With the release of “Halloween Ends” earlier this month has come another round of appreciation of master genre filmmaker John Carpenter.
Carpenter, who created and directed the original “Halloween,” has famously not really been involved in any of the recent remakes or continuations of his work aside from David Gordon Green’s trilogy which he has contributed the music for.
In a new interview with Vulture, he was asked to reflect on his thoughts on the “Halloween” franchise’s legacy, and he offered an answer that feels very much in line with Carpenter:
“I don’t care. I really don’t care. The ‘Halloween’ movie I love the most is the one I made back in 1978, the one I directed. Others are other people’s visions. That’s the way it goes. That’s what happens when you give up. I didn’t want to direct sequels. I didn’t think there was a story left. Boy, was I wrong, huh?”
Carpenter says he does appreciate the money he receives when people remake his films, but he only gets a cheque depending on one condition:
“There are two kinds of remakes for me. One is where I’m the originator of the material. I wrote the screenplay. Two: It was an assignment from the studio. ‘We want you to do this.’ If it’s an assignment from the studio, they don’t pay me when they do a remake. They own the material. If I’ve generated the screenplay, they have to pay me. That’s the kind of sequel I like. My movie exists. Make your own. You want to pay me a bunch of bucks, fine. Have a great time.”
Thus films like the “Halloween” revival and the remakes of “Assault on Precinct 13” and “The Fog” he scored paydays on as he wrote the originals, same goes for any potential “Escape from New York,” “They Live” or “Prince of Darkness” remake.
However, he didn’t write “The Thing,” “Starman,” “Christine,” “In the Mouth of Madness,” “Village of the Damned” or “Big Trouble in Little China,” so any remakes there he won’t cash in.
He also doesn’t hold his work on a pedestal, saying he has little interest in going back and rewatching his own work:
“I don’t want to see it. When I watch my old movies, I see the mistakes and the things I didn’t do, and I start looking like, ‘What am I doing? That’s stupid. Why didn’t I do this?’ That’s painful. I don’t want to do that, so I don’t watch.”
Carpenter has been big into composing lately – working on the score for the Foo Fighters film “Studio 666” and the Zac Efron-led recent adaptation of Stephen King’s “Firestarter”.
