John Carpenter directs Ice Cube in GHOSTS OF MARS
© 2001 Screen Gems

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Ghost World: The John Carpenter Interview Part 1

"Retirement" is a common threat director John Carpenter issues at the end of his films, but the man who made a name for himself with the independent chiller HALLOWEEN and garnered Jeff Bridges an Academy Award nomination for his performance in STARMAN says that thoughts of "retirement" are all par for the course.

"Life is complicated," he admits. "Yeah, I would love to stop and retire, but I guess there is some primal love for movies that keeps me coming back. I can't explain it. It's something I think about. It's just all of a sudden there is a new opportunity and I'm like, 'Uh, I'll try it again.'"

At 53, Carpenter has a rich oeuvre of work ranging from straight out sci-fi (DARK STAR), to action-adventure (ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13), to true-life drama (the made for TV ELVIS with Kurt Russell) to, of course, horror (THE THING, THE FOG, VAMPIRES, CHRISTINE). Still, he admits that most of his work is not really horror, but rather thinly veiled westerns -- something that is very apparent when you start dissecting the films down to their essentials. There's usually a lone gunslinger, a sense of general isolation and, of course, a showdown between the good, the bad and the ugly before it's all over.

His current film, the $33 million dollar GHOSTS OF MARS, certainly doesn't veer from that tried and true formula. An old-fashioned horror film that wears its exploitation roots on its sleeve, Carpenter has delivered a film that fits perfectly into the urban cycle he started with ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 and continued through the ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and L.A. films.

The Martian Police Force - armed and ready for action

© 2001 Screen Gems

Set on the angry Red Planet of a near future that depicts Mars as colonized, a group of interstellar police officers (headed by Natasha Henstridge) set down on a remote outpost to apprehend escaped criminal James "Desolation" Williams (Ice Cube). What they find instead is a barren and empty place with no trace of the previous humans who had been working and living there. Of course, the spirits of Mars have taken possession of those inhabitants and plan on taking out the new intruders.

Carpenter recently sat down with CINESCAPE to discuss MARS, as well as his illustrious career in general one that has witnessed many of his older films become modern day classics and, in some cases, proved that the eclectic director has always been one step ahead of his peers.

CINESCAPE: Did you think of GHOSTS OF MARS as a western?

JOHN CARPENTER: It's kind of a RIO BRAVO type... again.

CINESCAPE: What attracted you to setting the film on Mars?

CARPENTER: The color of the planet being red. It's very stylized and the pictures that we've seen of Mars make it look pink. Well, I couldn't do a pink horror movie, so we made it a real red, orange-like look and set it at night. The color is pleasing to your eye. It works out all right.

CINESCAPE: Weren't you scared after MISSION TO MARS and RED PLANET flopped?

CARPENTER: I am not scared of anything, man.

Natasha Henstridge plays Melanie Ballard, the kick-ass red planet cop in pursuit of James "Desolation" Williams

© 2001 Screen Gems

CINESCAPE: You always have strong female characters how do you think the female characters in GHOSTS OF MARS are different from the one's you've written in the past?

CARPENTER: A lot of movies have a lot of female action heroes and they fight, but they always have to prove that they are equals to men. In this one, they don't have to prove anything. There just are. You just accept it from the start. And it came out of me thinking about what Earth would be like supposing for whatever reason we were overpopulated and we had destroyed the environment. Well, perhaps the matriarchy would control reproduction the instinct to work together as opposed to working together for self-interest.

CINESCAPE: Where did the idea originate?

CARPENTER: It started back at Miramax. Bob Weinstein asked me, "Why don't you do a Mars movie kind of deal?" But he didn't say, "Mars movie;" he said, "Why don't you do an movie in outer space with the supernatural?" I wrote a treatment and he said, "I don't like this; it's like your old films and like your other movies." So I said, "All right." We raised some money in France and I needed a screenplay, so I called Larry [Sulkis] and said, "Look, let's dash something out." So I had a little treatment. That's kind of how it got started.

CINESCAPE: How do you divide the work between two writers?

Behind the scenes with John Carpenter's GHOSTS OF MARS

© 2001 Screen Gems

CARPENTER: If I can make him write the first draft, it's my favorite thing to do. That's the hardest part; that's the dog work. We had to go back and restructure the film because it was written linear at first. It's like this is way too familiar, so we scramble everything up in the screenplay and made that come later so that you are not traveling on this familiar territory.

CINESCAPE: Did you shoot it that way?

CARPENTER: No, this was already in the screenplay. It wasn't easy, but you think to yourself, "What does the audience need to see first, second, third, fourth? When is the right time to explain this?" It's about narrative in that time. Then you start thinking about the narrative. I believe audiences nowadays are very cynical and sophisticated so you need to trick them sometimes.

CINESCAPE: So how did the form of the screenplay change? Were there things cut out of the movie?

CARPENTER: I read the script for our first draft and it was like the tour of my living room. I knew what's going to happen. It started at the beginning, releasing the ghosts and we ended, so I realized it was not going to work. It's too familiar to us. It's a fine little ghost tale, but I thought, "Let's mess around with it." Larry and I began to extract things and move things around.

CINESCAPE: Did you trim anything from the finished cut of the movie?

CARPENTER: What you see is what we shot.

CINESCAPE: So nothing major was deleted?

CARPENTER: No big scenes were taken out, but what you see is the result of the movie being compressed. Movies play better faster nowadays. So you cut your movie together and it lasts 100 minutes or so, and then you try and get it down to 90. Once you get 10 minutes out of it, you would be surprised at how fast it will go. That's what I am always trying to do to get it to go as fast as it possibly can just so it plays.

• Stay tuned tomorrow for Part 2 of Cinescape's exclusive John Carpenter interview