ARGENTO: This is a very important occasion, because it is the first time that you and I have a public meeting and I wonder what you think is going to happen. I don't know: we could kiss each other, we could say "fuck off" to each other, we may fight too. Or we could get married and shoot a movie right now, right here, at the end of the evening. Why not? Ghezzi (an Italian critic and filmmaker) can help us, as he is already shooting. Anyway, we have here an enormous book on you, it weighs 50 pounds. There is written everything on you, nothing to add: Carpenter from his birth, his first love, pictures of all the people in his crew, everything. Therefore I think that the only thing I have to ask is something I'm not personally interested in. Frankly, of him as a director I don't care to know how he realised a certain shoot, how he had to fight for making that film, etc... I want to know where and how he was born, what his family was and how he got to make movies. For me this is a mystery: how on a certain day a person begins to make movies and becomes a famous director, among millions of people. How can you do that? And, thereafter, why did Carpenter deal with the human fear and restlessness among all the topics? This is what I want to ask John.

CARPENTER: I was born in 1948, in January, in NYC. When I was five I moved with my family to a little town in the South of the United States. I owe those locals everything I learned and knew about people. I became a director first because I fell in love with the movies and the cinema. When I was four I saw 'IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE' (by Jack Arnold, 1952) and I began to make movies when I was eight. My father bought me a camcorder and from the very beginning I tried to reproduce into the images the feeling of evil I had from this little town, trying to convey that to the people who would eventually saw it.

ARGENTO: It seems that that present, the camcorder your father bought, was of fundamental importance.

CARPENTER: Not just important: besides the camcorder, my father gave me the love for music - he was a teacher of music and he transmitted me his joy - and I grew up listening to him. He was the soundtrack of my life. My mother, instead, gifted me with a great imagination. These two things and the camera pushed me in this direction. I began to study cinema and a bit by chance I became a director, for being in the right place at the right time.

ARGENTO: You studied in Los Angeles, but you attended the right university, for usually who studies in LA goes to the UCLA, while you were at the USC, a place where you seriously study cinema, a real university, not that of Spielberg and Lucas. A place where you hit it hard. And everybody who love cinema is aware of that.

CARPENTER: You are right. At the USC you have to learn everything about cinema: shooting, sound, lighting, editing, acting, writing, directing, everything. There I learnt everything. But now, let's talk a bit about you...

ARGENTO: Well, I come from a family where they made cinema, and I've been very close to this world since I was a child. My mother was a photographer and my father worked as a producer. When I was eighteen I finished to go to school and I began to work in a newspaper writing about cinema, writing reviews, making interviews. I would be very good at writing an interview for a newspaper, but this is exactly what I want to avoid, because I am interested to know something deeper. But you have to know that I was very good at writing very light interviews, as the newspapers want. About me and how I got close to the cinema, I always think of a series of casual facts, but also to an almost unconscious need. I thought I was happy in writing about cinema, it was something that fitted me, and when I began to write as a pro - stories and script that at the beginning, they did not even realise - I thought it was the best work in the world, alone with my typewriter. After I became a director too, and that was less funny. I know John's opinion is different, because he considers the writing as the worst part of his job, while the shooting is the most exciting. For me it is the opposite: I get excited when I write, while when I shoot, with all the technicians around, the confusion... You wrote a lot of films, not just for you, also for others, using different noms de plume. You are, therefore, a very productive person, from this point of view. Why, indeed, do you state that you don't love this phase?

CARPENTER: Because it is painful. Directing a film means to be on the set with the actors, the lights, the operator, and that is what I do love. The writing process is very different, intellectual, analytic, you choose to use certain words and certain images instead of others. On the contrary, when I am on the set I talk to the actors, the technicians, I feel at home. I drink a lot of coffee and I smoke lots of cigarettes and I think: "This is the place where I always wanted to be, the set". Where do your fears come from?

