Assault on Precinct 13 poster art by Tyler Stout, https://www.tstout.com
September 10, 2024
By Koraljka Suton
Four years before Halloween, a film that single-handedly redefined the slasher subgenre, John Carpenter made his directorial debut with Dark Star (1974), a science fiction comedy about an alien terrorizing the crew of a deteriorating starship, co-written by Dan O’Bannon (who would go on to pen the screenplay for a much more serious film about aliens. Namely, Alien). Following Dark Star’s release, producer J. Stein Kaplan, Carpenter’s friend from their time at the University of Southern California, offered the filmmaker financing for two low-budget films he was to both write and direct. Their initial titles: The Anderson Alamo and Eyes. After the writing process was done, the script for the latter was sold to producer Jon Peters and renamed Eyes of Laura Mars, with Irvin Kershner in the director’s chair and Tommy Lee Jones and Faye Dunaway in the lead roles (even though Peters bought the script so that his then-girlfriend Barbra Streisand could star in the film, the actress ultimately decided against it, due to “the kinky nature of the story”). With Eyes now out of their hands, Stein and executive producer Joseph Kaufman could put all of their attention on The Anderson Alamo, which was ultimately financed by CKK Corporation, a production company founded by Stein and Kaufman’s families. With a budget of just $100,000, Carpenter was not able to make what he had initially envisioned: a $5 million movie with big stars (as he once told Sight and Sound magazine), more specifically a Western reminiscent of the ones Howard Hawks used to direct, such as his John Wayne-starring films El Dorado (1966) and Rio Lobo (1970).
So, Carpenter got creative. Maybe he could not afford to make the high-budget Western he wanted, but what he could do was take the basic plot of one such film and set it in modern times. And that is exactly what he did. The filmmaker borrowed the premise of Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) and, instead of a sheriff’s office, barricaded his characters inside a decommissioned Anderson police precinct. The original title The Anderson Alamo (the first word referring to the L.A. neighborhood where the story takes place and the second to John Wayne’s 1960 film The Alamo), which Carpenter wrote under the pseudonym John T. Chance (the name of John Wayne’s character in Rio Bravo), was changed to The Siege. But during post-production, the distributor decided to do away with that title altogether and replace it with a more ominous one. And so, even though the assault is carried out on Precinct 9, Division 13, Carpenter’s action thriller was ultimately named Assault on Precinct 13. The number 13 being the ominous part.
The film opens with LAPD officers ambushing members of a local gang called Street Thunder due to weapon theft. Several members get killed, resulting in the gang’s warlords swearing revenge on both the citizens and the police of Los Angeles. We follow Lieutenant Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker), who gets tasked with taking charge of the aforementioned decommissioned precinct during its last couple of hours before getting shut down for good. When he arrives, there are only three people left in the building: Sergeant Chaney and two secretaries, Leigh and Julie. At the same time, a prison bus with three convicts is making its way to the state penitentiary. Among them, convicted murderer Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston). Due to one of the prisoners being visibly ill and in need of medical assistance, the bus makes a stop at the precinct. Little do its passengers know that the sick convict will be getting anything but—along with the rest of them. For unbeknownst to those currently occupying the precinct, Street Thunder’s warlords are at large, roaming the streets, looking for potential victims. They decide on a driver of an ice cream truck. And a little girl who finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Filled with rage, the girl’s father murders one of the warlords, before seeking shelter in the precinct. In a state of shock and unable to speak, the father in incapable of communicating what happened.
What follows is a siege, with the seemingly countless members of Street Thunder stopping at nothing to kill everyone in the precinct. While the father is still unable to either move or speak, Lieutenant Bishop, the two secretaries and the two remaining convicts must work together to try and survive the night. But no matter how many gang members they manage to either kill or maim, more and more of them just keep on coming.
