John Carpenter chose to write They Live under the pseudonym ‘Frank Armitage’, a character from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror. Lovecraft has always been a big inspiration for Carpenter as he states, “Lovecraft wrote about the hidden world, the world underneath. His stories were about gods who are repressed, who were once on Earth and are now coming back. The world underneath has a great deal to do with They Live.”

Behind every great man is a great woman. Sandy King Carpenter, wife of John Carpenter, has worked in different capacities on his films Ghosts of Mars, Vampires, Village of the Damned, In the Mouth of Madness, and Body Bags. She was the associate producer and script supervisor on They Live, the 1988 satirical riff on the political climate of the time that has gone on to be a fan favorite worldwide.

Jason Bene: Can you talk about the short story that They Live was inspired by, Eight O’Clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson?

Sandy King Carpenter: I think John took the basic structure from that and the basic premise. There are other elements that made it more of the time which is the basic persona of John Nada. Nada was based off of a homeless guy that I saw at the market over on Laurel Canyon one day after I took the kids to school. I watched this guy who was there with his dog and a backpack, and I watched the market manager and everybody follow this guy through the aisles. All he was doing was buying dog food. I got fascinated by who this guy might be because he didn’t look like a run of the mill criminal or homeless person, yet there was something different about him. I was fascinated because he had a big backpack outside that his dog was guarding. I was putting away my groceries and I did something totally against character for me which was I saw the guy hitchiking on the freeway on-ramp and I went and picked him and his dog up. I wound up driving him to Oxnard where he had his tools in storage that he was picking up for a construction job. He told me all about his life and he was one of the working homeless. He had come from Colorado where there was this big building bust that was going on because of the Savings and Loan collapse.

Basically, I came home and I said, “Okay, I think I got John Nada. I know who he is.” Here’s the deal, there’s all of these guys coming into California for construction work because there has been a collapse in the building industry in Colorado. This was kind of being kept out of the papers and all of this kind of stuff because at the time this was Neil Bush’s [son of George Bush Sr.] deal with the Savings and Loan in Colorado. From the beginning, we really felt that this was a poltical story. It was really a political satire couched as a sci-fi action movie. The original short story was sci-fi. There were various elements going on in our Country at the time politically, much like now, that needed to be brought in to tell a different tale. So that’s what we did.

Jason Bene: It also sounds a lot like the Reagonomics of the time where you were either rich or poor. There was no more middle class and most people were living from paycheck to paycheck and being homeless was not that far off if they lost their job.

Sandy King Carpenter: We had big arguements with the producers and with the executives at Universal. They wanted to make it in the future to make an economical collapse believable. Our point was that they had been on their cell phones and in their BMW’s too long that they weren’t looking around them. In fact, there were these homeless, and they were the working poor. The execs were living in a bubble. It was our opinion that our generation, which had come from the early 70′s and the Vietnam War era, had grown indifferent poltically. This was a story where all of our heroes could come from the disenfranchised. We just thought it was a good setting. If you make Gandhi, while it’s great movie, you are only preaching to the converted. There is an interesting challenge in speaking to an audience which would not normally hear this message. Which would not normally hear the message of the disenfranchised. Which would not normally hear a wake up call of caring for each other. I personally feel it’s a message they need to hear more now.

Jason Bene: I think They Live is probably more appropriate now after the eight years we endured under George W. Bush.

Sandy King Carpenter: The sins of the father are revisited. At the time we felt really strongly that this was a tale worth telling and it was not a coincidence that it was set in homeless encampments. There was a real ‘Justiceville’ at the time in Downtown Los Angeles. It was not like ours, but there were homeless encampments. One of the things we did do with the release of the picture was radio promoted screenings across the Country. It was one of the first times a fifty city, radio promoted screening was used as a food drive for the holiday season. We coordinated with Street Aid USA and they raised thousands of pounds of food. They did things that weren’t considered hip at the time. We had to fight for that. We thought even if it wasn’t a hip thing to do, I thought more people wanted to hear that message.

Jason Bene: What is great about the script is you never say Republican and you never say Democrat; you never lay it on thick. I can be that homeless person if I lost my job.

