How John Carpenter Found His Second Act

It’s Halloween, which means it’s time for my bi-yearly phone call with John Carpenter. Last time I talked to him, Halloween Kills was about to come out and he, his son Cody and his godson Daniel Davies had composed the score for the middle section of David Gordon Green’s reboot trilogy. It was business as usual, chatting about the ins and outs of providing the music for a film you have no hand in building (but is still based on characters you created). If you’ve tapped into any of Carpenter’s conversations in the 21st century, you know he’s a dry interviewee whose answers are almost always shorter than the questions he’s being asked. He’s a tough cookie to crack, but that’s par for the course for one of cinema’s greatest storytellers who also hasn’t told a new story in over a decade (his last feature film, The Ward, came out in 2010). Though he’ll always be the Master of Horror, Carpenter has largely become the king of pull-quotes in recent years. Ever since the Halloween reboot, he’s been back in the public eye and doing rounds of publicity, be it for the films or for his Music Themes anthology albums that he releases perennially.

His recurring conversations around his personal life—that he just wants to watch basketball and play videogames—get lots of traction on social media, mainly because he is, after all these years and all these killer films, truly one of us. When you call Carpenter up, you’re on his time. During our conversation, he actually halted our talk so he could chat for 30 seconds with someone leaving his house. But that’s the shit I love, I love that Carpenter gives positively no care as to where our interview goes. You can try to pick his brain about artistic choices in his music or philosophical themes present in the scoring he, Cody and Daniel do—but it’s a stalemate, the man is 75 years old and just wants to kick it with his hobbies and rake in the cash that every Halloween sequel, re-equel or reboot nets him.

And that, my friends, is the pinnacle of the American Dream. It’s a John Carpenter world, and we’re all living in it. But of course, I felt that it was important to see if he’d ever gotten around to finishing The Last of Us Part II, what he thinks of the recent NBA offseason and, perhaps most essentially, how he thinks his Golden State Warriors will fare this year. I also caught up with Carpenter about everything from Orson Welles to The Thing to “nice guy” George Thorogood to his new Movie Themes anthology release, which includes score cues from Prince of Darkness, Assault on Precinct 13, They Live and more.

---

Paste Magazine: How are you feeling about the Warriors this season?

John Carpenter: I can’t wait to see what’s up! I don’t know how that’s gonna be. I think it’ll be great, but I don’t know. I’m also looking forward to seeing the [Milwaukee] Bucks, oh my God.

I was going to ask you, because I remember you told me on our last call that you’re a Bucks fan. How do you feel about Damian Lillard joining the team?

I think it’s fabulous. They could be a powerhouse, but so could the Celtics, now that they have Jrue Holiday. God, they could just be unbelievable.

Have you been playing any new videogames lately?

I’ve been playing Fallout for a long time, I really love it. It’s addictive. They have a new update, a new Atlantic City expedition—I can’t wait to see that—coming up. I’ll see what’s out there. Assassin’s Creed, maybe? We’ll see.

Did you ever get around to finishing The Last of Us Part II?

[Laughs] I tell you where I stopped: I couldn’t get the portable generator started. I kept trying, then I said “Fuck this.” It’s also the same problem with Read Dead Redemption. I couldn’t get on a horse in the first one. And I hated the gun aiming in the second one.

Do you have a favorite console at this point?

Oh, the best one is the PlayStation 5. The imagery is just so incredible.

That’s my go-to, too. I wanted to ask, when you were directing and scoring Dark Star, had you known prior to that that, if you’re going to make a film, you’re going to have the main hand in composing the score? Or was it initially a way to save money that turned into an entire career of performing double duty, essentially?

The second thing. It was a necessity. Student filmmakers, we never had any money for something like that. I would provide the music—I did for other students and I did for myself. That was the same for Dark Star. It just kept going.

When you were in film school at USC, was there much consideration or instruction on scoring?

There wasn’t much on scoring at all, nothing. They didn’t have classes. They had a music department, which was pretty incredible. But, when I was there, they really didn’t do the scoring.

You’ve said before that you don’t rewatch your old stuff, that you’re not interested in catching wind of a mistake or something that you might have done differently. It’s a pretty open thing to say, that you can see the faults in your own work. Did Orson Welles coming to your school and being open about his own failures have any impact on what your own outlook is, at this point, on retrospect?

He was slightly defensive, but slightly. Only slightly. He was great, though. He said he could only take responsibility for one of his movies: Citizen Kane. That was interesting, because he’s made some other great movies, there’s no doubt about it. There’s no percentage in covering anything up. I’d watch some of my films and I would say to myself, “Well, why did I do that? That’s stupid.” It embarrasses me now. But I don’t want to talk about that, let’s not talk about that.

One of my favorite movies ever is His Girl Friday, and I know you love Howard Hawks, too. There was comedy in Big Trouble in Little China, but not the screwball stuff that Hawks was doing. But I have to ask, did you ever consider trying your hand at a bonafide comedy flick at all?

It would have to be written. I never encountered a funny script, per se. But I would have. Screwball is hard to do. It’s real hard to do, anyway. I don’t know, it depends. I mean, if one came along now and I could figure out how to do it, I would.

It would be nice to see your take on it someday. Most of the synth music you were interested in back in the 1970s was derived from sci-fi movies. Were you tapped into electronic bands like Kraftwerk at all?

I wasn’t. I didn’t know much about bands back then. I really didn’t know much about electronic music. I knew Switched-On Bach [by Wendy Carlos]. I guess it was more prevalent than I thought it was, but I didn’t pay attention.

You’ve been dedicating a lot of your space in recent years to music and, being that filmmaking was your first love, is music grabbing your curiosity now in the same way that films did back then, when you were making 15 of them in 20 years?

My first love ever was cinema. That’s never going to change. I grew up with music, it was second nature to me. My dad was a musician. It’s very close to me, but it’s not the same love as movies. But I do love making music with my son [Cody] and my godson [Daniel Davies]. That’s been just a joy, so I have a second career now—a second act. They used to say that Americans don’t have second acts, but I lucked into one.

At what point did you realize that Cody was a musical virtuoso?

I can’t remember exactly when. We were playing together one day. “Holy shit.” I don’t know when it was, it just happened.

He got a keyboard credit on Vampires when he was only 14. What was the scope of his work?

He did something really simple, but his ability [has always been] unbelievable.

Working with Cody and Daniel on the Music Themes series and then the scores on the latest Halloween trilogy, how does working with your family in such an important capacity change your affection towards music?

It makes it fabulous, it makes it the greatest. I can’t tell you what it’s like. It’s in the family, and we all contribute equally. It’s the best, I never imagined it would happen.

One of my favorite things ever is that The Thing From Another World plays on Tommy’s TV in Halloween. There’s a story that you were approached about making The Thing around 1975, 1976, but they ended up going, initially, with Tobe Hooper. But was making The Thing From Another World what Tommy and Lindsey are watching in Halloween a conscious nod at the time?

Oh, no. And it isn’t true that I was offered that movie that early. They tried to get Tobe to do it. He had his guy write a script, but they had other people writing versions. They put it underwater, they had all sorts of tries at it. And I was then considered after The Fog, during Escape from New York. They all came to visit me, Universal came to visit me and they said “Would you like to try this?” I had giant mixed feelings, because I love that movie. I still do, the original. But I found a way to do it my way, so it turned out okay.

Did you and Tobe talk at all about the movie after the fact?

No, no.

You’ve been pretty vocal over the years about The Thing being the one movie that you are the most proud of making. What’s the story behind you holding such reverence for that film, in particular, aside from it being one of the best horror movies ever made?

I’ve dealt with some tough films. Elvis was a tough movie, because of the amount of people in it. There were a number of speaking parts, I had to deal with locations and such. The Thing, there were a lot of main characters in that. It was an ensemble group. And then, just pulling the monster off, that was a baptism of fire.

Ennio Morricone gets tapped to score the movie, and he’d struck gold with Sergio Leone 15, 20 years earlier on the Westerns. What were the conversations around getting him in particular to come on and score The Thing?

They weren’t gonna consider me, so there was no real conversation other than Stuart Cohen—he was associate producer—suggested “How about Ennio Morricone?” I said, “Done. If we can get him, he’s the greatest.” His score for Once Upon a Time in the West is one of the great movie scores of all time.

Do you think there is any connection, from a thematic or a sonic standpoint, between a Western score and a horror score?

I don’t know. A score’s a score. I don’t think so.

It’s a hypothetical, but if you’d gotten to direct a bonafide Western that wasn’t Vampires, do you think that you would have stuck to synthesizers or brought someone like Ennio on?

No idea, that’s impossible to say.

I know you’ve got a storied history with Forbidden Planet. Were you a fan of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff when you were growing up?

Well, I was a fan of all horror movies, but I was a Boris Karloff guy more than Lugosi.

I like Karloff, too. Okay, so Ennio delivers to you this Thing score and you decide there needs to be a few synthesizer cues in there. Why did you feel that way?

We were in the process of mixing The Thing and we got to that point and I realized “I need something here.” I just need something to go in the background and it be really simple. It was really simple, it was just a tone—just something to support the scene. That’s what it was, then I ran out and did it.

I’m interested in the lost cues from that movie that you re-recorded and have put out in the Music Themes. What made you want to revisit those moments in particular all these years later?

The idea of the anthology albums is to take songs that did, the music I did in movies, recycle them and improve them. Improve the song, improve the sound. Cody takes the midi of the old stuff and then brings it into the modern era. And then we make money. Money is the general motivating factor behind all of that.

Cash is king.

Yeah.

I love Christine, it’s one of my favorite movies ever. And I especially love the soundtrack and the Dion and Bobby Day songs. What was driving you to, for that script, fill the soundtrack with popular music rather than just the score you conducted?

I don’t remember how that was decided, but there was a guy who provided a list of songs from the era. He was an expert. We found “Bad to the Bone,” which is just the greatest. George Thorogood, nice guy. Real nice guy.

You’d wanted to enlist a science-fiction feeling into the theme of Season of the Witch. And we get to hear that on Music Themes. What are the logistics in differentiating a synthesizer from sounding sinister enough to be in a horror flick versus making it mythical or alien enough to make total sense in a sci-fi film?

It’s the notes you play, and that’s the big thing. If you get a low sound, it pretty much sounds ominous by itself. But that could just be a bass part in the music that’s, otherwise, not ominous. So, it’s all stuff that you play.

Having wanted to make Halloween into an anthology, did you and Debra [Hill] have any initial idea for what might have come after Season of the Witch, had it been better received and people just didn’t immediately want Michael Myers back?

No, I had no idea. Zero ideas, blanks.

On a couple of tracks in this Music Themes collection, we get to hear a lot of synth cues that soundtrack when Michael makes movements. But there are also quite a lot of softer moments, like “Laurie’s Theme.” How do you make certain cues reflect the terror being felt by a character versus emphasizing the violence of a monster?

It’s just part of being a composer and the choices that a composer makes. The way that we play, that’s part of the gig.

One thing I’ve always loved that you said is that you don’t find any monster scary, that it’s real life that’s scary. How does that factor into making music for you? Is there a desire at all to come up with a sound that could just as easily tap into the disasters around us as opposed to something cinematic?

It’s hard to say, it’s especially scary times now. I don’t know how I would score it, but that’s an interesting idea to think about.

Is there any overlap for you, from an art perspective, in recording a song versus remaking a film? Are they comparable at all?

No, no, no. [Pauses] Well, I should stop and think about that. [Pauses again] I don’t really think so.

How many takes do you go through when you’re composing?

I have no idea, I’m clueless about that.

You don’t keep track of the drafts?

What do you mean, “drafts”?

Rough takes that don’t end up making it, demos.

The rough takes that don’t end up making it are the ones with mistakes in them.

You got me there.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

---

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.