The western director who influenced John Carpenter most: “I fell in love with his work”
Even though John Carpenter has never directed a straightforward western during a lengthy and illustrious career full of classics covering multiple genres, he still drew plenty of influences and inspirations that would go on to inform his own filmography.
Whether it’s the siege mentality of Assault on Precinct 13, the square-jawed heroes dripping in charisma that headlined Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live, or the dust-covered backdrop of supernatural actioner Vampires, there’s always been shades of the western peppered throughout Carpenter’s back catalogue.
However, one name above all made an impression on the director when he was coming up in the industry, and it wasn’t John Ford. Instead, Carpenter named Howard Hawks as somebody he didn’t just study and meet in person but as somebody who constructed their movies in a fashion that appealed directly to his own burgeoning sensibilities.
It’s fitting that the person who helmed The Thing from Another World – which was loosely remade by Carpenter himself in The Thing – proved to be such an influential figure in the aspiring filmmaker’s professional life, as he explained to Mick Garris on Post-Mortem: “Well, I studied him in film school, and got to see him in person. He came down to talk at the school. I fell in love with his work because he’s so versatile. He did adventures and The Thing from Another World, he did cowboy movies, comedies. I mean, he did all sorts of things. I studied the plumbing: how Hawks made movies, how he staged scenes. I was a fan of that. But other than that I loved the strong women he had. I’ve always been attracted to that.”
During an interview with MTV, Carpenter described Hawks as “a visionary filmmaker who lasted from the silents to 1970. When I was in film school, the big director everyone talked about was John Ford. But I always thought Ford, who was Irish, was more of an immigrant director. Many of his themes were very European, as were his views of women, the family, and motherhood.”
On the other side of the coin, compared to Ford, Carpenter opined that “Hawks was a modern director. His women were strong and modern and put up with no bullshit. I really responded to that because it felt real and American.” In fact, when naming his five favourite movies of all time to Rotten Tomatoes, he even found a workaround to include two features by Hawks.
Elaborating on why he couldn’t separate the director’s romantic adventure Only Angels Have Wings from John Wayne’s Rio Bravo, Carpenter offered that both films “are his visions of adventure stories with male groups, and men and women’s relationships, and life and death and danger,” but not before admitting that “when I was learning about what the director is and does, probably a lot of them were Howard Hawks movies.”
Rio Bravo may have come out on top, but the entirety of Hawks’ oeuvre evidently played a huge part in Carpenter honing his signature style.
