The Making of The Thing" is a captivating and immersive documentary that peels back the layers of one of the most legendary and enigmatic horror films in cinematic history, John Carpenter's "The Thing" (1982).
This documentary invites viewers to journey back in time to the early 1980s, a period when practical effects and suspense-driven storytelling reigned supreme in the horror genre. Through a combination of rare archival footage, exclusive interviews with the cast and crew, and behind-the-scenes materials that have remained hidden for decades, "The Making of The Thing" provides an intimate and illuminating exploration of the film's creation.
The journey begins by revisiting the origins of "The Thing" as a remake of the 1951 classic "The Thing from Another World" and the decision to take the story back to its source material, John W. Campbell Jr.'s novella "Who Goes There?" With Carpenter at the helm, the documentary delves into the director's vision of paranoia and isolation in the remote Antarctic setting.
Audiences are treated to in-depth interviews with key players, including Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, and John Carpenter himself, who share their experiences working on the film. They discuss the challenges of portraying fear and distrust among a close-knit group of characters and the intense camaraderie that developed during the shoot.
"The Making of The Thing" also delves into the groundbreaking practical effects work of Rob Bottin, whose grotesque and imaginative creature designs continue to astonish audiences to this day. The documentary explores the meticulous craftsmanship behind the film's iconic transformations and the risks taken to achieve such stunning and terrifying visuals.
As the narrative unfolds, viewers are transported behind the scenes of the film's remote set in British Columbia, where the cast and crew faced the harsh elements and the difficulties of shooting in subzero temperatures. The documentary captures the dedication and determination of everyone involved, showcasing the collaborative effort required to bring Carpenter's chilling vision to life.
The film's release and initial reception are also explored, highlighting the mixed critical reviews and the subsequent rise of "The Thing" to cult status. "The Making of The Thing" examines how the film's intricate storytelling and practical effects have continued to influence and inspire generations of horror filmmakers.
In the end, "The Making of The Thing" is a thrilling and intimate tribute to a timeless masterpiece of horror cinema. It provides an inside look at the enduring legacy of "The Thing" and its lasting impact on the genre, cementing its place in the pantheon of cinematic classics.
This documentary promises fans and cinephiles an unprecedented journey into the heart of the Antarctic terrors and creative genius that made "The Thing" a landmark in horror cinema.
This documentary invites viewers to journey back in time to the early 1980s, a period when practical effects and suspense-driven storytelling reigned supreme in the horror genre. Through a combination of rare archival footage, exclusive interviews with the cast and crew, and behind-the-scenes materials that have remained hidden for decades, "The Making of The Thing" provides an intimate and illuminating exploration of the film's creation.
The journey begins by revisiting the origins of "The Thing" as a remake of the 1951 classic "The Thing from Another World" and the decision to take the story back to its source material, John W. Campbell Jr.'s novella "Who Goes There?" With Carpenter at the helm, the documentary delves into the director's vision of paranoia and isolation in the remote Antarctic setting.
Audiences are treated to in-depth interviews with key players, including Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, and John Carpenter himself, who share their experiences working on the film. They discuss the challenges of portraying fear and distrust among a close-knit group of characters and the intense camaraderie that developed during the shoot.
"The Making of The Thing" also delves into the groundbreaking practical effects work of Rob Bottin, whose grotesque and imaginative creature designs continue to astonish audiences to this day. The documentary explores the meticulous craftsmanship behind the film's iconic transformations and the risks taken to achieve such stunning and terrifying visuals.
As the narrative unfolds, viewers are transported behind the scenes of the film's remote set in British Columbia, where the cast and crew faced the harsh elements and the difficulties of shooting in subzero temperatures. The documentary captures the dedication and determination of everyone involved, showcasing the collaborative effort required to bring Carpenter's chilling vision to life.
The film's release and initial reception are also explored, highlighting the mixed critical reviews and the subsequent rise of "The Thing" to cult status. "The Making of The Thing" examines how the film's intricate storytelling and practical effects have continued to influence and inspire generations of horror filmmakers.
In the end, "The Making of The Thing" is a thrilling and intimate tribute to a timeless masterpiece of horror cinema. It provides an inside look at the enduring legacy of "The Thing" and its lasting impact on the genre, cementing its place in the pantheon of cinematic classics.
