The movie that convinced John Carpenter he was better off retired: “I can’t do this anymore”
John Carpenter was once among the most prolific directors in Hollywood, particularly during the 1980s, a period in which he churned out eight films, including genre-defining classics like The Thing, Escape From New York, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live. The ’90s saw him add five more movies to his oeuvre, but by 2001, his output came to a screeching halt. The culprit? The gruelling production of one specific film ultimately led Carpenter to decide he was better off stepping away from the director’s chair.
In 1998, Carpenter capped off a mediocre decade with his biggest hit in a long time. Vampires, which starred James Woods, was a neo-western horror action bonanza that made $20million in the US but was much more successful in other world markets. It also pulled in a healthy $42m in home video sales, making it the only one of Carpenter’s movies of that decade to turn a profit.
In the wake of this success, Carpenter secured a $28m budget for Ghosts of Mars, a sci-fi horror action movie in which a team of police officers and one rogue criminal fight a colony of possessed miners on the titular red planet. Carpenter assembled a cast including Jason Statham, Ice Cube, Pam Grier, and Natasha Henstridge and set out to make a knowingly camp, tongue-in-cheek space western.
Unfortunately for Carpenter, the budget might have been bigger than some of his previous ones, but it still wasn’t enough to achieve what Ghosts of Mars demanded. Even Ice Cube later said, “I don’t like that movie. I’m a big fan of John Carpenter, and the only reason I did it was because John Carpenter directed it, but they really didn’t have the money to pull the special effects off.”
Constantly battling against the rigours of making an explosive action movie on a tight budget must have made Carpenter feel like he was fighting the same uphill battle he’d faced throughout his Hollywood career. At this point, he was nearly 30 years into his career yet still experiencing the same problems he’d had on every production.
In 2022, he admitted to The New Yorker, “On Ghosts of Mars, I was exhausted. That was the big thing. I remember seeing a behind-the-scenes [documentary], and it showed me on set working, sitting in the scoring session. God, I’d aged. Tired and ancient.”
Carpenter realised that the culmination of a career of stress and exhaustion while making movies had caught up to him. He confessed: “I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ It was too rough. For me, it became not worth it. And I didn’t want to say that about movies. Movies are my first love, my life.” So, rather than stay in the trenches and risk losing any more of that love for cinema that he valued so much, Carpenter decided to call it a day for a while.
When the film was predictably lambasted by critics who didn’t seem to understand that it was supposed to be schlocky, B-movie fun, it only strengthened Carpenter’s resolve to stay away. He once grumbled, “I have no power over what critics say, but when people complained about the movie being campy and not scary…the name of the movie is Ghosts Of Mars, I figured the campiness would be self-explanatory.”
When Carpenter was eventually tempted from his semi-retirement to make The Ward in 2010, he gave Crave Online more insight into how he felt after Ghosts of Mars. He explained, “I was burned out, man. I was whipped. I had fallen out of love with cinematic storytelling. I didn’t want to make any movies. I had been doing it for so many years in a row.”
In truth, the decades of directing would have been tiring enough, but Carpenter regularly wrote and scored his own movies, too, so he was doing the jobs of three people on each film. He admitted, “It just caught up with me. I realised I hadn’t backed off from it, so I had to stop for a bit.”
Removing himself from that relentless Hollywood grind was ultimately good for Carpenter, who hasn’t directed since The Ward. These days, he focuses more on music but also spends most of his days watching basketball and playing video games.
In 2023, though, he told Variety that he’d be open to directing again, but with a few provisos: a reasonable budget, a generous shooting schedule, and producers who “allow for the basketball season and the playoffs”.
