The director John Carpenter instantly knew was the real deal: “He’s got a vision”
Few directors are as beloved by subsequent generations as John Carpenter. The iconic horror filmmaker, who rattled off a succession of classics in the 1970s and ’80s, has always been a significant influence on most of the horror, sci-fi, and action directors who came after him.
Conversely, Carpenter has always had a keen eye for picking out filmmakers he believes have huge potential. In fact, he once pointed to a young director with only one movie under his belt and marked him out as the real deal – and over the next three decades, he was proved correct many times over.
In the early 1990s, Carpenter sat down with The Guardian for an interview, and the talk quickly turned to how young filmmakers can break into Hollywood. Carpenter was from the first generation that could attend film school, and his education at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts proved invaluable in getting him started. However, he had already begun to show the fiercely independent spirit that would later define his career by leaving USC in his final semester to begin shooting his first feature film.
From the moment he left film school, Carpenter knew he would need to write his own material and work independently before Hollywood would even think of welcoming him into the studio system. So, that’s what he did: in the ’70s alone, Carpenter wrote and directed Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13, and Halloween. He also wrote and directed the TV movie Someone’s Watching Me! and the movie Eyes of Laura Mars, which Irvin Kershner helmed.
By the ’90s, Carpenter still believed in this pathway into moviemaking. “How do you break in?” he asked himself. “You have to force your way in. Nobody wants you. They don’t want you coming around; they’ve got enough.”
He continued, “The way to get in is to write. Write a great screenplay that every studio must have right now. Sell it for a lot of money, and then write another one that they must have.”
At this point, Carpenter suggested that the filmmaker turn the tables on the Hollywood suits. In theory, they’ve now written two undeniable scripts, so this is when they should shoot their shot and demand, “I direct this one.”
Carpenter nodded sagely, “That’s how you get in.”
The director that Carpenter then praised was someone who followed this very path on his way into Hollywood. Before he was able to get the green light to direct his first movie, he wrote two screenplays that built his reputation in the business: True Romance and Natural Born Killers. Tony Scott and Oliver Stone brought those scripts to the screen, and suddenly, the director had enough cache to be trusted with directing his debut: Reservoir Dogs.
“There’s a lot of good directors working,” Carpenter mused in this early ’90s interview. “I’m a big fan of Quentin Tarantino. Reservoir Dogs is a great movie. It’s fun. It’s really funny and ridiculous and violent.” After only one movie, Carpenter already knew Tarantino was someone to keep an eye on. He’d seen something in the uniquely structured heist movie that convinced him Tarantino displayed an intangible not every director exhibits.
“He’s got a real vision,” Carpenter nodded. “This guy’s for real. I like it a lot.”
Fittingly, Tarantino would later reveal that he wasn’t so different from the countless other directors of his generation in one way: Carpenter was one of his guys. In fact, he explained that The Thing, Carpenter’s classic 1982 sci-fi horror, inspired Reservoir Dogs in terms of its tone and atmosphere.
“I defined it when I saw The Thing,” Tarantino summed up. “I tried it in Reservoir Dogs…The paranoia in The Thing was so thick, and so bottled up in that shelter that it bounced on the walls until it had nowhere else to go but through the fourth wall and into the audience. That’s what I hope that I share with The Thing more than anything else.”
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