This documentary promises fans and cinephiles an unprecedented journey into the heart of the Antarctic terrors and creative genius that made "The Thing" a landmark in horror cinema.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00shoot it, right? So the camera's set, everything's ready, and then Carpenter goes,
00:03wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. Shouldn't there be fire, you know, like underneath the lens here?
00:10You know, and everybody goes, why? And he goes, well, because they're burning,
00:13they're burning everything around them. And this is the shot where the, you know, like the,
00:18you know, the head's stretching off, but nobody's seeing it. So just for continuity,
00:21we want a little fire in the foreground. You know, meantime, nobody's thinking about it,
00:25and I didn't either, but the room is filling up with, you know, explosive fumes, right? So,
00:32so finally, you know, the effects guy gets a fire, you know, there's like a thing called a fire bar,
00:37which is basically a pipe with a bunch of little holes drilled in it, much like, you know, you
00:41would have in a fireplace that works with gas, puts it underneath the lens out of sight. And,
00:47you know, John says, okay, everybody's set, ready to go? You know, I go, ready, all the guys ready,
00:51everybody's ready, thumbs up. Hey, you in there, I'm knocking in the little, you know, box, you
00:55know, you guys, you know, you ready in there? Ready. You know, like that. Okay, great. You know,
01:00so John says, roll camera, right? So they roll camera, right? And he goes, all right, light the
01:05fire bar. Guy turns on the gas, you know, stuff's coming out and the guy's up there with a, with a,
01:11you know, like a lighter, you know, and he's, and finally it ignites, right? And the whole
01:21effect, the whole Hallahan, you know, replica body explodes, right? The whole room goes into
01:28this huge fireball with a whole crew sitting in it, right? Because this is a small set.
01:33And when the fire clears, everybody's sitting there like in a cartoon, you know, with their
01:37face is black, but, you know, nobody had black face, but they were all going like this. And I'm
01:42staring down at the, at the body. And I'm in shock because since it's a one take deal only,
01:48I look down at it and I go, Oh my God, it's on fire, right? It's on fire. And then John says,
01:56don't just stand there, put it out, you idiot. You know, like that. And then, and then, you know,
02:01I was just so shocked that months of work preparing for this moment was just blown to
02:05bits and in just a second. So we, you know, put it out with fire extinguishers and stuff like that.
02:10And then he just goes, Oh my God, we had to set up, take a whole nother day to get back to this
02:16point and finally just accomplish the one shot where the head stretches and the neck severs.
02:22All of us had, had made a trip to the shop. I had to get this little thing done for my head
02:27and everything. We all made a trip over there. Some of them like David and Charlie had to have
02:34very complicated things done. So I didn't spend much time there, but when we were at the shop,
02:40Robert already started sculpting a lot of the things like he sculpted the fused bodies that
02:47we find in the Norwegian camp. And that was lying on the floor when I walked by the first time. And
02:52I just remember thinking, this is, this is incredible art. This is amazing, grotesque art
02:59that he's created here. The same thing with the big fused dog thing. It was actually before they
03:04put all the hair and the, and the, and the slime and everything, and all that pink slime that all
03:10that drippy stuff and the, and the pieces of, of King crab claws or whatever the hell he used for
03:16that. Before he put all that stuff on it, it was an amazing piece of sculpture. Just beautiful.
03:24I mean, grotesque, horrible, but also very beautiful. So what I did was I was so, you know,
03:31wanting this stuff to come out so great, I actually lived at Universal for a year and five
03:38weeks without taking a day off. I worked, you know, seven days a week, never took a day off,
03:45you know, and I was there night and day, night and day. I'd sleep on the sets, you know, a carpenter
03:49would come in, where's Rob? You think, oh, he's, you know, he's in the, he's in the locker room,
03:53you know, or he's in the lab, you know, and then he'd wake me up, hey, you know, we got to shoot
03:58this thing or whatever. And I ended up, you know, working so hard that I ended up in the hospital
04:06at the end of the show. John looked at me and he said, you don't look well. Somebody take this guy
04:11to the hospital, right? You know, but since then, you know, I've, I've wised up and, you know,
04:17it's, I don't do that anymore. When it comes to the creature effects on, on the thing, it's,
04:24this is Rob of Teens movie. I mean, and there was no, no loss for, you know, incredible effects.