The gang members of Street Thunder, who are given almost no dialogue, are not portrayed as actual human beings, but rather as relentless zombie-like creatures that refuse to be defeated. And this was precisely Carpenter’s intention, basing the gang members who seem to grow in numbers by the minute on the zombies in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. They represent an ominous outside threat that exhibits practically supernatural qualities, and one that our band of unlikely allies seems incapable of defeating. But in the midst of the assault, a surprising bond is formed—Wilson and Bishop, who each stood on opposite sides of prison bars, are forced to unite if they are to survive the night. When push comes to shove, they are no longer a convicted murderer and a police lieutenant. Their pasts, identities and circumstances become irrelevant, because in the grand(er) scheme of things, both of them face the same threat, meaning that both of their lives are at stake. As well as the lives of Wilson’s fellow prisoner and the two secretaries. This changing relationship, marked by the duo’s growing mutual respect for one another, is at the very heart of Assault on Precinct 13. In other words, the humanity that permeates their relationship lies in stark opposition to the completely un-humanlike figures that seek to destroy them.
But theirs was not the only bond that developed—sparks begin flying between Wilson and one of the secretaries (Leigh) and even though nothing comes of it, it is tantalizing to witness growing sexual tension amidst the overall, life-threatening chaos. And the character of Leigh was yet another homage to Hawks. In the words of John Kenneth Muir: “… also important in [Assault]’s homage to director Hawks was the unforgettable presence of actress Laurie Zimmer as a prototypical ‘Hawksian Woman,’ i.e., a female who gives as good as she gets and is both tough and feminine at the same time.” Even her name was an homage—to Rio Bravo co-screenwriter Leigh Brackett.
Before principal photography could even begin, Assault on Precinct 13 had to undergo a couple of months of preproduction. The cast were experienced, albeit relatively unknown actors. Darwin Joston, who had appeared in several popular television shows during the 1960s and early 1970s (such as Lassie (1954-1973), The Virginian (1962-1971), The Rat Patrol (1966-1968), Ironside (1967-1975), The Rookies and McCloud (1970-1977)), was Carpenter’s neighbor while the filmmaker was working on the screenplay. The two quickly became friends and Carpenter wrote the character of Napoleon Wilson specifically for Joston, even infusing the convict with the actor’s traits, such as his dark sense of humor. Joston’s performance is not only considered the pinnacle of his career, but is also often cited as the best one in the movie. The unique mixture of stoicism, sardonic wit and unexpected tenderness that Joston brought to the role made Wilson a full-fledged, sympathetic human being, as opposed to an archetypal action hero. Joston’s co-star Austin Stoker had previously starred in blaxploitation movies such as Abby (1974) and Sheba, Baby (1976), as well as the science fiction film Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). The two lead actors would go on to work together on yet another project: the poorly received 1982 SF horror Time Walker.
The 20-day shoot took place in November 1975: the first two weeks were spent on in-door filming, while the rest was shot on location. It was the first time Carpenter had worked with Panavision cameras and lenses and, according to him, making Assault on Precinct 13 was the most fun he had ever had as a director. He decided to employ a tactic that he thinks can be utilized when making low-budget films in general: shooting as little footage as one can and stretching out the scenes as much as possible. He also saved both time and money by composing the film’s score himself in just three days’ time and performing it with his long-time collaborator Tommy Lee Wallace (who got his first gig as art director on Dark Star). In Carpenter’s own words: “Well the one thing I have to say about me as a composer from my point of view is I’m cheap and I’m fast and I’m riff-driven—meaning that most of the title themes in my films, or most of the music, is driven by a riff.” Needless to say, this approach to filmmaking worked wonders for him—despite working on a small budget, the film eventually became a critically acclaimed work of art that garnered a cult following. Many critics even hail it as one of the best action movies of that time period. But that was not always the case.
Even before its premiere in 1976, Assault managed to get its fair share of controversy. The Motion Picture Association (MPA) demanded Carpenter cut its most infamous scene, lest the movie get an X rating. The scene in question is, of course, the inciting incident that set the siege in motion—the shooting of the young girl, depicted in gory detail. Carpenter was advised by his distributor to do something that low-budget filmmakers usually did: give the MPA a copy that lacked the problematic scene, but distribute the film with the scene left in. Assault was eventually rated R, and Carpenter later came to regret shooting the scene in the first place, claiming that he was “young and stupid.”
When the film did premiere, not only did it get mixed reviews, but it also did not earn much at the box office. Even Carpenter’s Dark Star co-writer Dan O’Bannon showed a lot of disdain for it. He went to the premiere, but did so reluctantly, due to his jealousy over the filmmaker’s professional success. The way Carpenter treated the gang members’ humanity also reminded O’Bannon of the way his former friend and co-worker treated their friendship—with the utmost disregard. But then the film opened at the 1977 Cannes film festival, where it got praise from several British critics and George A. Romero himself, who stated the following: “Carpenter at Cannes wiped us off the face of the earth with Precinct 13. Right from the scene when the little girl gets blown away, I was blown away.” This resulted in the film getting selected for the 1977 Edinburgh film festival. But the real acclaim came after it was shown at the London Film Festival, where Carpenter received the British Film Institute Award for the “originality and achievement of his first two films.” Due to a rave review by festival director Ken Wlaschin who deemed it the best of all the movies that were shown, Assault on Precinct 13 became a hit not only there, but also throughout Europe.
The success of Assault also enabled Carpenter to make his following feature film, which turned out to be the movie of his career. Independent film producer Irwin Yablans saw Assault at the Milan Film Festival together with financier Moustapha Akkad and the two approached Carpenter, offering him a chance to direct a horror movie about a killer who stalks babysitters. Carpenter went on to name Halloween’s killer after Assault’s British distributor—Michael Myers of Miracle Films.
Needless to say, Carpenter’s Assault greatly influenced many action movies that were to come. It has been argued that had it not laid the groundwork for the genre, films such as Die Hard and The Matrix would not have followed. Assault also served as inspiration for movies like Florent Emilio Siri’s The Nest (a 2002 quasi-remake) and Lokesh Kanagaraj’s 2019 action thriller Kaithi. In 2005, director Jean-François Richet even remade Carpenter’s cult classic. Filmed on a $30 million budget, the movie starred Ethan Hawke as the cop and Laurence Fishburne as the inmate, but it failed to satisfy critics or have significant box office success. No matter how hard you try, you will rarely manage to outdo the original. Especially if the original is Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13.
Koraljka Suton is a member of the Croatian Society of Film Critics and has a master’s degree in German and English. For her thesis, she did a comparative analysis of Spielberg’s ‘Band of Brothers’ and ‘The Pacific’. Koraljka trained at a Zagreb-based acting studio for six years and fell in love with Michael Chekhov and Lee Strasberg’s acting techniques. She is also a contemporary dancer and a Reiki master who believes in the transformative quality of art. Read more »
Here’s a rarity: John Carpenter’s screenplay for Assault on Precinct 13 [PDF]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available at Amazon, Shout! Factory, and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation.
In this piece originally published in Sight and Sound’s Spring 1978 issue, John Carpenter talks about his first two features, Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13, and why he would have loved to work in the old Hollywood studio system.
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Carpenter manages to send his action up and take it absolutely seriously at the same time, keeping his audience simultaneously on the edge of their seats and on the brink of gleeful mockery. The film is a virtuoso display of old-style professionalism, shot with beautiful functionalism in the head-on camera style that marked nearly all the Hollywood greats from Ford and Hawks to Billy Wilder, who might have been talking for John Carpenter when he condemned any director who does otherwise with his camera. “He isn’t doing what he should be doing: telling the story.”
Exactly. I believe in that so much. Because when you use the camera to express an emotion by an exaggerated angle or something, that is fine, but if you have to do it because what is happening on the screen is not interesting or compelling enough, then you’re in trouble. If people are talking, that’s more important than the director saying Hey, look at me, I’m a director, I can do all this. Who cares about that anyway? The audience cares about what is on the screen. Film school allowed me to grab the camera and zoom in and out and show off. I hate show-offs and I hate pretension. My first films were very avant-garde because, as young as I was, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, so I tried everything and kind of felt my way along. I made some awful movies. I couldn’t show them, they’re just so horrible. Sometimes of course you have to have an angle or a camera trick for a dramatic effect, and then, if it’s used right, you hope it works and the audience will respond to it emotionally. For instance, I shot the opening of Assault on Precinct 13 myself, using a hand-held camera, following the gang coming out of a doorway and walking down an alley, then they hear something but go on and are suddenly gunned down, and you look up and see the police ambush above. I knew that it would be a bit self-conscious but that people would pay attention to it right away, and then I could get on with the film and move them into it.
Do you really see yourself as belonging with the older generation of filmmakers, people like Howard Hawks?
Absolutely, yes. If I had three wishes, one of them would be ‘Send me back to the 40s and the studio system and let me direct movies.’ Because I would have been happiest there. I feel I am a little bit out of time. I have much more of a kinship for older style films, and very few films that are made now interest me at all. I get up and walk out on them. And in that sense I have a tough battle. I like genres, and regardless of what film I do, I identify for myself what genre I’m working in, so that I can relate it to others. Not necessarily that I want to say to the audience Hey, you’ve seen this before, but for myself I identify it. And I find that I make films differently, and my ideas are basically different from most directors in Hollywood because—and I may be wrong—films are getting more and more pretentious. Even something like Close Encounters of the Third Kind… It’s a movie about flying saucers, and the potential of a big budget movie about flying saucers could be great, but the way the film was made they just… went out the window!
How do you feel about the New Wave then, Godard and Truffaut and their early attempts to extend the genres?
It’s very difficult for me to reflect on that. I have a feeling that Truffaut and Godard, a lot of European film-makers… whether it’s the system they are working under or… their movies are texturally inferior somehow, there’s something missing in them, just in terms of a visceral approach to a movie. And I can’t figure out whether it’s intentional, or whether they haven’t the technicians, or what. But there is a distance from the screen to the audience. And my whole philosophy of movies is that movies are not intellectual, they are not ideas, that is done in literature and all sorts of other forms. Movies are emotional, an audience should cry or laugh or get scared. I think the audience should project into the film, into a character, into a situation, and react. The great thing about some of the B movies or the film noir, say, is that the audience did just that. In The Big Sleep they wanted to know what Humphrey Bogart was going to do. These other directors don’t do that. They take the superficial aspects of it but they don’t get down to the real guts of the thing, which is that the audience has to care. I don’t feel you can just sit and analyse the film intellectually, because then it has failed. So in terms of extending the genres, philosophical ideas, I’m not as interested in that as I am in getting the audience to react, really to project into the film, and come away having had an experience.
At the same time you are also in a sense distancing the audience, alerting them to be aware of what they are seeing in genre terms, through your humour and your movie allusions.
Because I think audiences are more sophisticated now and they’ve seen too many genre films. I’m trying to get them in all sorts of directions, but it’s not an intellectual idea. They don’t sit and think, ‘What’s he trying to say?’ They’ll laugh or chuckle their way with me, or they’ll feel their way.
You said that the humour in Dark Star was a later development. Is the same true of Assault on Precinct 13?
Exactly. I found in both films that I had constructed a situation which, the grimmer it got, the funnier it was to me. In Dark Star, these men have been in space for 20 years, there are no women, and they are kind of going crazy. I put myself in that situation and said it’s horrible, then I began to think it was funny. The same goes for Assault on Precinct 13. I began with a very serious idea about people being attacked which began to become humorous to me. So it arises out of the situation rather than the decision, well, I’m going to make this funny. The first part of the picture, setting up the characters and the conflict, before they all arrive at the police station, is fairly straight, because I’ve learned that you want to take an audience up to a certain point and set them up, let them know what’s going to happen. Then I begin dropping in the humour, like the girl wailing, “Why would anybody shoot at a police station?” From then on I can carry the absurdity. So basically, as soon as the lights go out in the station and the siege begins, I figured I had a chance to start putting some humour in, because the audience by that point is hooked.
The humour is also backed by another sense of slight dislocation that comes with the introduction of Napoleon Wilson, the killer on his way to Death Row who becomes a hero and seems to belong to another film.
