Interview by Jim Hemphill
John Carpenter describes being born in Carthage, New York, in 1948, the son of musician Howard Carpenter, and growing up in a replica of Lincoln’s log cabin in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He traces his love of movies to The African Queen, seen at four, and It Came from Outer Space in 3D, and recalls USC’s film school, housed in old stables, where he worked on the Oscar-winning The Resurrection of Broncho Billy and began Dark Star with Dan O’Bannon.
He recounts modeling Assault on Precinct 13 on Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo and making Halloween from Irwin Yablans’s idea of a movie about babysitters, with Debra Hill writing the first draft and Nick Castle as the killer. He scored it in three days, building it on the 5/4 rhythm his father taught him on bongos. He also discusses The Fog, Escape from New York and his long partnership with Kurt Russell.
He talks about The Thing, which fans hated on release, and Ennio Morricone’s bleak score, which grasped the film’s end-of-the-world theme before he did, as well as Starman, Big Trouble in Little China and They Live. He describes a second career in music with his son and his godson, Daniel Davies: the Lost Themes albums, a world tour, and scores for the new Halloween films and Firestarter.
Reflecting on his work, he calls it all instinctual and says music is the purest creative form “because you don’t have to explain anything.” His advice to young filmmakers echoes his father’s call to create: “Make a movie, don’t wait on anybody.”