04:31It was a, it was a pretty hungry movie when it gets down to that aspect of it. We came in actually
04:39with, you know, Rob's request because it was an overload period where I think he had some,
04:46some 7 million creature effects going on and talked to me about possibly picking up
04:54one of the effects as, as some of the overload, which happened to be the,
04:58the dog thing at the beginning of the movie. It was, we were just getting heavily into
05:05this new element of puppetry and animatronics coming together at my studio. And since I
05:12like Rob a lot, and I've also worked with John Carpenter before, and it was a fairly fun and
05:21simple situation for us who jumped into it. It's one of the first effects that you see in the movie.
05:27These dogs have been taken over by, by the thing. So I attacked it in a way of figuring out a way
05:36of how to do it simplistically, how to do it quickly and economically, and also create a,
05:42you know, a pretty nifty effect. And so we attacked it as literally a puppet.
05:49So when you do see this effect in the movie, I remember looking at myself in the mirror and going,
05:56how, how easily can I puppet something if this is the head? Because we were just starting to get
06:02into, to puppetry at that point in our studio. And had us do a snapshot of me just holding my hand
06:10like this as a human being, so that it was, this is about the most intricate and amazing machine
06:17anybody could build. And then from that snapshot of me standing there, just like this with my hand,
06:24just like this, we designed the dog thing over that. So it was form following function.
06:32We did not create freely. We created based on the machine that was going to, to make this thing work.
06:38And when you actually see this dog thing in the movie, you will see that there's this hump,
06:43this interesting hump, and this long neck that comes out, this really cool head that comes around,
06:48and it's snarling and going through all these gyrations. And it has all this wonderful organic
06:53movement. And it's basically because all that organic movement is the person inside it who
06:59is disguised by the design. So we came up with a concept, designed that concept, and literally
07:05built a really cool hand puppet with an animatronic face. We literally came in to help out,
07:12to take a little bit of this overload, and to do a really fun character, and a neat creature,
07:18and a neat effect. But it wasn't for the credit, and it wasn't for the film. It wasn't my film.
07:26It was Rob's film, and he should be very proud of it. I'm thrilled for him, and I think what
07:31he did is outstanding. Some of the neatest effects we've seen, and I'm glad that we have a
07:37cool effect in the film. The big scene in the kennel, when the thing first makes its appearance,
07:46and we set it on fire with the flamethrower, and then put out the fire, was one of the most
07:51exciting things I've ever worked on. There were seven or eight cameras, nine actors with fire
07:56extinguishers, and we really had to go in and put out the fire. And the stage was elevated 15 feet
08:02or so above the floor, so there were real firemen underneath, and there was a lot of safety
08:05apparatus for us. But I remember that, you know, usually the roll them, marker, action, and all
08:14those cameras clacking, and the flames building up from the gas jets, and us waiting, and then
08:20finally the call, and we all went in and really put out that fire. It was really wonderful.
08:24The kennel sequence is basically broken into two areas, which is one, first the dog transforming in
08:30front of the dogs, and then the point at which the humans see it. And at the point at which the humans
08:36see it, it was very important to also understand that what, again, we were looking at was an
08:41amorphous shape that, you know, you could really call a thing. So when the big mass, or the dog,
08:48or what it is transformed to, pulls itself up in the corner of the ceiling, you know, trying to back
08:53up and escape, you know, from these guys, and the dogs, and everything. It just wants to be left alone.
08:58You know, it's got nowhere to go, you know. So basically, you know, these guys are looking at it,
09:02and they go to torch it, and what happens is that it, you know, rips open, and then this, you know,
09:07this really strange kind of formation comes out that looks much like a flower. And in essence,
09:13if you go back and, you know, freeze frame, what it actually is, is it's not a flower. It's about,
09:19like, I don't know how many dog tongues. You know, it's a bunch of dog tongues, and there's dog
09:24teeth growing out of the thing. And I wanted something there that, you know, actually,
09:30you know, in the mind would sort of be, you know, something the dog used to be,
09:36and has now, you know, changed into something that is like a twisted nightmare.
09:40The burn, I remember the burn when David Clannon's eruption, and then we burned him. That
09:49was probably the biggest effect there that we all worked. And the guy who did the burn was a,
09:55I don't remember his name, but he was a specialist at doing these full-body burns,
10:00and that was very impressive and spooky to be a part of, because what happens is,
10:07he's got, he can't breathe once he's ready to go, because if he does, he'll sear his lungs.