Sandy King Carpenter: I think all of us can be that person. All of us are one major illness away from losing our homes and being on the street. Any of those conditions. I think that a general disregard of others and the human condition is the closest thing that I can think of to being aliens. Everyone wants to think of the horror without us and I think that is secondary to the horror within us.

Jason Bene: Who came up with the idea of the sunglasses as a device to see this black and white alternate reality?

Sandy King Carpener: That John’s sense of style. I don’t know because I am not familiar with the short story. For all I know that could have been in the short story. John had the framework and the idea for the movie. I didn’t read the source material and I’d be lying if I said where that stuff came from. There’s a lot of things that perculate before he speaks. In terms of going to black and white I think that’s a stylistic choice, and he showed the other world and then decided what’s the simpliest way to do that. It contrasted to what else you have without doing a whole lot of fancy, high priced effects.

Jason Bene: The overindulgence of the 1980′s pops up when Nada sees the money that says, ”This is your God.”

Sandy King Carpenter: I remember sitting with Larry Franco and trying to think of the most offensive things that people do. Having a newspaper and pulling out the sports section and throwing the rest on the street. Smoking cigars in close places. Rolex watches for two-way communicators. Trying to figure out what are the signs of excess and what are the signs of superficialty. Just using them to a cliché. One of the reasons that the ghouls aren’t particularly scary is they’re more there for a political point as opposed to being the scariest thing you ever saw.

Jason Bene: I think They Live went over everyone’s head because at the time a lot of fans wanted another The Thing type of monster movie. I feel like most of John’s films find an audience years later.

Sandy King Carpenter: It opened number one and beat U2: Rattle and Hum. It suprised everybody. I remember nobody thinking it was going to do anything. It beat everything that they thought was going to kill us. I remember talking to Tom Pollock, the head of the studio on that Monday and he said, “Well, so we’re number one.” They were so excited that they changed the ad campaign which was somewhat disastrous because people looking for it couldn’t find it. We kind of had a fight over the ad campaign. They wanted to make it more political and make it more about the current election. We fought that saying, “That’s a mistake because Bush might win.” It’s really not just about the current election, it’s about life. It’s about a world view. So they immediately changed it to a black and white ad instead of the one with the poster of Roddy with the sunglasses and the American flag. People spent the next week looking for the theater because they couldn’t recognize the ad. It wound up having some decent legs and wound up did nicely for a little film. We have always been pretty happy with what happened and how it’s taken.

Jason Bene: Were you at all concerned about casting an entertainer from the World Wrestling Federation? Roddy Piper didn’t have a lot of experience in front the camera and the role of John Nada is a meaty one.

Sandy King Carpenter: We went out on that limb ready to saw it off. We’re the ones who fought to have him. We met him at Wrestlemania III. He had been a favorite wrestler of ours. We had also seen the bit of acting that he had done, and while it was not stellar, his circumstances weren’t stellar in the other things. We thought given the right role and given John’s direction, he would be fine. He was willing to turn himself over and to train for the role and work with the stunt coordinator. You know – no guts, no glory.

Jason Bene: Then you have Carpenter veteran Keith David, who was in The Thing and who also did the voice-over for the trailer for Ghosts of Mars. Can you talk about the infamous fight scene with him and Roddy Piper and how that was coordinated?

Sandy King Carpenter: What was really interesting was Keith David was willing to do a lot of rehearsal with Roddy on the acting, and Roddy was willing to work a lot with Keith on the fighting. There was a lot of time put into the prep on the movie, where John spent a lot of rehearsal time with both of them on the dramatic scenes. Jeff Imada spent a lot of time with them. We had another office that was also a house where they just did a lot of stunt work in the backyard day after day after day, working out the fights.

Jason Bene: It was like watching a wrestling match done in the streets.

