John Carpenter | Interview

It’s pretty common for filmmakers phoning Chicago to ask how the weather is, but when John Carpenter calls from L.A., he’s got something special in mind. At ten, Carpenter saw Vertigo here (he no longer recalls at which theater), and he also remembers taking a cold walk along the lake. It was his first viewing of the film. “My reaction was, I’ve just watched someone’s nightmare,” he says. “It’s unbelievable, what a movie.”

Hitchcock is, of course, one of the 63-year-old director’s idols. (Part of the reason he puts his name above the title is in homage to the master.) And like Hitchcock, he’s worked long enough in the industry to watch it change in fundamental ways. John Carpenter’s the Ward, the director’s first feature since 2001’s Ghosts of Mars, went MIA after last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. After being acquired by a small distributor, the film isn’t even opening in Chicago, but in the suburbs. It’s also gradually expanding on video on demand.

Carpenter feels it’s simply harder to compete for viewers’ attention than it used to be. “The audience knows a lot about how movies are made,” he says. “There’s a democratization of filmmaking. People go out and make their own little movies—you see a movie like Paranormal Activity or Blair Witch, a real small-budget film that makes a lot of money. Everybody knows how special effects are done. Everybody knows everything. So it’s really hard to reach an audience.”

And The Ward, by Carpenter’s own admission, is “an old-school horror movie,” a thriller about a young woman (Amber Heard) trapped in a mental institution with a killer ghost. It’s not that Carpenter doesn’t like the Blair Witches of this world—“I never thought I’d see a movie that no one directed,” he says of that film, “It’s a landmark film in that sense”—or even blockbusters. He professes, in a bit of a surprise, to be a “big fan” of the Harry Potter series. (“I love some of the darker stuff.”) But he does feel that modern films have forgotten how to ease into a story.

In the years since They Live (1988), Carpenter seemed unable to recapture the acclaim or success of his ’70s and early-’80s classics, but the long absence came about more through garden-variety burnout than any sort of creative frustration. “I remember on Ghosts of Mars they had some behind-the-scenes footage,” he says. “I remember looking at myself. I was completing the music. And I thought, ‘Who is that zombie? Look at my eyes. Look how tired I am.’ ”

Still, his star, who cites Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween as an inspiration, was keen to work with a legend. “I’m honored to come out of his sabbatical with him,” Heard told me at Toronto, which, incredibly, Carpenter had to skip because of jury duty. “He has a history of making his leading ladies [three-dimensional].”

Carpenter is now enough of a brand to see his own classics remade. A reboot of his own reworking of The Thing comes out this fall. “I don’t see all of them,” Carpenter admits. “The ones that I am happiest about are the ones that I had a hand in creating either the story or the characters, because that means in order to remake it they have to pay me,” he says, joking a little.

“Truly, one of my dreams as a person is to be able to find a way to get paid to do nothing. I always thought that was maybe the height of human existence.”

John Carpenter’s the Ward opens Friday 8 at AMC South Barrington 30.