10:13He has to do the whole thing holding his breath, and it's all a matter of timing. And then the
10:19minute he came off, he had to be put out and immediately, you know, freed so he could draw
10:26breath and stuff. When I started seeing some of the effects that Rob had created, there was one in
10:32particular, one particular sequence where Charlie Hallahan's head comes off the table, and
10:38a tongue shoots out, and it pulls across, turns over, and grows stalks, and walks across the
10:43floor. When I saw that, I realized a great sense of relief, because what I didn't want to end up
10:49with in this movie was a guy in a suit. See, I grew up as a kid watching science fiction and
10:55monster movies, and it was always a guy in a suit. Or sometimes it was a kind of bad puppet,
11:02like It Conquered the World comes to mind right now, Roger Corman's movie, this kind of vegetable
11:07monster kind of going like this woodenly. And my fear was, they'll laugh at us, you know, they'll
11:13laugh at, they'll be a joke. I mean, even as great as the movie was, An Alien was a terrific movie,
11:18it still, in the very end, upstood this big guy in a suit. Oh, I don't want to do a suit. You know,
11:25I want something that's alive. So I was, when I saw that stuff coming out, I was like, oh man.
11:33Now, there were some effects we had to fool with, they didn't work perfectly, because this stuff is
11:38not like, as Rob said to me, it's not like ordering pizza on the phone. You have to build
11:43it and create it. And sometimes it doesn't work. In our case, I think it did. You gotta be fucking
11:54kidding me. Rob Bottin did the special makeup effects, and Roy Arbogast did the set special
12:10effects, the explosions and so forth. But they worked together in one area, and that was
12:16in terms of certain construction for the thing, certain signs that Rob couldn't handle.
12:23In other words, his little team could go so far. So they intermeshed at one point
12:28and began a collaboration to pull off that last creature coming up out of the floor and opening
12:36up. That was a huge monstrosity, and the size of it was amazing. So we had a lot of work to do.
12:43The first part, which was the pass where he actually has to run underneath the floorboards,
12:48that was done by Roy Arbogast. And what they did was they built actually a train track underneath
12:54the floorboards. They put a huge metal ball on it, and they actually dragged it with a huge cable
13:02mounted to a winch that actually was a high-speed winch. So they just flipped the thing, and then
13:07this ball would roll underneath and just break all the floorboards up. And that looked very
13:11impressive. Then what we see is the floor being ripped up, and now we see this image of Wilford
13:18Brimley rising up out of his hole, sort of stuck to a huge tentacle with all these
13:25tentacles that are writhing off of it. His chest actually rips open. This dog starts to struggle out.
13:31And because we wanted to open up the scope of what we were seeing, we decided to use animation.
13:41And there's this guy, Randy Cook, who's brilliant at stop-motion animation. I worked
13:47with Randy before, known him for quite a while, and asked him if he would actually do this,
13:52the wide shot, which would basically be the worm, the Blair monster, comes up through the
13:57floor. And now we're back really far, and we see, oh god, it's huge. And tentacles come flopping
14:02out on the deck. And then we'll cut to a medium shot of the dog actually starting to rip through
14:11Brimley's chest. And then we'll come back to the wide shot and actually see the dog
14:16leap out and land on the floor right in front of Kurt. And so actually, Randy and his crew set to
14:23making a miniature version of the whole set, and it was absolutely beautiful, really wonderful.
14:29The miniatures for the sequence, it was inside a room that had a lot of oil cans and
14:36some other miniature pieces. I can't explain exactly what it is. A guy named Jim Belahovic,
14:44and again, Susan Turner, who built the spaceship for the beginning of the film.
14:48Randy asked me, Randy Cook, the animator, asked me to make it on a two and a half inch to a full scale.
14:54That seemed to be a good size for him to work with. So we made a rather large one. And of course,
15:00it has to be very solid to do dimensional animation. You have to have a very solid
15:04base, so we made it very solid. We made it so a part broke away, so when the floor exploded,
15:10Randy could get right in there and work. Additionally, when we built it, we built it
15:14with no supports in the middle of the floor, so that they could have the creature come up at any
15:20point. We hadn't quite decided yet. And of course, we had icicles hanging from the top,
15:26which we used silicone for because they couldn't be moved either. With, you know, frame by frame
15:30shooting, you can't, you can't disturb anything. Everything has to stay exactly the same.