ARGENTO: This is the deadliest question I have to answer to, so I ask him the same, so he gets the lesson. I have to admit that I don't know where the fear comes from it is a matter of instinct. To be sincere -as I tell a lot of lies, because the people want to know about this fear and I am forced to answer - I do not know where it comes from. From the deep, I think, from something dealing with my childhood. Perhaps the hallway I had in my childhood house, too long? Maybe it is that... He talked about the first film he saw and I also remember that the first horror movie of my life, 'THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA' (the 1943 version, starring Claude Rains, directed by Arthur Lubin) did change my life, helping me discover a world to me unknown. I didn't know of a world where there were ghosts, such obscure passions, people living underground. I couldn't even imagine it, and I think it fascinated me a lot. Then, when I was a boy, I had a long illness that forced me to stay in bed for months without being able to move - I had a rheumatic fever - and in that period I read the books from my Father's library. I read everything that was there, essays, Shakespeare... One day I happened to read a collection of Poe's stories: another mad falling in love. All this led me to the discovery of that famous door behind which, once opened, you find an unknown scenario, completely different. Many people ask me - and I am going to ask you too - why I don't make movies of another genre, but for me it is impossible. Once you've found this door and you have passed the sill, feeling such intense and destructive sensations, to the limits of the impossible, how can you go back and tell about the everyday facts, the normal life, you who are used to fantasies, to monsters coming out from the clefts, to a girl who enters a college and discovers that all the teachers are witches... How can you go back?

CARPENTER: I think this is a very good answer. Mine, to the same question, is going to be simpler and more direct, maybe more boring. My family was a family from the North that moved to the South, in times of segregation and heavy racism. We were outsiders, strangers in a strange land, characterized by a hate I couldn't understand, to me senseless. I was growing up in a sort of heaven made by our home and the family, but outside there were people with a different culture, with religious and racial prejudices that wounded me and made me feel misplaced. And I found the only way out from all this in the movies: watching fantastic films I began to identify myself with the dark side, the evil, the vampires, the monsters gripped on the skyscrapers, the ghosts... They were isolated creatures too, as I was, and in my films I often told of persons entrapped in a certain ambient or under siege from the outside. I think it fundamentally was a way to go back and fight this negative culture that surrounded me. I'd like my answer to be as poetical as yours...

ARGENTO: Mine was not a poetical answer but almost a drug-addict answer, because I am addicted to these films. Instead, your story is very beautiful... But I wanted to know something more about your team. You created and put together a group of collaborators and you went on with them for a long time. Besides, I've known one of them, Dan O'Bannon, who is an exquisite and very intelligent person. Can you tell me something about this?

CARPENTER: I remember the first time I went to LA - we are talking about 1968 - I had to go from the airport to the University. I bought a city map and the distance seemed enormous to me, but it was a beautiful day, so I began walking with my two suitcases. An hour after I was still in of the airport! Two hours later I was practically lost... Until I met someone who very kindly came with me to the University. After this first hard period I began to make many friends at the University, they were all people who loved cinema and wanted to make movies as I did. In the first year we were 99, all sure to become directors, one day or the other, until our teacher said: "Maybe only one of you will succeed". Everybody thought they would be that one - I myself did - and the strangest thing is that the best ones, the ones I admired most, never arrived in Hollywood, others did not even realise a single film. I think there is an essential quality that allow you to go on in the film making, a sort of unnatural obsession... The group around me shared this obsession beginning to make low budget films. My first film cost $60,000 and screened on my birthday. It was great, I would have never thought to have a chance of that kind. One day, I used to say to myself, a big limousine will come to my house and a man will say: "Mr. Carpenter, come with us to the Studios, we want you to direct a movie for us". But such a thing did not happened. Nobody seemed to be interested in us. So I decided to write scripts: in Hollywood you can earn a lot writing scripts that maybe would never be realised. I thought it was simple but I wanted to direct a film anyway. So my friends and I, with the same unnatural obsession, ground our teeth and little by little the film began to come...

ARGENTO: I want to say something more about this topic of the school and the team. Indeed, when I was younger I also had my group, people with whom I only talked of cinema and everybody wanted to make films, but I felt the less gifted, maybe also the less clever, the less enthusiastic. Of those 20-30 persons I thought I was the last, the one who had least chance of all. Instead I've been the only one who made films for real and sometimes I meet those people that didn't succeed - they have become lawyers, teachers. I meet them and I almost want to ask them: "How did it happen, if you did not succeed, how did I?". Maybe because I was the most stubborn fellow, you don't need to be genial to make movies, you need to be very precise, maybe. Anyway I wanted to ask Carpenter something else, something a bit alarming. We make this terrible movies, we move so many of these energies, of these forces: didn't you ever think - as I did - one day, to break unintentionally this sort of Pandora's vase where there is all your madness, and that all those horrible things, all those scaring thoughts invade you, and make you end like Poe or Van Gogh?

