Everybody in that room was totally aware of who he was, what he’d done, what he hadn’t done, how he lost control in Hollywood.ĭEADLINE: And years later you took inspiration from Welles when you shot Halloween. We were like little kids around the campfire, listening to the master speak. He was off screen but wanted these bullshit questions that didn’t make any sense to him that he thought intellectually pretentious students would ask. He was there filming his last movie, The Other Side Of The Wind, so he had a camera crew there trying to get the students to ask his character questions. To sit and listen to Orson Welles … man, oh, man. It was unbelievable! Roman Polanski was there with his bride, Sharon Tate, in 1968, with Fearless Vampire Killers. We had directors like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and John Ford come down and lecture us. Then, going to USC I began to watch movies in a different way and was exposed to different kinds of movies, foreign films. My passion came from the young guy who was watching The Fly back in 1958. I went to movie theaters and fell in love with genre films in the 1950s, when there was a big wave of monster movies. The first was when I was a kid, probably the most emotionally influential time, when you’re naïve and innocent. When in your life do you feel you were most shaped as an artist?ĬARPENTER: There were two times in my life that inspired me the most. He said, ‘The only reason I’m doing this movie is because I have alimony to pay, and my daughter in England is in a rock ‘n’ roll group and she said the music that you did for Assault On Precinct 13 is cool.’ But it turned out great.ĭEADLINE: You were a voracious student of cinema. I hadn’t dealt with such an established movie actor, and I was a big fan of his work. He said, “I don’t know why I’m in this movie, and I don’t know who my character is.’ I was terrified. We were going to start the movie in a week or two, and he came to Los Angeles and I met him for lunch. Loomis an iconic character.ĬARPENTER: Wonderful man! I loved Donald a great deal. That’s fine.ĭEADLINE: And financial pressures are what landed you a great actor like Donald Pleasence, who wasn’t your first choice but went on to make Dr. You know, he was busy and probably worried about something else. Without looking up he says, ‘Nice to meet you.’ The guy’s 80 years old, I’ll just leave him alone. I met him recently at one of these conventions. However, we had no money to manufacture such a thing, so what did you do? There were two options – one was a clown mask, which was a better mask, but the Captain Kirk mask was altered, spray painted, eye holes cut, with the hair. Does Shatner know he is the proto-Michael Myers?ĬARPENTER: The mask that Michael Myers wore was written as “the pale features of a human face” – that’s what the script said. You’ve said that once you nailed that mask, you had it made. I was determined to use that so a lot of scenes were done in one take.ĭEADLINE: Michael Myers’ now-famous mug was actually a modified William Shatner/Captain Kirk mask that became one of the most memorable horror faces of all time. Panaglide - you strap it on, and off you go, and there’s more freedom in the movement, freedom to track up stairs, around corners, follow characters. There were certain things I insisted we invest in: Dolly shots for a low-budget crew take a bit of time you have to lay down tracks and level it, put the dolly on and rehearse. But the ambitions of this movie were not bigger than its budget it was designed for the low budget, back in the days when there were still low-budget exploitation movies made. JOHN CARPENTER: Man, it was one of the most fun sets because everybody was young and we were just making a movie. Why was Halloween one of your favorite shoots? At 30, you were the oldest person on set making a low-budget horror movie in 20 days. He recalled having the time of his life shooting Halloween, a modest $300,000 slasher that would spark one of the most influential horror franchises of all time.ĭEADLINE: Halloween turns 36 this year. “It’s this big $500 million game, beautiful to look at - no story whatsoever”) and shares his lifelong love of music with son Cody Carpenter, with whom he’s releasing an album in February called John Carpenter’s Lost Themes. These days Carpenter is big on video games (“I’m playing Destiny right now,” he says. But as the horror business has gone microbudget, those passions have turned elsewhere. John Carpenter Doesn't Get 'Barbie' And Admits It All Went "Right Over My Head"Ĭarpenter speaks candidly of his successes and failures, and of the health issues that required emergency eye surgery in recent years - what he calls “the most terrifying recent memory I have.” There’s still passion burning within the Master of Horror.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |