“I don’t love her anymore”: how Courtney Love unwittingly killed John Carpenter’s movie career
Despite never working together, Courtney Love was nonetheless instrumental in toppling the first domino that led John Carpenter to realise he really didn’t want to be a movie director anymore.
The iconic auteur was responsible for more cult classics than most, and his legacy endures as one of the most important filmmakers of his era, with his influence still being keenly felt today, but even though he continues hinting that he might, it seems very unlikely that he’ll ever step behind the camera again.
Why? Because he can’t be fucked. That’s not verbatim, sure, but it’s close enough, since Carpenter has spent the last decade and a half since The Ward repeatedly telling anyone who’ll listen that he’d rather make music and play video games than go through the rigours of directing, and fair enough.
He doesn’t need the money, and since he’s become one of Hollywood’s favoured pipelines for remaking, rebooting, and rehashing, he’ll continue getting paid for his contributions to cinema, while he still remains tenuously involved in the industry by composing the occasional score. If he wanted to direct again, he would have done it by now, but he obviously isn’t interested.
What does a musician and very occasional actor have to do with his decision to turn his back on the business? The Escape from New York and The Thing mastermind was gearing up to shoot Ghosts of Mars, with Love pencilled in to play the leading role of Melanie Ballard, the soldier who leads her team in a prisoner transfer that ends up pitting them against the titular Martian spirits.
Unfortunately, a week before shooting was due to start, and the Hole frontwoman ended up filing a lawsuit accusing Lesley Barber, her then-boyfriend’s ex-wife, of deliberately running over her foot in a Volvo as part of “a mission to destroy her,” which left her injured and forced her to drop out of the sci-fi flick.
As you’d expect, it didn’t do much for Carpenter’s enthusiasm, and after bringing in Natasha Henstridge as a very, very last-minute replacement, there came a moment during production when the director suddenly realised that he hated his job, which wasn’t ideal when the film was nowhere near finished.
Referring to cinema as an entity as opposed to a medium, a realisation struck Carpenter that he was never able to recover from: “I don’t love her anymore,” he told The New York Times. “I was burnt out. I had been ridden hard.” He dragged himself and Ghosts of Mars to the finish line, but his decades-long love affair with the moving image was as good as over.
Yes, he returned nine years later for The Ward, which was hardly a swansong fitting for someone of Carpenter’s standing. Would he have remained in love with cinema had Love’s foot not been run over right before she was due to headline Ghosts of Mars? We’ll never know, but it can’t be ruled out.