Sandy King Carpenter: They incorporated some of Roddy’s signature stuff. The idea is it’s a fight between friends. It’s two guys who are willing to beat the crap out of each other over a point. Where one guy really wants to convince his friend he’s got to see what’s going on, and the other guy is really convinced his friend has lost his mind. And they are willing to come to blows over it, but unlike most fights, this is a fight where one guy is saying you got to see what I see. You have someone who doesn’t really want to hurt the other guy, and another guy who doesn’t want to hurt him back and wants to be left alone. And they finally get to the point where when a couple of lucky blows are landed then they are mad and really start fighting. It’s a fight that isn’t just your regular street brawl, and I think that’s why it becomes kind of a favorite of fight scenes.

Jason Bene: I thought it was great that George ‘Buck’ Flower was able to play someone other than the bum or the homeless person. He gets to show his acting chops when he sells out and becomes one of the rich after being poor. By the end of the film he is unregonizable.

Sandy King Carpenter: ‘Buck’ was very cool and he had a lot of fun with that. The line, “What’s the threat? We all sell out every day” was actually a line from one of the executive producers when they were trying to have the aliens eat babies and be cannibals and do all kinds of things. John explained, “The threat is your humanity and losing yourself.” And this guy said, “What’s the threat? We all sell out everyday.” We were talking about that later and I said, “We need to use that line.” It seemed like there’s the point. That line immediately went into the drifter’s mouth.

Jason Bene: You also got to work with your good friend, Peter Jason.

Sandy King Carpenter: I knew Peter from The Long Riders. I brought him into the Carpenter family on Prince of Darkness. I thought Gilbert was a really good role for him. It suits him and he’s really a strong actor. When you need a backbone, lynchpin, lots of dialogue and information actor who you buy as a grounded member of the community, you get Peter. He and ‘Buck’ are both yeoman kind of actors that are able to be called in when you need to ground a community and create a universe within a fantasy film. You have to have character actors that can pull that off.

Jason Bene: “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubblegum” is probably the most quoted line in cinematic history. Who wrote it?

Sandy King Carpenter: It’s a Roddy line. I believe that was one of his lines from wrestling that he brought in.

Jason Bene: The way he walks in and delivers that line it is almost like a scene from a Western.

Sandy King Carpenter: ‘Buck’ has always claimed that Carpenter only makes Westerns.

Jason Bene: I think Vampires is the closest he has come to an all out Western, but here it feels like it too, especially with the music.

Sandy King Carpenter: When we were doing the behind-the-scenes EPK [electronic press kit] for They Live, the theme was John Carpenter’s America Heroes. All of his leads are a certain kind of guy, the anti-hero, the lone wolf guy.

Jason Bene: At the end of the film John pokes at himself when a blowhard commentator on television says, ” All the sex and violence on the screen has gone too far for me. I’m fed up with it. Filmmakers like George Romero and John Carpenter need to show some restraint.” It was nice to see John have some fun at his own expense because at the time he took a critical licking for some of his more violent films.

Sandy King Carpenter: On The Thing, David Ansen of Newsweek called him a pornographer of violence. I remember when we did Vampires they were all up in arms. It’s a vampire. They like to play with their food. What do you want? They’re suprised what they are. They’re advertised as what they are. We raised two children who grew up just fine. They weren’t allowed to see our movies when they were under thirteen years old. We don’t do torture porn. It’s an easy shot to blame other people for society’s ills, when society doesn’t want to look at itself.

Jason Bene: I think those comments hurt John and Starman was his answer to those critics. Everything is timing. E.T. really hurt The Thing at the box-office.

Sandy King Carpenter: E.T. and Reagan were of the same ilk. People were trying to deny a lot about life. There’s nothing wrong with E.T. and there’s nothing wrong with little kids that want him to phone home. Reese’s Pieces are great. There’s room for all kinds of movies. Whether it be life, country, their children, or anything else, they look for convenient scapegoats. They did it with comic books. They did it with morality codes on movies back during Scarface. It will always be with us. We had to make choices on They Live. We realized at a certain point when Nada looks through the glasses that we had to make sure at one point he looks at the cop and sees he’s not an alien and lets him go. We wanted to make sure that we did not accidentally send a message that all cops are aliens and you kill them. As a filmmaker you have to look at the messages you send and make sure you’re saying what you mean. While we are nobody’s babysitter, we are reaching people emotionally. We are touching triggers for good and for bad. You always hope it’s for good. You always hope you are uplifting. I felt the message we sent with They Live was a positive one that you are supposed to reach out for a higher idea. You hope that what you do with everything is more about humanity within you. You need an awareness of the more frail minds and the more suggestable. It doesn’t mean that it can govern everything you do. You take it into consideration and sometimes you sit there and go, “Did we say something we did not mean to say here?” And when you are responsible you check that. Do I think that implied on Vampires? No. Should the vampires have sprayed less blood on the walls?  No.