CARPENTER: No, I realised that since I've begun to make a horror or a science fiction film I've always slept well. I transmitted this restlessness to other people, not to myself. It's not that I am scared by my own films, because I stay always on the human being side, I do not identify myself with the evil, the murderer or the monster, I stay with those who try to defend themselves from all this. I think this allows me to have a good sleep, to have a calm life, to watch basketball and wrestling matches. What else do I need?

ARGENTO: well, that is a good hope for me, because I am obsessed with the fact that, one day, while I am shaving, I hit this crystal vase and boom it breaks and lets out all the evil, these frightening things, until I feel a sort of reject for the humanity and I cannot live anymore. I thank John for telling me this story because I also want to sleep as well. There is one thing that everybody may ask themselves. Mr. Carpenter, do you believe in magic, in these disquieting worlds?

CARPENTER: Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I do not believe in any kind of supernatural phenomenon, demons, ghosts, UFO's, witchcraft... We are here, we live only one life, we must try to make it the best possible. I do believe, indeed, in the supernatural of the screen where it lives, there are our fears, our dreams, our hopes. It is the screen only where we deal with these fantastic worlds. I believe in the real life, in the things that stand before me, in the nature, but... If tonight someone saw a UFO in the sky, I would certainly be pleased to see it.

ARGENTO: I've never seen a single UFO in my life, and I've never known a witch, but, from a cultural point of view, to me that is a very interesting thing, and you cannot state they don't exist. I had this kind of experiences only in my mind, in my long nights, in my nightmares, many times. Then I did try to meet a witch, for a film I had to make, I travelled around Europe, I met a lot of them, I spent a lot of money, but I never saw anything, apart from coincidences, synchronicities... Anyway, as Carpenter, I do not believe in the supernatural either. I want now to ask Carpenter his opinion about a debate still in progress, i.e.: is John Carpenter a man of the Left or of the Right wing?

CARPENTER: Left or Right? What do you think?

ARGENTO: I think John Carpenter is a saint, so he's not a leftist nor a member of the Right wing.

CARPENTER: Listen, I want to tell you something. I do love the country where I live, but I'm not afraid to criticize it for the things that don't work. we have too many McDonald's, we give too much importance to the celebrities, there is a whole series of bad things. But I am a capitalist too, I earn money, I'm attracted by money. If there's someone in this room who wants to give me some money to make a film, I will do it, if I am well paid. It will be a film of mine, anyway, because this is what I want to do: it can be a bad movie, that does not come out as I wanted to, anyway it is my film. My parents were of the Democratic party, my grannies went through the Great Depression, and we learnt to appreciate values as the social security. On the other side in my father's family there was a famous patriot, he was one of the revolutionaries that chased the English and French away. We have never chased away the Italian, they are welcome... So I am not interested to think in Right or Left terms, but in humanity, in relationship terms. I'd like one day if we could take all the prejudices and the hatred that existed to throw them away and start from the beginning. It can sound silly, maybe it is a bit pretentious, I apologize.

ARGENTO: Now I want to ask a less challenging question, I know that one would have embarrassed you. You consider yourself as a great pilot, you often reach the set by your helicopter. Is it true that piloting a helicopter is one of the thing that most fascinates you?

CARPENTER: Piloting a helicopter is an absolutely different experience. In the 80s I made the film 'THE THING' (1982) and we had lots of helicopters, I could see them taking-off and landing... The helicopter can go up and down, go aside, backward, it is like when you dream to fly. I saw these people piloting them and I thought: "It must be easy, I want to try it too". I also thought that if I wanted to make movies about brave men, I should have tested my braveness too. The first time was not at all good - there are quite complicated commands on a helicopter - my teacher showed me what to do in case of an emergency landing. He turned off the engine and we began to fall like a stone from the sky, until in the very last moment, he made a wild manoeuvre and we finally touched the ground. He said: "Now you know what an emergency landing looks like". I replied: "Didn't we crash?". Some time after that it was a thing I used to do every day: turning off the engine - like going on the rollercoaster - and down you go. I love the helicopters because they are very different from planes. The plane is forced to go forward, it needs speed, when an helicopter can stand still, can go backward. Of course it can be more dangerous, but I always touch wood...