Or maybe another time. Out of the Old West, I hope. I try to make him so that he doesn’t really belong with the people around him. He’s completely out of place as a prisoner. He is, in a way, removed in a heroic sense from everyone else, and I try to define his character less in terms of him being psychologically strange than through his lines, through the sort of metaphysical level on which he judges people. He is always asking people for a smoke, for instance, and there are two people who respond to him with some sort of kindness. One is the Black police lieutenant, who says “No… sorry”, and Wilson thinks, ah, he gave me a little respect as a human being. The other is the girl, she gives him a cigarette. So through his eyes those are the two people who are worthy of his respect. At the end, after what they have been through, Wilson and the lieutenant have established a sort of bond; I could have built up their characters and the relationship, but I thought that would have been copying Hawks right down the line, so I just didn’t want to do it. Basically it’s Wilson’s ending, and all I wanted was, through the lieutenant, to state the fact that he deserved some dignity for what he’d done. It wasn’t meant to be more… just a very simple ending, clean, heroic.
Wilson’s dialogue is very Hawksian; isn’t some of it quoted from Rio Bravo?
Not to my knowledge. Maybe unconsciously. There’s the line when Wilson says to the girl “You were good!” after her part in the shoot-out, and I thought, wait a minute, I’ve heard that before, where did that come from? And I think it’s from a lot of Hawks films. But I wasn’t consciously quoting it, it sort of came out of the character.
Apart from the unmistakable Hawksian feeling, there do seem to be replays from Rio Bravo, like the ‘No quarter’ banner that the Cholo gang throw down before the police station and the ‘No quarter’ music played throughout the wait for the attack in Rio Bravo.
I really never thought of that. The closest thing to another film that I was consciously aware of is the tossing of the shotgun, which is from Red River. The police being alerted to what is going on when blood from the dead telephone linesman starts dripping on to the roof of their patrol car… yes, I guess that’s the blood in the beer scene in Rio Bravo. And nobody seems to have noticed that the Black lieutenant’s story about being taken to a police station as a child by his father is Hitchcock’s own story. But the tossing of the shotgun is the closest I ever got to taking something and really using it, because I don’t like to do that. I find a lot of directors, specifically somebody like De Palma, virtually copy a film as he did with Vertigo, and I hate that. Bogdanovich copies too. He wants to make movies about old movies, to say, ‘Hey look at me, I have good taste, I love Hawks, I love Ford, I love Hitchcock, isn’t that great?’ I don’t want to copy another film, simply to get the ambience. In the case of Assault on Precinct 13, I was approached by a backer with a certain amount of money, and he said, let’s make a picture that we can sell. And I wanted to make a western, very badly, because I love westerns. So I thought, I’m going to make a modern-day western, and I’m going to transpose the Indians attacking the fort. I’m going to use youth gangs. And I’m going to use archetypal heroes, I’m going to stylise a great deal, I’m a great Howard Hawks fan. And it just sort of came out of that. But the point is that the film has to stand on its own, without the inferences from Hawks. That can’t be the central point of it. After all, although I also made it for people like you to get an added attraction out of it, I made the film basically for audiences who don’t know Hawks from anybody.
Isn’t there a slight anomaly in that, although you see yourself back in terms of the Hollywood studio system, you are practically a one-man band—not only directing, scripting and editing, but writing the music and virtually producing your films. So where’s the system?
The system back then, as I understand it from having talked with people, is that the control and the style and the point of view was basically left up to the director. Today in Hollywood the mechanics of getting a film going, the number of hands that grab on to it, is ridiculous. When I say studio system, I would have loved to have worked with the stars they had on the roster, the technicians they had, the kind of movies they were doing where a director could move from one genre to another in succession. I would love to give up writing films. I hate writing. I hate editing. I’m doing it only out of self-defence, because there’s no one else who can do it to my liking. And the reason I have done the music on my films is because I’m the cheapest and the best I know for the price! I would love to work with a Goldsmith or somebody like that, but I can’t afford to, so it’s me.
Do you foresee difficulties in surviving now that the studio system doesn’t exist any more and so many deals have to be made with people wanting a piece of the pie?
I know, this comes down to my present dilemma, because I don’t want to compromise that much and I see the writing on the wall to get to a position of power where I can do my own films my own way. I must compromise to a certain extent, and the least painful way is through writing. So, writing my way towards a position of power, I have to write scripts that I often wouldn’t want to direct, and I have become a good journeyman writer. I’ve written a lot of scripts that are successful but that I wouldn’t give a damn about, although I always apply the craft and do a good job. What I’m saying is that I don’t put John Carpenter into those scripts—and in the past year I’ve written six—I write them for the machine and for an end purpose. I want to do Assault on Precinct 13 with five million dollars and big stars: this is what I’m after, taking a low budget film like this and getting the power to be able to do it within the studios. They’re not going to let me walk in, I have to work my way up there. It’s very frustrating.