15:35I try to copy the live set exactly. I mean, it was rather difficult with the ice cave,
15:42because it was just jagged cave. And so we had to measure each part out and make it exactly the
15:48right dimension so it would match. I like to make it look absolutely, I know a lot of people like to
15:54take shortcuts, but I don't like to make it look exactly right, because I think there's no
15:57substitution for having it be exactly right mathematically and visually. In the final
16:04picture, what happened was his carpenter had it the sequence cut together, and felt that at the
16:10end of the day, his eye could detect that there was, you know, stop motion animation in the picture.
16:16And at this point in time, again, that, you know, since it was done, you know, many years ago,
16:20you know, we actually didn't have the use of a computer, which would kind of, you know, smooth
16:25out the animation a little bit. And so, you know, John decided that no, we're not going to use the
16:30animation in the picture, you know, even though it was beautifully executed.
16:49We all met at Vancouver Airport, and then we were going to fly to Prince Rupert,
16:56where we were going to get a plane to Stewart, British Columbia. So we flew into Prince Rupert,
17:03and as we were coming down, we realized there was a snowstorm going on. So we thought it would be a
17:07little dicey if we were going to take a small plane and fly into Stewart. So we get into Prince
17:12Rupert, and around 11 o'clock at night, they heard the entire cast in this huge, like, greyhound bus
17:18or something. By now, it's continuing to snow, and the snow is getting deep. We're driving along,
17:23I remember Peter Maloney was sick from eating something, and everybody was kind of falling
17:28asleep. And, you know, it's the lull of that bus as it's driving along. And we're all just about
17:34out of it, and suddenly we hear the bus driver yells out, slide, slide! So we all wake up,
17:40and the bus literally slides, and it starts going almost like off the mountain. I thought it was
17:45going to, like, bounce off the mountain and ricochet and throw us off the other side. There
17:50was no guardrail or anything, and it just plummeted for a thousand feet because we're in
17:53the middle of these snow-covered mountains. So now if this was a movie, you cut to the next shot.
18:02The whole cast, we're up in front of the bus, surrounding the bus driver with our eyes
18:08completely open, and we're driving at, like, 10 miles an hour now, and we're just kind of glued
18:12to the...we're glued to the road. But Maloney's still in the back, and he's sleeping. So about
18:20three o'clock in the morning, or who knows when, there was, like, a motel halfway to Stewart, and
18:26we were going to pull in there to see if we could get some coffee, make some phone...I don't know
18:29what. But it's continuing to snow, so it's really deep. So this Greyhound bus has to make a right
18:36hand turn and then go up this hill into the parking lot of this motel or something, and the
18:42bus slides, and it gets stuck, like, right in that depression where you go up. And he couldn't get
18:49the bus going. So, like, we're sitting there, and I'm not sure, but I'll take credit. I said,
18:56why don't we all get out, lighten the bus, and we can actually push it on the ice or something. So
19:01you have this cast of amazingly talented people getting out of this bus in the middle of the night
19:06in Canada and lining up on this side of the Greyhound bus, and they start to push the bus
19:11when the bus driver put it in gear, and we actually got it moving so that he could get back up to the
19:15lot. Well, we got into the lot, and the motel was closed. So we had to turn the bus around,
19:22and we got back on the road, and we drove for another two or three hours. We got into Stewart,
19:27British Columbia at five in the morning. Carpenter comes out into the middle of the street. He's, like,
19:31welcoming us. He's all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He slept and had coffee, and we're all, like,
19:36you know, like, we, you know, it was...we were a mess from being up all night. And he said,
19:42Welcome to Stewart, and that was our arrival at Stewart, British Columbia.
19:46The conditions are almost unbelievable to imagine shooting a movie in,
19:52and somehow there's a part of me that wonders how we ever survived it. We had such problems
19:58all the way down to the cameras. We couldn't...we had to leave them in the cold because we couldn't
20:04take them from the warm out into the cold inside and outside because the lenses would
20:10would have been messed up. I mean, the whole approach was one of just trying to push this
20:18giant rock up a mountain. We had no comforts, and it was a dangerous spot. Make no mistake about it.
20:26We were in a very dangerous spot shooting this movie, and I think that some of the reality of
20:31that showed. I know the cast members bonded together, and they really became their characters.
20:36They were really standing out in the snow dealing with the problem.
