Voices on the Art Form

Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 JOHN CARPENTER

During the summer of 1997 John Carpenter filmed a vampire movie in New Mexico, John Carpenter's VAMPIRES. He was the director, co-producer, co-writer, and also composed and recorded the film score with synthesizers. Similar credits appear on many of his projects, which cover a variety of genres - futuristic science fiction (Escape From New York, Escape From L.A.), the kung fu movie Big Trouble in Little China, the horrific Halloween, the love story/comedy Star Man.

Of filmmaking Carpenter says, "You've just got to be creative and invent things. I do it more like jazz, I improvise it. It just comes from the heart. . . . " The son of a music professor, he spent his childhood immersed in music. Yet, as he recalls, there was always the lure of moviemaking.

My dream had always been to get into the movies and become a director, and that was a dream which started when I was 8 years old. I made my first movie when I was eight with some friends of mine in class, since my dad gave me his 8 millimeter camera. . . . I was in love with movies. I went to see every movie I could. So, I was 20 years old and had to make a decision: either I go out to California and go to film school and try it, or I don't. So I decided to go. My dad was kind enough to send me to the best film school in the world, USC. . . . The instructors I had! The people who came down and lectured me - among them were Orson Welles, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, it goes on and on and on: All the great American directors had ties to the school and would come down and talk to us. . . . It was an amazing time to be in film school, and I think that's why I got where I got today because I just immersed myself in film.


In Halloween, there are a lot of references to Hitchcock's style.

I think especially when you're starting out, Hitchcock is an easy person for a young person to copy because his style is on his sleeve - it's obvious. I'm more influenced by Howard Hawks. He's my favorite director. His style is really harder to get a hold of. It looks completely invisible and easy.

It seems that when you were first starting out you were poking fun - at institutions, philosophies, technologies. I'm referring to Dark Star and Halloween. Do you have a certain philosophy or school of thought that you live by?

I have a philosophy that I live by but it's not necessarily one that I'd apply to every movie. I don't have a message in movies. Dark Star, for instance, was meant to be more of an absurdist comedy. Being young at the time, I wanted to incorporate phenomenology into a science fiction movie, kind of do something different with it. The whole idea of a captain who's dead and frozen in the ship and you can talk to his brain is kind of the idea of Waiting for Godot. God is not coming! The captain's not coming - he's dead. Those are little, tiny kinds of things I was interested in.

In Halloween I had an assignment to do a movie about this guy who kills babysitters. So I wanted to elevate that movie to something that rings true; I was trying to make a mythical kind of evil. I was talking about fate, because in essence he just comes to town and starts killing people. So they were fated to be in the situation. So I had to come up with some mumbo jumbo in the classroom scene to kind of justify it. As I remember it, there was also the line "fate is a force of nature." So that's kind of the idea . . . the force of nature.

You tend to poke fun at your heroes, too. Escape From New York, Escape From L.A. - the Kurt Russell character's not perfect!

I hate pretention in characters. Pretentious character to me in an action hero would be one who takes himself so seriously that he thinks he's going to right a moral wrong. None of us can do that! . . . I poke fun at myself all the time. I suppose it's just a quirk in me. I hate being pretentious. . . . The minute you think, "I've got the answer now," boom! Crash and burn!