And paradoxical. Assault on Precinct 13 might reasonably be described as a surefire commercial movie. Yet the major distributors weren’t exactly falling over themselves to distribute it in Britain.
Yes, I know. I feel I’m treading on thin ice in a way. The film was distributed all wrong in America, as blood and guts, without any of the suspense or mystery. And Assault doesn’t deliver that, so it has done just fair. If I had made this film brutally realistic, without stylising it at all, it probably would have done much better in America. I wanted the audience to have fun with the characters, laugh with them, while at the same time having the violence of the situation going on. But because the youth gang problem is so serious over there, they don’t want it to be stylised.
Although you elide the violence so that there is remarkably little of the currently fashionable bloodletting, despite the fantastic number of killings, there is still one fairly shocking moment: when the little girl—conventionally to be menaced but not killed—is shot through the ice-cream.
When I thought of that, to me it was the most absurd death I could think of, getting shot through an ice-cream cone. You don’t really see very much when she is shot; it’s the idea of it that is kind of horrifying. A simple dramatic trick: I wanted the bad guys to be bad. And if they could kill that little girl, there is no way you’ll sympathise with them, there is no way you’ll say, well, they’re poor, they have reasons. I didn’t want any political or social messages at all, and that scene was specifically planned for that reason. An incident that really happened started me on it. A youth gang was standing round a bus stop and a bus pulled up. One of them said, the next person that gets off, I’m going to kill him. A little girl stepped out and he shot her, got in a car, and drove away. What kind of people will do that? In broad daylight? I mean, they don’t care about anything, it’s completely senseless and psychotic. So I thought, well, I’ll make the villains that way, because to me that’s a frightening thing, utter horror, to think I’m going to walk down a street and be shot for nothing. I was discussing the character with the actor who plays this gang member who shoots the little girl, and he gave me the best explanation of the villain. He said, “I don’t want to play this as a man with a gun, I want to play it as a man who is a gun.” That was exactly what I wanted these people to be like, killing machines with the mechanics of the trigger. They just don’t care, which is why this character, when he gets out of the car to confront the dead child’s father, just stands there and is shot down. Basically, to me the evil outside was totally irrational and senseless. Had I wanted the gang to be realistic, to make a social comment, it probably would have been either an all-Chicano or an all-Black gang. I deliberately made it racially mixed, not being too specific about it, keeping it a little shadowy and indistinct.
Talking about B movies, you said that one of their great qualities was in going straight from A to B, but you also said that in Dark Star you meander, giving yourself a chance to explore personality. Do you feel the same is true of Assault on Precinct 13?
Yes, very definitely. With Dark Star we had a stricter narrative at first. Then as the picture grew, I began to realise that there were variations on the basic situation, that I could go off in this direction or that, explore this guy a little bit more and then over to another, and that the audience would go along. It was an episodic kind of thing, the closest I’ve come to improvisation; but the thing that allowed me to do this was the central concept, without it I’d have been lost. Now I’ve become a little bit more disciplined. I don’t think I would do anything that loose again. In Assault on Precinct 13, Wilson has a very simple story, and all I have to do is set him up to get him to a certain point. But I like to meander around, taking in Wilson’s philosophy and how he feels about things: the scene in the bus where he talks to his police escort; the silly game whereby he and Wells decide who goes out to make the break for help; when they’re downstairs in the basement looking for a way to defend themselves, and Wilson and the girl talk, discuss really a kind of love relationship while the movie stops for a minute, just going off on a sidetrack.
Much of Wilson’s dialogue has this meandering, teasing quality, with his philosophical asides, his half-completed explanations, and the unresolved question of how he came to be named Napoleon.
I’m trying to build a certain mystery, curiosity, romance about this man, compared to the police lieutenant, who’s really a strait-laced kind of guy whom I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time with. He isn’t Black because I’m saying something about Blacks. Nor did I want to say anything about policemen. I just wanted somebody, a kind of one-dimensional character who represents law and order, who accepts responsibility in that situation.