20:40There was a real camaraderie in the making of the film because these guys, I mean, they got...the
20:46actors got into the business of being scientists working together, thrown together. I would imagine
20:54in the real world, a group of people in an isolated environment would have to pull together
21:00and be friendly, and we did some...lots of research. People could go up there for long stays.
21:08They'd bring cassettes and records and books, and they would get flown in like video of Super
21:15Bowl games and baseball games. The actors tried to mimic that. They tried to copy that.
21:21There's been some great scenes where all 12 men are looking at each other and trying to figure
21:27out who's who, if you are my best friend or if you are about to thing out on me and kill me,
21:34but my favorite thing in this whole picture is to be able to be up here in a location like this and
21:44just be able to shoot up here. It's unbelievably fantastic. When the set was built and then it
21:51got snowed in as we had hoped, we were then going up a snowy, icy dirt road, one lane,
21:59with mining trucks coming down and radio contact back and forth. So the trip up each morning and
22:06back in the afternoon and the evening was sort of a long, tedious, and sometimes kind of scary
22:16trip. It was one of those things that paid off because we were able to put the set in a
22:22location that we would not have been able to otherwise. We lived in the town of Stewart.
22:29It's one of the last ice-free ports, I believe. So they floated a, I guess you'd call it a logging
22:38camp barge dormitory into the port and that was the crew housing. It was a large, flat barge that
22:49had very small cubicles in it with a bed and it was very much a kind of a college dorm situation
23:00for the crew. I think it made the adventure more interesting, you know, and there was a certain
23:07bonding that occurred with the crew, but of course it was not the most luxurious
23:13conditions. The drive up from Stewart to the site on the glacier was 45 minutes of unbelievable
23:23stuff. Every day we passed eight tan bald eagles eating, you know, having just killed salmon,
23:29eating them on the side on the snow, you know, blood-covered snow. It was just amazing.
23:34Good morning, gentlemen. Good morning. Oh, man. What's going on? Hey, this must be a movie.
23:40Everybody went up every day. So there were many days you just sat around and sort of did nothing
23:45except look at how beautiful it was. That was the extraordinary thing. We, even though it was 20
23:49below, the gear we wore after a few days of acclimation kept you warm and you could walk
23:55out on these fantastic glacial vistas. We were three-quarters of the way up this huge glacier
24:02and that pale blue color of the ice, it stretched for miles and miles and miles and miles down as
24:09it sloped down into the valleys and the white snow all around you and just hints of the darkness of
24:16mountaintops. It's a sequence of images I've never forgotten, really powerful. I've never
24:22been that high up for any length of time in the mountains in that kind of cold weather.
24:28It was just gorgeous. So I felt the sets up there gave us a tremendous feeling of place,
24:33which was important because the movie's about, on a psychological level, is about isolation.
24:41Even though there were a number of us there, each one of those men had his own
24:46little trap, little prison that he lived in, cut off from everything else except the guys around
24:52him. And then the introduction of this alien, which couldn't be seen but could be sensed,
25:00intensified that experience for each and every guy in it. And that was,
25:04I thought, the most interesting part of the movie for me. In fact, I felt my character,
25:08Dr. Norris, knew unconsciously that he had been infected by the thing.
25:16And in fact, in the sequence when they're trying to decide what to do,
25:19when everybody's flipping out and run all around, around the hallways, and somebody,
25:24I think it was Tommy Waits' character, had a gun. They had to talk him out of it. They
25:29wanted to take the control away from Moffat. They asked me. And my character said,
25:38I don't know, fellas, I just don't think I'm up to it. In my mind, he was responding to a
25:44signal from the inside that he didn't really understand, logically, that something was wrong
25:50and he was the wrong guy. And so, anyway, that business of being up there and seeing that
25:57sense that you were really alone, nothing, the wind, the cold, all those elements was fabulous.
26:06We won't have that white situation over there, right? So I think we'll be okay.
26:10Well, we may, well, we might want to do it. We could just do a little pull back.
26:15Good idea to come back into here and then come into the situation here. That sounds good.
26:26John Carpenter created a tremendous atmosphere on the set. It was very positive. It was
26:34supportive. And it was also, it encouraged you to work hard.
26:50John is one of the few directors who can walk onto a set and be faced with a scene that may
26:57involve five or six people and some complicated blocking, and with no preparation, work with the
27:03actors and arrive at a blocking that they're comfortable with, and not one that he dictates
27:08to them, and then decide on the spot what the most effective coverage for that scene is going to be.
