The only movie that inspired John Carpenter to direct: “I think that’s probably true”
It’s always felt a little strange that the genre that made John Carpenter fall in love with cinema in the first place was one that he never tackled conventionally, even if he did pretty well for himself without taking the time to scratch that itch.
He grew up on a steady diet of westerns, with John Ford and John Wayne inevitably becoming early heroes, although it was only ‘The Duke’ who was involved with his all-time favourite movie. Carpenter was obsessed with Rio Bravo from the first time he saw it, and it wasn’t something he tried to shy away from.
Assault on Precinct 13 is basically a remake of Howard Hawks’ 1959 classic, and he edited the hard-boiled action thriller under the pseudonym of John T Chance, which was the name of Wayne’s character. He was also a major Clint Eastwood aficionado but somehow never directed a western of his own.
Of course, there are elements of the genre all over his filmography, and it goes well beyond Assault on Precinct 13. Escape from New York, and its sequel Escape from LA embrace many of the tropes, with Kurt Russell’s iconic Snake Plissken an Eastwood surrogate so blatant and obvious that Carpenter admitted he dreamed of having the iconic star play the role.
1998’s Vampires was as close as he came, but even then, the title gives away the fact that it’s not exactly a straightforward oater. The western is Carpenter’s favourite genre, Wayne and Eastwood rank among his most cherished actors, Ford and Hawks are the filmmakers he wanted to emulate, and his favourite film is a western. Naturally, then, it was a sci-fi flick that convinced him to become a director.
The director who’d go on to master horror through Halloween, The Fog, Christine, and The Thing was only eight years old when Fred M Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet hit theatres in March 1956, and even though the picture only runs for under 100 minutes including credits, that was all the time needed to let Carpenter know his career path had already been decided.
That said, it all circled back to the western in a roundabout way. When The New Yorker asked Carpenter if it was his genre of choice that instilled his ongoing desire to shoot in widescreen, he was in agreement: “I think that’s probably true,” he said. “Not sure where all that develops.”
On the other hand, only one feature made up his mind about what he wanted to do with himself. “I know the movie that influenced me to become a director was Forbidden Planet, and that was a CinemaScope film,” he continued. “It was a widescreen space opera.”
A groundbreaker in its own right after becoming the first film to show humans travelling across space faster than the speed of light, the first to be set in a solar system other than our own, the first to give a robotic sidekick a personality that treated them as a supporting character, and the first to use a completely electronic score. Beyond that, it also set Carpenter on the path towards iconic status.
