The one cinematic wish John Carpenter always wanted: “I would have been happiest there”
He may have ended up becoming one of the most iconic, inspirational, and influential figures in fantastical cinema, but it wasn’t sci-fi or horror that John Carpenter grew up watching when he dreamed of making movies for a living.
Like countless other avid cinephiles of his era, Carpenter was raised on a steady diet of westerns, with his love of John Wayne manifesting on-screen in more ways than one. Several of his heroes carried notable shades of ‘The Duke’, and he took things several steps further when Assault on Precinct 13 stealthily remade Rio Bravo.
The 1959 classic was directed by Howard Hawks, who has always been one of Carpenter’s favourite filmmakers, even if their approaches were completely different. He may have been inspired by the ‘Golden Age’, but the director leaned heavily into his more outlandish sensibilities when he was crafting a string of smash hits, cult classics, and underappreciated gems.
Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live don’t exactly have an awful lot in common with the 1940s and 1950s flicks that enraptured Carpenter so much when he was a budding cinephile, but if he had any wish in the world to be granted, it would be the ability to get sent back to that exact time period to see if he could cut it alongside his heroes.
“If I had three wishes, one of them would be, ‘Send me back to the 40s and the studio system and let me direct movies’, because I would have been happiest there,” he admitted to the British Film Institute. “I feel I am a little bit out of time. I have much more of a kinship for older style films, and very few films that are made now interest me at all. I get up and walk out on them. And in that sense I have a tough battle.”
With some of his best work focusing on silent serial killers, extra-terrestrial creatures, martial arts mysticism, murderous automobiles, alien invaders mounting a hostile takeover of Earth, nefarious weather, and dystopian societies, Carpenter’s signature style would hardly thrive during the ‘Golden Age’.
He always viewed himself as a classicist, though, and there’s no doubt he would have been able to adapt himself to fit the times if his wish were granted. He’s a man of many genres, so if he wanted to make a showstopping musical, tense noir, or star-crossed romance as was all the rage at the time, then there’s no reason why he couldn’t or wouldn’t succeed.
Carpenter never got around to any of those aforementioned offshoots, but based on his ultimate wish, it can be put down to his unfortunate status as a man out of time.
