was the Drew Barrymore sequence. The studio hated the dailies," editor Patrick Lussier told The Hollywood Reporter, referring to the daily footage (or "dailies") of the film that had been shown to executives.

Screenwriter Kevin Williamson was filming another scene for "Scream" with Craven when the director got a call from the studio about the movie's opening.

"They didn't think anything about it was good. They didn't understand the lack of footage and they didn't see his vision for that sequence at all," Williamson recalled.

According to the report in the THR, the filmmakers cut together another edit of the opening scene and screened it for Dimension Films. After executives saw the new cut, Craven was given the green light to continue production.

"They immediately called out and said, 'We are so wrong. This works so incredibly well. We can't believe how suspenseful and terrifying this is. We clearly had no idea how to look at what you were doing,'" Lussier recalled.