A DIRECTOR’S DREAM
By Henry Sheehan
Few movie characters have starker dilemmas than the heroes of John Carpenter’s films. From the spacey astronauts of his first feature, 1974’s DARK STAR, to the frightened townsfolk of VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, they have one big problem; how to stay alive to the end of the picture.
As it turns out, that’s a fitting mirror for Carpenter’s own career. The director of one of the most profitable movies ever made, the prototypical slasher film, HALLOWEEN (cost $300,000; worldwide gross: $60 million), he has been embraced and rejected by the big studios with frustrating regularity. Beguiled by the idea of making their own John Carpenter, executives—and at least one star become suddenly disturbed when Carpenter begins turning one out.
For once, Carpenter seems to have ducked the problem. VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, a remake of a 1960 sci-fi semi-classic was shot for Universal, and Carpenter says it was a dream.
"It’s a good marriage, because we all had the same goals in mind," is how he describes the relationship. "We all knew what story we wanted to tell. I can’t tell you how impressed I am with Universal; the way they treated me, you can’t get better than that."
Actually, when Carpenter gets into the details, it seems like it was more a case of overlapping than identical goals. For one thing, Universal was anxious to finally get the movie made.
"I know they’ve been trying to make this movie since 1978, because of that year’s success of Phil Kaufman’s remake of ‘BODY SNATCHERS,’" Carpenter says.
"It was a big hit when it came out and had all the elements, killer kids and everything. I thought, ‘Sure, it’s an obvious choice, it’s easy, that’s a pretty easy movie to make.’ You don’t have to do much to the original, really. You’ve got to bring it up to date, humanize it a little and make the characters rich. When the original was made, you couldn’t say the word ‘pregnant’ on screen. So the birth scenes and the women weren’t dealt with."
But Carpenter, 47, had a few other motivations, a couple of them quite personal.
"I must tell you, when I was 12 years old I saw VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED and it stuck in my mind for several reasons," he recalls. "The whole idea of a whole town blacking out was ‘Wow!’ Also, I somehow got this incredible crush on one of the girls in the original. She was the first love object I had; I wanted her to zap me and take me over and make me do whatever she wanted.
"I also knew exactly where to shoot it. I live up there, Inverness, Calif., and Point Reyes, where we shot THE FOG in 1979. I have a house up there. It’s paradise; you can stand anywhere, put the camera down and shoot and you’ve got it, it’s there. It’s a small town, plus it’s home; I get to shoot at home for a change. So off we went."
But there were artistic and career factors at work, too. Carpenter’s last previous film was classically personal. "IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS used a Lovecraftian plot to work out some of the socio-political and philosophical notions that are part of every Carpenter film but which surface most strongly in personal films.
Whenever he has had trouble with a big studio—whether with BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA in 1986, or MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN, on which he clashed with star Chevy Chase in 1992-- Carpenter has reverted to independent production.
In the late ‘80’s that got us PRINCE OF DARKNESS and THEY LIVE, quirky delights. This year, it got us MADNESS. But Carpenter still wanted the variation a big time project would bring.
"They’re two different kinds of movies with different problems," he says, comparing his two latest features. "It was fun to do a drama like VILLAGE as opposed to MOUTH OF MADNESS, which had a little edge to it. This is more straight. This is more a baby-boomer, middle-class kind of a movie. There’s nothing wrong with that; I just hadn’t done one of those in a long time."
"If you make a movie over $10 million, you have got to try to reach out to the broadest audience you can find. If you make it under $10 million, you’re able to make it more quirky, more daring, more subversive, if you want to use that word."
"That’s the joy of low-budget filmmaking. You can be tough, you can be down, you can be all sorts of things that from a business standpoint you can’t do when you get over a certain budget.
"There was one big-budget movie I did that after it was done I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of this. I cannot do this anymore, I’m just not made for it.’ You have to want to be a politician. I don’t want to. I’m a hillbilly. I want to have a nice life."
Carpenter has managed to survive with remarkably few compromises. If he has a major regret, it’s that in surviving, he has been typecast.
Everyone knows him for his horror and sci-fi work and forgets that he has directed action films (ASSAULT ON PRECINT 13) and written screenplays for suspense thrillers (THE EYES OF LAURA MARS). He directed ELVIS for TV, while two Westerns he wrote also have made it to the little screen.
"No matter what I do, I’m always going to be ‘John Carpenter,’ he says shrugging. "It’s really weird. I can’t explain what it’s like, but after so many years, people have started to recognize me. My person! People will scuttle up on the street and mention a scene in some movie that I barely remember. I can’t escape it anymore; I’m just ‘John Carpenter.’"