Sandy King Carpenter was kind enough to let me dig through the They Live archives and pull out some uber rare, on-set pictures from the science fiction classic! Keeping with the Carpenter theme, make sure you read the interview I did with John on his 1987 opus, Prince of Darkness.

After toiling around writing screenplays [Black Moon Rising, The Eyes of Laura Mars], John would make an exploitation classic that was part Howard Hawks and part George A. Romero. Assault on Precinct 13 was a reference-filled suspense tale that won audiences over with its edgy bravado and unrelenting violence.

The ball was just rolling as this lead to one of my favorite films of all-time, Halloween. It was shot in various locations in and around Southern California – most of the streets were the beautiful neighborhoods of Pasadena. What he and producer Debra Hill did with little money, little time, and a true love of the craft is extraordinary. Like Jaws before it, the key to Halloween is the menacing score and faceless killer that lurks just behind a house, or a bush, or by the local school in Midwest suburbia where families take blind comfort in thinking they are immune to the black heart that has come knocking on their door.

John Carpenter reunited with Jamie Lee Curtis on the The Fog, tackled the Western with the science fiction action film Escape from New York, and then made the greatest remake ever with The Thing. After taking a critical blasting for the viciousness of The Thing, Carpenter went into Stephen King territory with Christine, which brilliantly captured man’s fascination with his vehicle and how your wheels can take over your soul and destroy relationships in the process.

Wanting to show his softer side, Starman was made and it was the flip side of his updating of John W. Campbell’s short story, Who Goes There? There are some marvelous make-up effects from the great Dick Smith, but the most glaring oversight of Starman is the performance of Jeff Bridges. His role here is where he should have won his first Oscar for Best Actor.

Big Trouble in Little China is ahead, I mean, way ahead of it’s time mixing martial artists, action, comedy, science fiction, and horror. People have to remember this is long before the chop-socky Asian influence had become commonplace in the U.S psyche. Studio interference on Big Trouble would force John to stray away from the studio system and get back to his roots, as he signed a multi-picture deal with Alive Pictures and out of that merger came Prince of Darkness and They Live.

I cannot tell you how hard it was to choose the one John Carpenter film that I wanted to give the respect it deserves. I toyed with They Live. Thought about In the Mouth of Madness. And was close to giving some love to Village of the Damned. In the end, it was a no-brainer for me to go with John’s darkest film to date, Prince of Darkness.

Jason Bene: After making Big Trouble in Little China, was it imperative your next film have a smaller budget with an independent company where you had more creative control?

John Carpenter: Yes. That’s the whole situation in a nutshell. I wanted to get away from the studios.

Jason Bene: You wrote the movie under the pseudonym ‘Martin Quatermass’. Can you talk about the connection to Nigel Kneale and the fictional scientist he created?

John Carpenter: The ‘Martin Quatermass’ pseudonym was my way of tipping my hat to Nigel Kneale and his groundbreaking serials that he did for the BBC [The Quatermass Experiment]. They were a combination of science fiction that mostly took place in the real world. That was very much on my mind, and also the mixture of science, horror, and fantasy.

Jason Bene: The look of the picture has a slightly distorted look to it. You are known for using an anamorphic lens to get the most coverage out of every shot. What kind of camera did you use and were you trying something new with the off-kilter flow to the framework?

John Carpenter: I used a Panavision camera with Panavision lenses. I don’t know about off-kilter. Maybe that was my state of mind at the time.

Jason Bene: From the lengthy opening credits to the nihilistic finale, your score is unrelenting. How did you come up with notes that were so haunting?