27:16That's a rare talent. In scenes, a particular scene, I think, which evinces that,
27:23that ability is the one in which the blood was in the refrigerator. They find the refrigerator and
27:28it's, all the blood's on the floor. It's been broken open. That's a difficult scene because
27:33you have a group of people in a semicircle up against a flat object. And if you think about
27:37that, that's an exceptional challenge to shoot effectively. I mean, one can take an easy cop
27:42out and shoot it from within the closure of the half circle, if you will, and take individuals on
27:48each. But I think if you look at that scene, it's much more complicated in terms of how he
27:53chose to cover it. I was very impressed with that scene. And the one that followed, where
27:58Windows runs down the hallway with the gun, which I think is one of my favorite scenes in terms of
28:03cutting, those two scenes in particular. And John always gets just the right angles. Very rarely,
28:12I can't ever really think of a time in which I would say, gee, I wish I had this, or gee,
28:16I wish I had that. And that's a testimony to his ability.
28:46The reviews were mixed, I think, with the audience. And there was an alternate ending
28:52to the film that was shot. I had spoken to John about this. I had said that I felt, well, gee,
28:58this is a terribly nihilistic ending. It's very much of a downbeat. Perhaps we should protect
29:04ourselves while we have the principal, Kurt, and just shoot an ending where we see that he survives.
29:12And John was open to this. So essentially what he did was he staged a scene
29:17in which Kurt has been rescued and is sitting in a kind of small office structure. And he's
29:24just had a blood test so that we know that he's not infected. And he has survived this ordeal
29:30rather than the kind of mutual death that concludes the film now. He just shot this
29:38for protection. We never previewed this. The issue did come up at the conclusion of the two
29:44previews as to whether we should perhaps try this ending, see how it flew with the audiences,
29:54and or make other adjustments on the film. And I think John essentially at that time felt that
30:00he had achieved in the movie what he wanted to do. He had made the story of Who Goes There,
30:07the short story from which the original thing was adapted, he was much truer to that, which I
30:10think was one of his intentions. He was a great fan of the original thing. He and I watched it
30:15at least two or three times. John's probably seen it 50. And it is a wonderful film. But he wasn't
30:20trying to do that film. He was in a sense trying to go back to the source of it. I think he felt
30:27he had accomplished that. And so that's the way the film went out. A lot of the things though
30:33that bothered the audience more than the monster were the poking around the monster and poking
30:38around human beings that had been burnt. It was like we all associated to it in terms of
30:44what's like gutting a deer. It's part of life. If you hunt and you take the meat, you gut the deer.
30:57I guess it's ugly the first two or three times you do it. But then after a while that's what
31:00you do with the, you take them out, you remove them, clean it, get the meat clean, then you cut
31:06the meat up. All that kind of when you're doing it, if somebody's not used to doing it, they look
31:10at that and they go, this is horrible. But they don't have any problem going to the store and
31:14buying that wrapped piece of meat. So they just don't see the other part of it. So in this movie,
31:19you see that part. We realized that those parts were probably going to be to a large degree
31:24rejected. Again, I thought it was great that John didn't stop doing the movie that he set out to do.
31:33And I'm very happy that the movie did find its audience and that it found its audience 20 years
31:40or 15 years later was to a great degree expected. People always come up to me and say, you know,
31:48my favorite movie you were in was, I mean, a lot of times this happens that they come up with the
31:53thing as the thing, as the thing that they liked the best. But it's a, you know, as someone else
32:02has probably said, this film found its audience, not in the theaters at the time. It wasn't a huge
32:08hit. It did okay. But in video and on cable and since then on video, it's, it has a very loyal,
32:17very intense following. And that's always fun. I mean, I've been involved in several of those
32:25that haven't gone through the roof in the box office, but in certain ways have an afterlife
32:30that's much stronger than films that have gone through the roof at the box office.
32:35It was so much fun to be with that cast and that director and that crew.
32:42I mean, you had like 60 little boys with helicopters and flamethrowers and guns and
32:49a monster and we're up in the Arctic. And I mean, it was a gas, man. It was like,
32:55it was like going out and playing cops and robbers when you were a kid. It was just,
32:59it was a fantastic experience in a, in a wild and unpredictable place with
33:11just once again, I have to say just a tremendous cast and crew. It was, it was just so much fun.
