Hang out on Film Twitter long enough and you'll eventually stumble across someone posing this chin-scratcher: ‘Which director is responsible for the longest, unbroken run of classic movies?’ There are cases to be made for plenty of filmmakers: Coppola, Kurosawa, Nolan, Villeneuve; but few hold a pumpkin-encased candle to John Carpenter. Between 1976's Assault On Precinct 13 and 1988's They Live, Carpenter made 12 films, most of which are considered alltimers today, even if they were rarely recognised as such by contemporary audiences and critics.
Carpenter was prolific, and then some. A multi, multi, multi-hyphenate, he habitually directed, wrote, produced and composed the music for his features. He was 28 years old when he penned the screenplay for Precinct 13 in eight days, and just 30 when he changed horror forever with Halloween. He was a wunderkind to make Damien Chazelle look like a late starter. Today he'd be inundated with rich contracts to helm blockbuster franchise fare, or treated with the auteur reverence of a Tarantino. In 1982, after The Thing bombed, he was dumped as the director of Firestarter.
If Carpenter wasn't sufficiently celebrated in his heyday, there's no danger of that anymore. During an hour-long chat in freely throws around words like ‘masterpiece’ and ‘magnum opus’ – praise he accepts graciously, but not all that comfortably. Following a string of flops in the ‘90s, Carpenter fell out of love with movie making. His relationship to his work is complicated to say the least. “You know, I'm not the biggest fan of talking about [],” Carpenter says over the phone from his home in LA. “But let's do it.”
