The only actor who intimidated John Carpenter: “He’s been in some of my favourite movies”
It’s hard to imagine John Carpenter, of all people, being intimidated by anyone, let alone an actor. After all, Carpenter is a notoriously no-bullshit guy with few airs or graces when it comes to plying one’s trade in Hollywood. In fact, most of the iconic Halloween director’s stories about working in the business feature him complaining about idiot studio heads or stars he didn’t see eye to eye with. However, Carpenter has admitted to feeling nervous while working with a star he’d been watching on-screen since childhood – and it threw him through a loop.
Carpenter grew up in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and developed a fascination with movies from an early age. His first loves were the westerns made by John Ford and Howard Hawks, but he also gravitated to sci-fi/horror flicks like The Thing From Another World, Forbidden Planet, and Godzilla. As he grew up, though, Carpenter began to notice a uniquely gap-toothed face popping up in many of his favourite films: Ernest Borgnine, a former Navy man and World War II veteran who won the ‘Best Actor’ Academy Award for 1955’s Marty.
Over the years, Borgnine lent his gruff, everyman talents to westerns like The Wild Bunch and Bad Day at Black Rock, disaster flicks like The Poseidon Adventure, war movies like From Here to Eternity and The Dirty Dozen, and espionage thrillers like Ice Station Zebra. All of these films were very much in Carpenter’s wheelhouse, which is probably why he seized the opportunity to cast Borgnine in his 1981 sci-fi action classic Escape From New York. However, he soon found that watching someone you admire on screen and working with them in real life are two very different prospects.
“I was scared of actors,” Carpenter confessed to DVD Talk in 2010. “That was my big problem. I just didn’t know how they operated or what they thought about. They were really intimidating. Once I got to know their process and figure out what they do, I came to really love them.”
The height of Carpenter’s intimidation in these early years was when he tried to direct Borgnine, especially during one of the film’s big set-pieces. “At the beginning, I had no idea about actors,” he lamented. “I remember a moment on Escape from New York, where they had the scene on bridge, I’d just tense up with Ernest Borgnine. I just thought, ‘My God, he’s been in some of my favourite movies.'”
At that point, Carpenter had directed four feature films and two television movies, but he still found himself getting in his own head when trying to direct someone with whom he had a personal connection by way of his films. If anything, it sounds like ‘John Carpenter, the fan’ kept winning out over ‘John Carpenter, the professional’, and it made for some uncomfortable moments and growing pains as a working director.
Carpenter theorised that, in those early years, he may have been too preoccupied with learning how to achieve his vision on-screen in terms of the visuals, special effects, and action scenes – or, as he put it, “the plotting of making films.” He admitted, “I wasn’t quite so worried about the acting part. I should have been more worried about it.” However, over the years, he got over this hurdle and became more comfortable around actors – although its unclear if Borgnine’s intimidation factor ever truly died down.
