“My three rules for living”: why John Carpenter refused to shoot a movie in Mexico
Often, as people get a fair bit older, they’ll get quite grumpy and complain about basic things, usually because they don’t care what anybody thinks anymore, and they can probably get away with it. The great thing about John Carpenter is that he has always been like that, and now that he’s older, it’s just magnified.
Luckily, being something of a genius, as Carpenter undoubtedly is, he can back up his curmudgeonly ways with work of the utmost quality; not many directors have made movies as good as the original Halloween with Jamie Lee Curtis, or the gloriously profound 1988 sci-fi They Live, let alone written and performed seminal scores for them too.
Carpenter was just as outspoken about other filmmakers at the start of his career as he is these days. He called Steven Spielberg pretentious and said he lost control of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dismissed Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer as just “OK”, and wasn’t happy at all with Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake, claiming it made his “butthole clench”.
But that doesn’t mean he’s not a fan of movies or directors, just as long as they’re up to his exacting standards. He appreciates the work of legendary Hong Kong director John Woo, and he likes Seven director David Fincher a lot, saying he has “a great eye”, but honestly, that’s about it; he’s a tough man to please.
Perhaps that comes down to the way he lives his life, an insight to which came when he spoke to the horror magazine Fangoria back in 2012, when he discussed the shooting of the 1990 comedy western El Diablo starring Joe Pantoliano.
Carpenter said, “I wrote that western, and came close to directing it. We were going to shoot in Mexico. Here are my three rules for living: 1. Never leave home unless absolutely necessary; 2. Never eat fish, and 3. Never go south of the border. I can’t explain why I didn’t do it, because it is a cool story with an edge, but wanting to make a western was an early dream of mine, and I didn’t want to fuck it up.”
The story of a teacher trying to track down an outlaw who has kidnapped one of his students, El Diablo was met with a very mixed response when it was released 35 years ago, and it was originally intended to be Carpenter’s follow-up film after The Fog all the way back in 1980, when he talked wanting to make a western in the vein of legendary Rio Bravo director Howard Hawks, but the pressure proved too much and it was delayed for a decade.
Carpenter was a co-writer and co-producer on the movie, and while it fared reasonably well with critics, it didn’t receive a full theatrical release, instead going straight onto HBO. He was about to enter what would be the least commercially successful period of his career, making Memoirs of an Invisible Man two years later with Daryl Hannah and Chevy Chase, which was a disaster, losing $25million at the box office.
He did recover to some extent however by heading back to his safe ground of horror, directing In the Mouth of Madness with Sam Neill, which became something of a cult classic and finished off what Carpenter called his “Apocalypse Trilogy”, also consisting of The Thing (one of the best horror films of all time) and 1987’s Prince of Darkness which reunited him with Donald Pleasance after he appeared in Halloween.
