The one movie John Carpenter always dreamed of remaking: “Maybe with Kurt Russell”
Throughout the 1970s New Hollywood era, director John Carpenter always wore his love of the old genre films on his sleeve.
While certainly soaking up the decade’s pessimism and mistrust of authority, Carpenter never sought to subvert cinema in quite the same way as his peers. He loved the old masters too much. Harbouring a deep veneration for film’s yesteryear, the legacy of auteurs like Howard Hawks, who were able to jump between Westerns, musicals, dramas, crime thrillers, and comedies while excelling at each, provided the young Carpenter with the key pointer as to how to approach his craft.
A peruse of his filmography reveals a firm commitment to the genre he takes his hand at. Aside from Dark Star’s hippies-in-space college movie, the horror, sci-fi, and action Carpenter pursued across his near 40-year output stand as textbook entries of their chosen stylings, from The Thing’s exemplary body-horror to the EC Comics ghost story that surrounds The Fog.
He was no stranger to remakes. Always adding the “John Carpenter’s…” prefix to his title to mark his auteur stamp, Carpenter nonetheless raided the Hollywood vault to reimagine the pictures of his childhood via his distinctive filmmaking lens.
The aforementioned Antarctic alien chiller was a remake of Hawks’ The Thing from Another World, and 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13 was pretty much an exploitation update of, once again, Hawks’ siege Western Rio Bravo from nearly 20 years earlier.
Naturally, we know where Carpenter’s likely to head when musing on other potential remakes he wanted to try his hand at. Speaking to film critic Anne Billson in June 1996, ahead of Snake Plissken sequel Escape from LA’s theatrical release, the director immediately pivoted to the Hawks filmography when considering the one picture in cinema history he was eager to grapple with, being 1939’s Only Angels Have Wings.
A Columbia Pictures romantic adventure film depicting an air freight company manager’s risky efforts to win a major contract across South America, there are few surprises as to who Carpenter mused in the lead role, “Maybe with Kurt Russell.”
It’s one of the most winning actor-director relationships in cinema. Standing tall as the lead in The Thing and Plissken’s first and wholly superior Escape from New York across the early 1980s, the two had already worked together on ABC’s admirable Elvis TV movie, and later would team up on the flawed but fun Big Trouble in Little China martial arts comedy. While not making his casting explicitly clear, we can assume Carpenter had Carey Grant’s leading role of Geoff Carter in mind for Russell.
Carpenter then posits In the Mouth of Madness star Sam Neil as the thorny co-pilot Bat MacPherson, and Starman’s Jeff Bridges to fill the role as the aviator veteran ‘Kid’ Dabb. There’s still time. Just. Everyone’s still alive and mostly working except Carpenter, who seems more committed to playing video games and releasing his Lost Themes records than he is to ever sitting in the director’s chair for one last filmmaking hurrah.
