John Carpenter names the hardest movie of his career: “That was a baptism of fire”
John Carpenter has built a legacy on taking risks. Just look at the first Halloween. When Carpenter released it in 1979, slashers weren’t really a thing. It was only thanks to the success of Michael Myers and his contemporaries that the genre is so massive today. Even his most famous films weren’t always well-received upon their arrival, and although we think about the likes of They Live, The Thing, and The Fog as classics these days, in another world, they might have been lost to history.
It hasn’t always been easy for the accomplished filmmaker and composer, and that’s something he’s been keenly aware of throughout his entire career. But which of his projects affected him the most? Which ones did he really struggle with? Well, considering some of the twisted stuff he’s put out over the years, his answer comes as a bit of a shock.
To celebrate his 75th birthday, Carpenter sat down with Variety to talk about his amazing life. When asked about some of the challenges he’s faced, Carpenter named a TV movie he directed in 1979 about Elvis Presley. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done was Elvis, a three-hour TV show,” he said. “We had 88 speaking parts and 100 and some odd locations in 30 days. Holy Toledo! I was too dumb and young to realise how tough that is. That was a baptism of fire. Hurry up, let’s shoot! It was unreal.”
The show was produced by legendary radio host and New Year’s Eve icon Dick Clark and starred Kurt Russell as the ‘King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’. Set on the night of the singer’s first live show in eight years, it portrays his rise to the top through a series of flashbacks, showcasing his professional successes and his flawed personal relationships with the likes of Colonel Tom Parker (Pat Hingle), Sam Phillips (Charles Cyphers), and his wife Priscilla (Season Hubley).
Elvis was successful enough to get a theatrical release, albeit in a trimmed-down version. It was nominated for a Golden Globe and three Emmys, but its lasting legacy is the relationships that formed off its back. Russell met his future wife Hubley on the shoot; they were married between 1979 and 1983. Perhaps more importantly, it marked the first time Russell and Carpenter worked together, directly leading to the likes of The Thing, Escape from New York, and Big Trouble in Little China.
Whilst Elvis might have given him the most grief, Carpenter also acknowledged that The Thing wasn’t plain sailing either. “Oh lordy, that was pretty hard too,” he exclaimed. “But that was my first studio film, and it was pretty great. You get a lot of stuff that you didn’t have as an independent. It was just incredible that way, and the studio was very nice to me throughout shooting.” He told the interviewer that, while trying to replicate the freezing conditions of the Arctic circle, the crew used some pretty incredible locations.
“We had a second unit that went up to the glacier field above the Mendenhall Glacier,” he said, referring to a gigantic ice structure in Alaska. “We shot for a couple of weeks up there and got some great footage, and we came back to the sound stages and worked there. Then we went to our set in British Columbia, which was built on a glacier, and built a set so we could blow it up and burn it down. And that was extremely cold and tough.”
