The “worrisome” movie scenes John Carpenter can’t stand shooting: “I hate it”
Every director has their likes, dislikes, and pet peeves that they try to avoid whenever they’re on set, but thanks to the content of his movies, John Carpenter had to do something he absolutely couldn’t stand.
It’s not as if he’s averse to blood, guts, and violence; otherwise, he wouldn’t have become one of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy’s leading filmmaking lights. Carpenter has killed a lot of people onscreen, many of them in gruesome fashion, but to him, that’s just like water off a duck’s back.
When you’ve got Halloween and The Thing in your back catalogue, that’s no surprise. He’s got no issues with action sequences, either, having dipped his toes into those waters in Escape from New York, They Live, and Big Trouble in Little China, to name three, and he also directed Jeff Bridges to an Academy Award nomination for Starman, so he’s no slouch at drama.
Still, he’s got his limits. One limit, to be precise, which admittedly did nothing to stop him from doing the very thing he hates doing. More than once, too, but the retiree had to grit his teeth and persevere because it was in the script, it served the story, and he didn’t have any other choice but to go through with it.
He’s one of cinema’s modern masters of the macabre, an expert on making things go bump in the night, and he deployed some of the most impressive and unsettling practical effects that genre filmmaking has ever seen, so what is it that keeps Carpenter up at night? As it turns out, the thought of setting a stuntman on fire.
“We set people on fire in Ghosts of Mars, we set people on fire in The Thing,” he reflected. “It’s worrisome to me. I hate it. I hate that kind of pressure. Some directors don’t care, but on my watch, if someone got hurt? I don’t want that. It’s supposed to all be fake. We’re creating illusions, not really hurting people.”
Despite his aversion to setting people on fire, setting people on fire was a recurring plot point in Ghosts of Mars, as it was one of the only ways to successfully and permanently stop those who’d been possessed by the ancient Martian spirits that slowly pick off the ensemble cast over the course of the picture.
Despite his aversion to setting people on fire, setting people on fire was also an important plot point in The Thing, with a flamethrower basically becoming a supporting character in its own right. Carpenter could have had it changed if he wanted to; he was the director, after all, which would have saved him from the existential hassle.
Then again, how do you make The Thing without setting humans, aliens, alien-human, and alien-dog hybrids alight? You can’t, really, but the director was absolutely shitting himself the entire time.