ARGENTO: Yes, we Italians touch other things, we are a bit more trivial. Anyway I want to ask Carpenter another question: '1997: ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK' is a very beautiful film, that had enormous success too. It is a bizarre work in your filmography. What did you want to say with that film?

CARPENTER: '1997' was strongly influenced by a novel called 'PLANET OF THE DAMNED', in which a sort of criminal is sent to a planet that is the worst place in the universe, where he has to accomplish a certain mission. I thought it was a good plot for a film. So I said: "Let's say that someone is sent to the worst place on Earth. What is this place? New York City, of course". The character played by Ken Russel is a recurring character in my movies, he is the last one left in America, the last man, all the others are corrupted. I loved to make that movie, but we didn't shoot it in New York. Anyway, is it true that here in Turin there is a square named after you?

ARGENTO: Yes, a cab driver told me that there is a Dario Argento square... There is something I really want to know: did Carpenter, who always reached the visual borderlines of what can be told, undergo a lot of censorship?

CARPENTER: In the USA, when you finish your film you show it to the censorship committee, formed by critics, but also teachers, housewife's... They are the ones who state what is acceptable and what is not, then it's up to you to make some changes, to modify something. Every year is different, you cannot say for sure that some thing is good, some times they are very conservative, other times they are more liberal. I had a hard experience with the censorship for one of my first movies, 'ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13' (1976). There is a sequence in which a child is killed by revolver-shots, and the committee rated the film with an X. So I cut the shot, I showed them again, and they said it was ok, that it was good in that way. Then I succeeded and managed with the distribution, so the film showed in the theatres with its original length. Now they are smarter, it is more difficult to cheat on them. I had troubles with my last film too, as they told me: "We do not have problems with the violence if it is motivated, but we cannot allow this chaotic and unmotivated violence", so we had to cut out several things. In a way, sex and violence are the two things people don't want to see, but, at the same time, they are attracted and they want to see them. What do you think about it?

ARGENTO: I had troubles with the censorship of all my movies, because the Italian committees are terrible. But now there is a new law, here like in France or Spain, for what you cannot completely forbid the film, but just forbid it to people under 14 or 18 years old. That is a positive thing, at least better then what happened in the past, when you could not go out with certain films. Indeed, I think there is a subtler and nastier censorship, not the national one, the one John has talked about, but the majors' one. They force you to cut, they are the biggest censors of the world, they tell you that you must cut a certain scene, even before showing before the committee. In any case I do hate the censors. Once I wrote a story for an English newspaper, 'THE INDEPENDENT'. It was about a boy and a girl, she is at the end of her pregnancy, and in the evening they are both excited as there's on Tv the first broadcasting of 'OPERA' by Dario Argento. They begin to watch the film, and after thirty minutes the girl feels bad, she throws up, is carried to the hospital and there she has an abortion. Why? because the censor cut out so many sequences of the movie as to make it unrecognisable. So the boy kills the censors one by one, in the same way as of the scenes they cut. I want to add something: recently I did a trip around different European countries, and now I have a new campaign to fight for: "Put the censors in jail". We must condemn them! You prosecute someone who enters a museum and rips a painting, so why does not the censor go to jail, as he does the same thing? I want that to be retroactive too, i.e. I want to see in jail also those who now are 70 or 80 and slaughtered my movies, and also the Orion functionary that cut out 25 minutes out of 'OPERA'. Twenty-five minutes!

CARPENTER: In this new 'politically correct' environment in America your extraordinary films would be banned, thus I totally agree and I join your campaign against censorship.

ARGENTO: Anyway, the 'politically correct' changes day by day. I want to recall an episode regarding my first meeting with the public, after my first or second film. I am very shy, and after the film, in a terrible anxiety, I said some scrambled words to the public then I asked them if there were questions and they began to insult me. The sort of well dressed people, who came to the cinema with their good ties and so on, they told me I sucked: "Aren't you ashamed to show all that blood, all that violence, do you know that you can be arrested?". I tried to defend myself without knowing what to do, when a furious girl suddenly sprang up and said: "You are a bastard fascist, a crook, you show all these killed women, I hope some feminist will smack your face". I didn't know what to say, so I replied: "I hope to kick her ass". This was my first hallucinating experience, all the hall was against me, I had no one on my side, I was desperate, unable to defend myself, I was the accused one. There was a great French writer and film critic, who tells a freezing thing in his autobiography. His readers accused him of being a fascist, but he was not, he used to look at himself in the mirror and said: "This is not a fascist face". At the end, looking at himself he discovered a little feature on his face that looked fascist, indeed. I do not know, the eyes too deep, the eyebrows too marked, so he tried to make up, to hide this feature, but at the end he admitted to being a fascist.