33:17It's a good film and it's, it'll survive for that reason, you know,
33:23might not be an instant success, but I feel that it, it has legs in the sense that people will
33:29enjoy seeing and probably more so as the years go on. I think that at the time when the thing
33:35was released, it, it was an innovative, very kind of unusual journey for an audience.
33:46And I think that it came across an interesting phenomenon, which was at the time,
33:53we also had a very friendly alien that came to visit the earth in the form of E.T.
34:00And it was, it was a case of an audience at the time feeling probably more comfortable
34:09with a friendly alien. And the fact that, you know, the sort of dark edge of the thing
34:17was something that wasn't sort of appreciated at the time. I think the, the audience's sensibilities
34:25always sort of change. And they're now sort of prepared to accept
34:32an alien that isn't so friendly in the shape of the thing.
34:36I really believe that if they had separated the releases somehow,
34:40that it would have been a big hit at the box office. It's since turned into a, what they
34:45call a cult film, but everything seems like everybody has seen it on video or on television
34:50or something. It's, it set a standard for special effects. I think that the people who like that
34:58kind of movie went and saw it anyway. The interesting thing about the thing,
35:03right, and, and the fact that it was actually done a long time ago, you know, people actually
35:07think that, that, you know, the, the imaging and the special effects and the creature work
35:13would ever hold up to this day, even in, even in the light of the fact that, you know, there
35:18are computer graphics and things now. And I think part of the reason for that is, is that it's,
35:23you know, you just can't beat wild imagination, you know, and no matter how you do it, as long
35:29as it's executed very well, you know, it, you just can't pierce through the magic.
35:36You know, actually it's really funny because I watch the movie now and I can completely pick
35:41it apart. You know, I mean, I can actually look at it and go, you know, I do that differently now.
35:46You know, I could do that better, you know, but, but the fun thing is, is that everybody that,
35:51you know, like I run into on the street or in the movie business or whatever,
35:55they always say, do you realize that, you know, your monster creation and the thing
36:03was a life-changing monster? And I go, what does that mean? And, you know, like I even have,
36:07you know, kids that actually grew up watching it on video and they say, yeah, it was just so crazy,
36:13you know, and it just sort of made us realize that, you know, you could do anything in the
36:17movies, you know? So it was, it's fun to have, you know, that, you know, part in history is,
36:22you know, having made something that was so wildly imaginative that it's actually,
36:27you know, caused others to, you know, come up with greater dreams.
36:30There are some movies that you do. I've done more, I guess, than my fair share of them.
36:36And I do think that, you know, maybe that I have to sort of look at that and realize something,
36:39that I have a tendency to like movies that aren't going to perhaps be accepted at the time.
36:46And if they're done well, though, they will be accepted later on. And I think that with the
36:50advent of video, that's a great, I'm very happy about that because ultimately you're making
36:57movies for the enjoyment of as many people as possible. And I like that there's video and that
37:02people can take it and make their judgment later on and perhaps without the politics of the time
37:08or without whatever's in the air at the time to set a tone to get in the way of just the project
37:14and just the story itself. There's a very somber, a somber kind of inevitability to the film.
37:23As it begins, you're seeing a helicopter flying and they're chasing a dog. And already it's,
37:29it feels like the end of the world to me. And that's what this is. This is an apocalyptic
37:34movie. This is the first of three films that I've worked on that have an apocalyptic theme.
37:39And I've dealt with them in different ways. This is the end of the world. It doesn't come from
37:44bombs dropping. It comes from within. And it was a movie that's tone started and
37:51and finished. And then basically it was almost there's nothing you can do because here it comes.
37:58And of course the thing is a metaphor for whatever you want to say. It's
38:02disease. It could be AIDS. It could be whatever. But it comes from within you. It's also
38:09basically the lack of trust that's in the world now. We see it all over. Countries, people.
38:16We don't trust each other anymore. We don't know who to trust.
38:20We're with somebody that we think maybe they're our loved ones and they may attack us.
38:26And that's what the thing is. It has a lot of truth in it kind of dressed up as a monster movie.
39:32It's a monster movie. It's a monster movie. It's a monster movie. It's a monster movie.
39:35It's a monster movie. It's a monster movie. It's a monster movie. It's a monster movie.
40:32It's a monster movie. It's a monster movie.