John Carpenter: I just have to be real honest about it. My composing capabilities are minimal. I have a decent feel. All you hear is me improvising along with the movie. Watching it and playing with it with various keyboards and overlapping and double-tracking and triple-tracking and just building up a feel. That’s basically what it was. Very simple.

Jason Bene: You brought in cronies like Donald Pleasance, Dennis Dun, Victor Wong, and future confidant Peter Jason to the ensemble. It must be exciting to work with a group of professionals who are also your friends.

John Carpenter: It was great. It was great fun. I just loved working with Donald again. I hadn’t seen him or worked with him since Escape from New York. He became a very close friend. He’s one of my favorite actors. It was wonderful working with him. I also became friends with Dennis Dun and Victor Wong. I thought I would do a different kind of casting. You have a scientist and I though Victor could pull that off. My wife [Sandy King Carpenter] had known Peter Jason and worked with him. This was her first movie on the production side. She said, “Try casting him.” It was wonderful. I love working with him.

Jason Bene: You took an intellectual approach to science vs. religion and how both of them perceive the devil.  Did you do research on metaphysics and atomic theory?

John Carpenter: A lot. It isn’t exactly a devil. It’s an Anti-God, which is very different. The devil by biblical terms is just a fallen angel. He started a rebellion in Heaven and was cast out. He’s not on the evil par with the deity. This is an anti-deity basically. I guess I didn’t explain that very well in the movie.

Jason Bene: You seemed to be going for the less is more approach with Frank Carrisosa’s make-up effects. Were you happy with the final results?

John Carpenter: I was very happy with it. I was especially happy with what Catherine turned into. I thought that was pretty good. I was very happy.

Jason Bene: The dream sequence involving the tachyon sent from the future is a foreboding piece of celluloid that fans still talk about to this day. Every time I discuss this flick, that’s the scene everyone says freaked them out.

John Carpenter: That’s weird. I never thought of that. That’s great. That’s interesting. I have to keep that in mind.

Jason Bene: I was so curious about the church that you filmed the exteriors for that I drove to L.A. to check it out and it pretty much looks the same.

John Carpenter: Is it still there?

Jason Bene: It is and I think it’s a theater/playhouse now.

John Carpenter: What street is that on down there?

Jason Bene: I don’t remember. I plugged the address into my GPS and headed out to see it. I told my wife that I think the inside of the movie was shot in Long Beach.

John Carpenter: Parts of it were. We shot in all sorts of places on that. We shot the interior of the church in Long Beach and we actually had a set built. There were various places.

Jason Bene: You shot it in my backyard because I was born and raised in Long Beach, California. I’ve always had a connection to this movie.

John Carpenter: Good man. There was an old hotel down there. It was used in a lot of sets for movies. It’s crumbling.

Jason Bene: I bet it was one of the hotels on Ocean Boulevard.

John Carpenter: I believe it was. It was falling apart and it was dangerous. We went right in because of the look.

Jason Bene: Rocker Alice Cooper cameos as a ‘street schizo’ who impales Etchinson with a bisected bicycle. Where did that gag originate from?

John Carpenter: That was Alice Cooper’s gag that he did on stage. He said, “Can I bring this along?” I said, “That would be great, we should use that.” It worked.

Jason Bene: I don’t think you had to do much directing to make him creepy. Just put some white make-up on his face.

John Carpenter: He’s a very nice man. He just had a good time. He knew exactly what to do.

Jason Bene: When Etchinson goes down the stairs and sees the pigeon on the crucifix you can hear Cooper’s song ‘Prince of Darkness’ playing.

John Carpenter: I don’t remember now, man. It was too many years ago.

Jason Bene: You have fans like me with too much time on our hands.

John Carpenter: God bless you all. God bless you.

Jason Bene: The tone and ambiance you create has an Italian flavor to it. The movie sits comfortably next to The Gates of Hell and Suspiria. Would you say this is your ‘Spaghetti Horror Film’?

John Carpenter: [Laughs] I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of that. That’s really interesting.

