“I can count on one hand”: the only actors John Carpenter knows he can depend on
You can rely on horror maestro John Carpenter for a no-bullshit take.
There’s a curmudgeonly rejection of Hollywood’s pretensions that has elevated Carpenter to something of a national treasure in the eyes of his fans. No care for glittering awards ceremonies, an aversion to phoney platitudes for the big pictures of the day, and a frank assessment of the film industry whenever he feels like obliging the press. Just a veteran who’s earned his lot, whiling away the days playing his favourite video games and jamming with his son, Cody, on the Lost Themes series.
Such an acerbic outlook is there on the screen too. Pick any one of his classic features, and you’ll be hit with Carpenter’s razor-sharp attitude radiating from every shot. From the electronic score’s austere sting, blue-collar protagonists or criminal anti-heroes navigating bleak worlds, wide shots bathed in shadows, and a penchant for cynical dialogue all firmly placing the “John Carpenter’s” auteur stamp at the front of his titles.
He’s old school. Carpenter harboured too much of a love for the classic genre filmmaker like Howard Hawks – who he remade twice with The Thing and indirectly on Assault on Precinct 13 – to want to subvert the cinematic medium the way much of his New Hollywood peers had done across the 1970s. He took the era’s independent culture and experimentation, but had little time for upending the film heritage he loved too much.
From this love of cinema’s early magic comes a Sam Peckinpah The Wild Bunch approach to the talent that falls under his wing, a solidarity with the crew and cast that have stuck it out in the trenches with him out on location or surrounded by buckets of fake blood and some prosthetic creature of the dark. There’s a handful in this inner circle, however, that Carpenter rates as the most reliable actors he’s ever worked with.
“Right after Body Bags, I got involved with In the Mouth of Madness,” Carpenter reflected to Robert J Emery on his The Directors series. “And luckily for me, Sam Neill, one of my favourite actors, was going to be in it. He’s a consummate professional and just an absolutely brilliant actor.”
Neill came from respectable horror stock, starring as the antichrist Damien in Omen III: The Final Conflict and featuring in the bizarre Berlin psychosexual chiller Possession in 1981 alone. Later, he’d play a supporting role in Carpenter’s Chevy Chase misfire, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, but yield a truly memorable turn in 1995’s aforementioned Lovecraftian romp, Neill firing on all cylinders in his writer going mad high theatrics.
“I can count on one hand the actors I can depend on,” Carpenter concluded. “Jeff Bridges, Kurt Russell, and Sam Neill are in that category.”
Russell will provide no surprises, boasting the definitive roles in the Carpenter canon with The Thing and Escape from New York, among other collaborations, but Bridges may seem out of left field. While after his heyday, Carpenter managed to eke an interesting sci-fi romance into his filmography, casting Bridges as an alien inhabiting the body of Karen Allen’s dead husband in 1984’s Starman. Such a lighter affair never pointed a new path for Carpenter, receiving a warm critical attention but miserly box office returns, but the experience managed to add a member to Carpenter’s core team of acting greats he’d namecheck years later.