You clearly calculate everything down to the last detail. Was this why the part of the girl was cut down during editing?
Yes. Of the actresses I tested for the role, Laurie Zimmer was absolutely the best. We experimented with the role a little, but I think I failed and she failed in one specific area. There’s a line in this character between being cool and assured and strong, and being cold and bitchy. And she crossed the line several times. It was my fault. She was very nervous, this was her first film. So when I got it into the cutting-rooms, I realised… this was a nuance, but it had to do with how you feel about this woman. So I had to cut a great deal of her part out, a lot of good lines which, if they had been delivered correctly, would I think have added to the film, though she works pretty well now. Most of what was cut had to do with her relationship to the other girl, Julie, the one who gets killed, who had a part that made much more sense originally. Now you perhaps wonder why I have her in the film at all, except to get killed. But originally there were tensions between the two girls, with Julie resenting Leigh for various reasons: Leigh is not only more attractive, she is an upper-middle-class girl who has come down into the ghetto, and being a cop is trying to help people. It gave a little more complexity, a little bit more shading, so that you understand why Julie fell apart before she was killed. You have to be careful of these fine lines: if you dip over, the audience is lost…
Can you envisage yourself turning to literary adaptations?
There’s a book I very much want to film by Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination. Terrific science fiction… it would cost millions and millions of dollars, I’ll never be able to do it. I also, strangely enough, would love to do Edgar Allan Poe’s A Descent into the Maelstrom. I think it could be a tremendous film. But that’s all in the future. I have to establish myself as a writer first, and then explore.
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In his commentary, Carpenter shares a wealth of information about the movie’s filming process, including his decision to cast college friends and his innovative approach of conducting filming across Los Angeles, which he later seamlessly integrated into a cohesive, distinct location. Carpenter also professes his love for the widescreen, a format—his favorite—that he was quick to become a master of. This was his first time shooting in Panavision, and he describes repeatedly his attempts to balance the frame, his striving for simple, precise visuals, and how this new ratio contributed to what he feels is the film’s slow pacing. More than anything, throughout his commentary, Carpenter brings up the Western and the genre’s impact on his career. —Studies in Cinema
An interview with John Carpenter and Austin Stoker.
‘BIG JOHN’
“In France, I’m an auteur; in Germany, a filmmaker; in Britain, a genre film director; and in the USA, a bum.” These are the famous words of John Carpenter, one of the most influential horror film directors of all time, whose works such as Halloween, The Thing, The Fog and In the Mouth of Madness remain an inescapable part of every horror film encyclopedia. A talented filmmaker, a modest, humble and practical man, and, for this occasion equally important, a disarmingly, refreshingly honest interviewee. It was from France, to go back to the quote we started with, that the idea for this rare documentary came to life. In 2006 filmmaker Julien Dunand made a documentary film simply called Big John, a 75-minute exploration of Carpenter’s career, character and American film industry in general. The film lacks clips from Carpenter’s movies, most likely due to budgetary issues, but more than makes up for it with a series of enlightening interviews with both Carpenter himself (mostly filmed behind the wheel while driving around L.A.) and a whole gallery of his frequent collaborators, such as producing partner Debra Hill, the Assault on Precinct 13 star Austin Stoker, actress and ex-wife Adrienne Barbeau, the Christine protagonist Keith Gordon, Carpenter’s composing collaborator Alan Howarth, who also did the music for the documentary, and many others.
The central value of this film, which is obviously made with a lot of love and respect both for Carpenter and the craft, lies in the one-on-one conversations between Dunand and Carpenter, which give insight into the life and work of a filmmaker whose golden days may be long gone, but whose significance for the art of film can’t be diminished. As on many other occasions, Carpenter leaves the impression of a sympathetic, straightforward fellow who feels he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. “Many of my film school colleagues were more talented than me,” he told us a couple of years back, “so you mustn’t underestimate the importance of sheer luck.” That may be the case, but through a career spanning four decades and eighteen movies, obvious talent and hard work was what kept him at the top.
Photographed by Rena Small © CKK. Intended for editorial use only. All material for educational and noncommercial purposes only.
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