Jason Bene: Maybe I read into it too much. I think it was all the bugs and insects that made me think of those films.

John Carpenter: That’s right out of [Luis] Buñuel. He had a lot of surrealism and insects running around in his work.

Jason Bene: Prince of Darkness falls in the middle of your ‘Apocalypse Trilogy’ [The Thing, In the Mouth Of Madness]. It wasn’t welcomed with open arms upon its initial release, but since then it has found its audience. What does the movie mean to you looking back on it?

John Carpenter: I have real fond memories of that because it was a return to low budget and it was really fun to make. We managed to put together something kind of creepy for very little money. It had a real neat atmosphere to it. It had a real deep feel to it. I am very proud of the film.

Jason Bene: With its 25th Anniversary right around the corner maybe we will see a Blu-ray release.

John Carpenter: [Laughs] You never know.

Jason Bene: I think there is a Region 2 DVD that you do an audio commentary [with Peter Jason] for.

John Carpenter: Oh God, I don’t remember. Probably.

Jason Bene: Do you think there really is a ‘Brotherhood of Sleep’ somewhere in this world watching over a canister of swirling green Anti-God?

John Carpeneter: [Laughs] I don’t know man. I hope so. I hope they maintain. I thought that was a neat concept. I kind of enjoyed myself on that. It was ripped off of a movie called The Sentinel. It was a book.

Jason Bene: The one from the 70′s with Chris Sarandon?

John Carpenter: Yes.

Jason Bene: That’s a scary movie!

John Carpenter: It’s a weird film, isn’t it? Its about priests who hold back the doorway to hell or something like that.

Jason Bene: John Carradine had those white eyes and he just stood in the window.

To interview director John Carpenter about one of my favorite movies from him is a dream come true. Thank you so much John, and I can speak for all of your fans and say we cannot wait to see your first feature film in almost a decade, The Ward, sometime in the near future.

Synopsis: Escape from L.A. finds Kurt Russell once again in the role of Snake, which he played in the 1981 film, Escape from New York. Los Angeles has finally had the really big earthquake everyone was afraid of, and what remains is now an island. Because the country’s ultra-righteous President-for-Life (Cliff Roberton) wants it that way, all the weirdos and freaks that previously inhabited New York in large numbers, and the rest of the U.S. in smaller concentrations, have been quarantined on the island of L.A. The president has Snake taken from the nice, decent prison he was living in for a special mission in L.A. The president’s daughter has joined the resistance movement determined to overthrow his one-man rule, and has stolen his secret “black box” (a doomsday machine) to boot. Snake is given a poison which will kill him in a few hours unless he returns to the president for the antidote. His mission is to recover the black box and kill the president’s daughter.

Trick ‘R Treat: skyrocketing to the #1 spot is Michael Dougherty’s directorial debut, a film that might not ever be knocked off its perch at the top. Never has a movie captured the unholy spirit of All Hallow’s Eve so brilliantly. This anthology has its vignettes weaved together in Pulp Fiction fashion. Werewolves, zombies, a badass imp, and a gothic atmosphere that adds up to an enchanting experience.

Halloween: John Carpenter’s seminal slasher still feels fresh after all these years. The Gone With The Wind of the genre still packs a wallop with an incredible score, beautiful cinematography, and a boogeyman who scares just as well in the day as the night.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch: Hated by critics and fans upon its release in 1982. I never understood this – it’s hands down the best sequel of the series, dropping Myers completely, and adding Silver Shamrocks, bugs, snakes, killer robots, and pimp daddy Tom Atkins!

Night of the Demons: man, Kevin S. Tenney sure hit this sucker out of the park. One of the best opening credits in movie history, Steve Johnson’s impeccable make-up work, a hot Asian chick, Linnea Quigley’s butt in the air, and the infamous lipstick scene. Trash classic!

Trick or Treat: Being a 80′s child, I went to school with people like Eddie Weinbauer – guys who were Metal Heads, who were told that they would burn in hell for listening to Iron Maiden and AC/DC. It’s great to see this picked on teen exact revenge with the help of a befallen rock idol.

Honorable mention: