John Carpenter 'Escape From L.A.' Interview [Hollywood Foreign Press/Jul 19/1996/US] By Elisa Leonelli [Courtesy: Elisa Leonelli]


Would it be fair to describe movies like Independence Day as right-wing science fiction?

Yes, I would agree with you. Most science fiction and action movies since the 80s take the point of view that the hero is usually on the side of the right wing, whether he takes the law into his own hands or not. All of these films basically have the same general idea, look at True Lies by James Cameron as an example. Who were the bad guys? Cliché Persians. The enemy we fear is always the other, either from the outside, like the aliens coming down to Earth, or from the inside.

What kind of political statement did you intend to make with Escape From L.A.?

In Escape From L.A. what I really say is that what we have to watch out for is not the enemy from outer space, the enemy are the Republicans and they're taking over the world. But that's just because I'm from the old days, when we used to smoke dope and hate the government. In my film we have a Muslim who's heroic, and she's killed, but she's a nice person [Valeria Golino]. The biggest villain is the right-wing white president. But I don't see them as stereotypes. The only stereotype I suppose is the revolutionary leader fashioning his movement after Che Guevara. But that was the choice of the actor [George Corraface], because Che was one of the most charismatic revolutionary leaders from South America. Basically it's really hard to romanticize a group called The Shining Path. They are Peruvian terrorists, they are real, and they do some pretty horrible things. So we tried to romanticize them, but in a way I think he's totally wrong.

How about horror movies? What side of the political spectrum do they tend to fall on?

In horror movies, you always boil it down to a conflict between external and internal. You've got a tribe of people sitting around a camp fire and the medicine man is saying, "We have all got to be afraid of whatever is out there beyond the darkness, it's that other tribe down the river, they're evil, they're demons, we have to kill them.

What was your concept for the sequel?

Now what I did on Escape From L.A. was to create a fictional America of the future in which the country has become a theocracy and the morally guilty are deported to Los Angeles. The idea came from inverting the idea of the first movie, Escape From New York. New York was a prison and the rest of the country was free. In this movie the rest of the country is like Russia during the 50s, it's walled off, and the only free place is Los Angeles. It's just flipping an idea around.

And what is the connection to today's reality?

I'm sneaking in all sorts of references to what we want to call 'politically correct'. There's a movement now in America to restrict a lot of our freedoms in order to have order, we're ready to get rid of all our freedoms, and, as my 77-year-old dad says, "We can't handle too much freedom, we just don't want it. We want to be told what to do and we want the rules really clear cut." There's a lot of people who have agendas that they believe in very fiercely, but I come from a place of arrested development as an adolescent. My whole being is, 'never tell me what to do.' I hate being told what to do. It's just an absolute questioning and hatred of authority.

What was your intended message?

I would only put it in the context of the story that I'm telling, because I'm not advocating a return to the Dark Ages. I'm not advocating a destruction of technology, because in fact technology is just simply a tool that we use as human beings. I think there's nothing wrong with technology, it can be great, it can also be misused, but that's not the issue. The issue for the character of Snake Plissken, as my alter ego standing there after having gone through this adventure, is that everyone in this world is competing for power, that everyone is bad, and if he does nothing everything's going to stay the same.

Is it a different version of the hero's journey?

Yes, if you go back to an old Joseph Campbell type story, there's only one story, you've got a hero who has to go on a journey, has to find a magical object. He brings it back from wherever he's gone, some strange place, and he transforms society with this object. I just decided that, instead of transforming it for the good, he just ends it all, he ends all the play for power and starts it all over again. And the strange thing about American audiences who have seen this, is that they all start to cheer when he does it. They all say, yeah, do it, hit the button.

How important was it for you to make the sequel with Debra and Kurt?

In this case we had all made the first movie together as a team and if you're going to make a sequel, you want the same team, because it worked once, so it's going to work again. You don’t have to go through the process of a lot of unnecessary bullshit with people. I mean, Debra and Kurt and I have known each other for years, we're friends. So it's really simple, I want their contributions to it, because we all know the movie we want to make. There's not a question about that.

What were some of Kurt's beliefs that you incorporated into Snake?

Kurt's an unusual character, he's hard to describe. He's an irresistible actor, but first and foremost he is an actor. He's a chameleon, he loves to play parts. He's the only person who's ever successfully played Elvis Presley and actually got the heart of that guy. And there's a part of him that I suppose is Snake Plissken, that's a little bit like him, but he's really too nice a guy for Snake.

How did you discuss the fine points of the message with Kurt who's a Libertarian, and Debra who's a Democrat?

What was really going on here was that Kurt said something like, "To be really fair we can't just attack the right, we've got to attack all stupidity, right and left, let's be really broad here, not look like we're attacking a simple target." So it gets more complicated. Some of Debra's issues are the environment, and it's something we all care about. We're truly going to die if we don't clean it up. We're not anti-environmentalist, we're anti-wacko. I mean, the excesses of any movement are what we're really talking about. But we had a great time. Debra got used to the cigarette smoke in a couple of days, it was not a problem. And Debra brought certain sensibilities that I wouldn't have even thought of. She wrote the entire scene that takes place inside the Beverly Hills Hotel with the surgical failures. It's an anti-surgery statement, and I would never have thought of that.

Do you agree with Kurt's Libertarian ideas?

Kurt and I don't ever have any problems. He loves to take outrageous positions, just to tweak you. One of his famous positions, and he'll talk for hours on it, is that he wants women to run everything. Women are going to let us men do what we want, and all we want to do is screw around with various women, while you women could do anything else you want to. And he'll go on and on and on about this. In a sense what he's trying to do is elicit your emotions from you, because that's the kind of personality that he is. He explains libertarianism like this, this is his explanation. If l'm living on a street and my road needs fixing, I'll get the neighbors together and we'll pay for it, we'll fix the road, but don't come down and fix the road and charge me unless I want you to. That's his position on libertarianism. It's strange, libertarianism fluctuates between the extreme right and the extreme left, it bounces all over the place. I'm not quite that radical in terms of my beliefs. I'm a solid capitalist, I love Hollywood, I love making money, the United States is great. Again, my political beliefs come more from this arrested development as an adolescent, it's really not particularly as profound as Kurt's. And I came out of the fifties too, I was born in 1948 and I grew up in the fifties. The sixties came from the forties. When the guys came back from the war, they said, "Wait a minute, what's all this domestic bliss they're talking about, we want some juice here." Only that was all hidden in those days and slowly now it's evolved. Yeah, I came out of a different time.

You are not a Republican, though, but Kurt seems to think that you have the same ideas about politics. Do you?

He may believe that, but I try to avoid serious debates with Kurt on certain areas. In other words, when things start getting really serious, I can steer the conversation back to girls or sports and we're all set. We do share certain things in common, though. We share the same feelings about Hollywood, we both see each other as having similar careers, we both see Snake Plissken the same way, we both see life a lot the same way. There's a cynical side to him, there's a cynical side to me. So we bond on a human level. Do I want to go to the Republican National Convention? I don't think so.

How did you come up with that ending to Escape From L.A.?

Well it's a pretty definitive conclusion about the world this man lives in. In other words, the world as he is confronted with in the last scene is a pretty grim place. No one is going to win. I feel like that his solution is to stop all the power grab and let's start all over again. In some kind of crazy way it's more of a hopeful kind of thing. That no one wants to play on a level playing field is really one of the issues of the film, everybody wants to have power over someone else. What if you really leveled the field, just shut it all down and start all over again? We'd probably do the same thing we're doing.

Do you agree with Snake's decision?

Like I'm saying, Kurt's playing a character who's a little bit of my alter ego. It's an unrestrained hatred of authority, any authority, no matter that you can supplant the authority with somebody else, you will still hate it. I think that's just an ancestral thing with my descendants. We stepped off on Plymouth Rock and the first thing we said was, "Don't tell me what to do." We said it to the Indians, we said it to the British, "Get out of my way. I'll take this land here and I'll smoke a cigarette." That's all it's about, it's not about anything deeper than that.

Was there some pressure to make Snake more likable?

There wasn't from the three of us. There was more of a very gentle questioning from the studio. How has Snake changed through the years? Maybe Snake comes to Los Angeles and has changed and he actually finds a cause, something to believe in. All of a sudden I found that we're going into family friendly movies. Oh my God, no. So I thought about how to respond and I came back and said: "This is an incorruptible man. You cannot corrupt him with anything. He doesn't care. He is Snake Plissken. You can't ruin that or we don't have a movie. We can't make him gentle. God, no. Get somebody else to direct that."

In the end the hero only saves himself, not women and children. Is that a conscious departure from other recent action or science fiction movies?

The issue is that Snake Plissken is an incorruptible character. He doesn't care about anything, he has no cause, therefore you can't corrupt him with anything. He doesn't care, he doesn't care about killing you, he doesn't care about saving you. He just wants to move on, he cares about the next sixty seconds of his life. Now, if you get near him and fool with him, he's like a snake, he'll bite you and kill you. But he's the absolute free man, he's not beholden to anybody, he doesn't have to protect you, he doesn't care enough, just don't tell him what to do.

What do I think happened in the American culture that now action heroes need a cause?

It started with Ronald Reagan being elected and the country swinging really hard to the right. But that was a move that started back with Barry Goldwater in American politics. It's a reaction to the sixties, it's a reaction to the voting civil rights act. You don't know how many people are still upset about that. Look at the black churches that have been burning since 1990. This is not a happy country. We still have the same problems and there are a lot of people so embittered about the 60s, and now there's this big move, there's another baby boom in America. Now it's cool to have babies.

Do you believe that as a parent or as a leader you can educate without exerting your authority?

Well, it's an age old question. You have to have authority up to a point, as a parent has authority over a child, but there's only so much you can do, then the child has to go out. All I can tell you is my father wanted me to become independent as quickly as possible, and he told me when very young, "You have to live your own life." Independence was more important to him than anything else. He didn't want me dumb and ignorant and bigoted, but that was the quality of my parents. I don't know what you do about evil people raising kids. There's nothing you can do about it. In an ideal world, but it's not an ideal world, so it's very difficult to find an answer. I don't have an answer for our current problems, really. Can you educate without authority? Probably not, but it depends on the authority. Because Nazi Germany was pretty authoritarian and look what happened. Nothing is intrinsically evil, but taken too far it certainly is. As I said, I preface my own comments by an unnatural hatred of authority. I'm not saying I'm normal, I'm saying this is the way I am.

Do you think all of us who live in L.A. are in denial of the dangers of natural disasters and street violence?

Clearly. I have lived here for 26 years, and I would never move out of town. I have the most beautiful house in the world, it's high in the Hollywood Hills, it overlooks the city. I am told it is inevitable that during my lifetime an earthquake will decimate this city and destroy it, and yet I'm still living down by the pool. I'm in total denial absolutely, wouldn't think about leaving. I like living on the edge.