Watch This: John Carpenter talks Directorial Style, Hawks, Ford & Horror Films
“Style is all about instinct. It’s all about how a director sees things. If you watch any of the directors that you admire… you can see what their concerns are and how they approach things, how they approach the characters, how they approach the world they’re in. So it’s an instinctual type thing. A director makes movies about himself. All the time. In some way or another. It’s finding a way to express in visual terms the instincts that you have, the feelings that you have inside.”
Here’s a nice interview with a writer/director whose films are synonymous with this time of year. John Carpenter went to USC film school in 1968, where he wrote and edited an Oscar winning short film. Another student film was enlarged and released as the sci-fi parody DARK STAR (1974), and he was off to the races. His next film, the urban action film ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976), combined elements of westerns and horror films in some startlingly effective ways. The runaway success of his third feature, HALLOWEEN (1978) set the (insistent, pulsing) tone for the rest of his career, and for the next ten years of horror films.
In the interview below (just follow along to part 2, etc.) Carpenter shares his philosophy of filmmaking as well as a little bit about his beginnings and early influences.
