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The Dark Visions of
JOHN CARPENTER
Director John Carpenter (left) and discussion moderator David Schwartz. (Photo: Elisa Haber)
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John Carpenter was confronted by an insatiable cult audience at the Directors Guild of America Theater in New York on August 9 for the Moving Images at the DGA screening and discussion of John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars. David Schwartz, Chief Curator of Film at the American Museum of the Moving Image (AMMI), moderated the discussion. AMMI and DGA co-sponsored the event. When the veteran sci-fi and horror director announced that Ghosts of Mars was never audience test screened, the audience cheered. Whatever the outcome, he says, "At least it's mine."
Carpenter, who studied filmmaking at USC the late 1960s, represents the innovative auteur director of post-1967 Hollywood. While he was still at USC, his short film, The Resurrection of Bronco Billy, won an Oscar. Yet, Carpenter acknowledges his debt to such directors as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks who shaped the classic Hollywood cinema. Hawks especially was his role model, and Ghosts of Mars, like his breakthrough film Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), is based on Rio Bravo (1959), directed by Hawks. One viewer noted similarities to The Thing, to which Carpenter said, "You got it." Carpenter remade The Thing himself in 1982, based on the Hawks-produced film of 1951.
Of Ford, Hitchcock and Hawks, he said, "They each had different specialties, they each had different signatures. Ford and Hitchcock would always wear their techniques on their sleeves, especially Alfred Hitchcock: he was technique. Howard Hawks was invisible. He made movies in every genre. They appeared to be without style, but that's the subtlest style of all."
That enigmatic quality fascinated Carpenter and his analysis of the creative sources of Hawks became his own personal quest. Schwartz asked Carpenter about what he discovered about Hawks and how he applied it to himself. Hawks, Carpenter explained, developed his filmmaking craft from his beginnings in the silent-film era and through the Golden Age of the Hollywood studio system. Hawks' personality was expressed "through gestures and characters and movement," says Carpenter. "He dealt with specific themes in his films, and that's what his interest was. He would interpret every story in a very specific way as he saw it." A Hawks' theme usually involved male bonding, the combative interplay between resolute men and independent strong women, and grace under pressure in dire situations.
Natasha Henstridge in Ghosts of Mars
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Carpenter himself follows these principles in Ghosts of Mars. The protagonists are a blonde white woman cop and a black man on Mars who must bond together to save themselves. Indeed, the movie is replete with an assortment of mature and young women who are brainy and independent. Schwartz noted that Natasha Henstridge is in the Hawksian mold. She is sexy, but Carpenter downplays the sexiness in favor of her toughness. "That comes from the actress because Natasha is my kind of actress. She reminds me a great deal of Kurt Russell in that they have the same approach to acting."
Carpenter and Ice Cube were simpatico. "Ice Cube had very specific ideas about his character and I liked his ideas." Carpenter admits he is flexible with actors, "as long as they don't change the narrative."
Regarding the script, a viewer praised Carpenter for departing from his usual narrative method and relating the action in flashback, as testimony by Lt. Melanie Ballard before her superiors. Carpenter developed the narrative while he was making the film. He and Larry Sulkis wrote the original script in a linear fashion, but Carpenter realized that though it was a genre movie, "there was a lot of cliché baggage" that he wanted to scuttle. He could elision sequences by voice-over narration and flashbacks.
Schwartz felt that the action-filled film has a clear script with well-defined characters, unusual in today's Hollywood. "This is a pure genre film," Carpenter said. "Even though Hollywood movies have stolen a lot of genre tricks, mainstream Hollywood is using all the horror techniques that my pals and I worked on in the 1960s and 1970s. But they're all pumped up. This film is not quite that high an octane."
Ice Cube in Ghosts of Mars
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The science fiction movie utilized a massive set, which was constructed outside of Albuquerque, N.M., at a Pueblo Indian-owned gypsum mine. The Western setting as a stand-in location for Mars is an interesting choice because Carpenter has always wanted to make a Western, but admits he probably won't.
In a nutshell, Ghosts of Mars is about Earthlings living on Mars in 2176 a.d. The roughly 640,000 people appear to be killing each other and becoming cannibalistic. Their bodies are being taking over in Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style by a strange force. "There is an ancient civilization on Mars that existed perhaps before we did here. They developed a technology of their own that was the supernatural and magic. They left something behind of themselves," he explained.
When the Earthlings arrive, and a woman scientist by accident unleashes, like Pandora, the ancient spirits, havoc results. As Carpenter states, the primeval spirits proclaim: "You shall not order. We shall order, even by proxy." No one ever accused Carpenter of making comfortable films. As he told the audience, "I can be dark. Real dark."
Schwartz queried the director about his theme of Earth as a corporate concern, devoid of concerns about the environment, and exploiting outer space. Carpenter replied, "If you think of Ghosts of Mars as a Western, you could see it as a frontier in America being taken over by the Europeans and supposedly the Native Americans leaving a little curse behind."
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