CARPENTER: Don't you think that being in the films, a part of the business, of a trade, the critics too are a part of them? Protecting the community, certain values?

ARGENTO: What values? I do protect values, the censor doesn't, he does not protect any value, nothing. I remember once the chief of one of these censorship committees, a judge, said to me: "I have never experienced fear in my whole life". I replied: "How is that possible, never? A thunder, slipping form the stairs, your wife ill...". And he said: "Never, never, I've always been dominating". Then I said: "You are mad, you just dominate your madness, nothing else". You can see that this censorship issue anguished me all my life long. I want to tell you about a common friend, George Romero, with whom I co-produced 'DAWN OF THE DEAD' (1979) that had its world premiere right in this cinema, many years ago. I still remember it was crowded and everybody clapped their hands. I partially wrote the script too and I worked on the music too, because, like the master Carpenter, sometimes I enjoy to write some music. We shared the world in halves. I said to George: "I will deal with Europe, the contacts with the critics, I will manage to have the best possible screening, and so on". In Italy the film was forbidden to people under 18, quite a hard thing. In the following month we presented the film in France and it was wholly rejected. I asked to be heard for adding some more cuts, because George told me to do that, for the film to go out. No way, in France there was this law that you could not present the movie immediately after, but 18 months after and after changing the film. After one year and a half I was there again and all my changing was to put two sequences in different places. The film was rejected again. I phoned George and I said, very ashamed, that the film did not pass that time either. He went mad with the French and said to me: "What do we do now?". And I said: "I don't know, let's try again in a year and a half". So I cut little things to show my good will: rejected again. After six years there's a new government. I call George and I said: "good news, in France the old government fell and there is a new one, that is supposed to be more liberal. Let's try again, but presenting them the original version of the film, without any cuts, and let's see how the story ends". The film was accepted.

CARPENTER: In the USA it works in a different way and I never had to face such a situation. Basically, every film that is a bit disturbing is doomed to be censored, and I say not just by the special commission, but also by the press, by the Tv and generally by the media. For some reason they think that disturbing images can be bad for the beholder. There's a debate in progress now in the USA: everybody complains of the violence in the movies for a slaughter happened in a high school, where two boys armed to the teeth killed a lot of people of the same age. In this way they try to find some guilty parties and it is easy for the films to be accused. For many Americans the films we make are just above pornography, just a bit. A film that came out recently in the United States, 'FIGHT CLUB' - I suggest everybody watches it - has been unanimously condemned. I don't think that the situation is going to change, on the contrary, I think it never changed. When I was a boy, a psychologist told us that keeping on reading comics and watching movies like 'GODZILLA' would eventually make us idiots. It is always the same story. It is common to think that a particularly violent film can stimulate one to do the same things he saw in it. They talked of this, for instance, about 'NATURAL BORN KILLERS', thought guilty of having pushed several people to murder. The only time when someone copied a film for real was in 1904, when, after having seen 'THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY', some people assaulted and robbed a train in Ohio. As you can see, that is a very old story.

ARGENTO: At the beginning of this meeting I said it could have ended with a fight, and maybe that is going to be the way it ends, as I completely disagree about this issue. It is not us who are responsible for what society creates, we show the facts that happen. I want to tell John how the Italian painters in the Renaissance used to paint really terrible and frightening images, Devil's images, saints tortured, but nobody thought they were criminals to be put in a jail. In his times, Caravaggio was not persecuted for the themes in his paintings, but because he gambled, he was a brawling man. About 'NATURAL BORN KILLERS', there's been an all Italian version, far more ridiculous. Sergio Leone, whom I worked with, told me that many years ago there was out in Italy a film with Clint Eastwood, 'HANG'EM HIGH'. It was a light film, maybe a little stupid, but someone, in Genova, hung himself after seeing the film. There was an enormous campaign against the movie, that, compared to Leone's films, was a film for kids. This is to say that I don't believe that people rob or go on racist punishment missions because they saw that in the films. They do such things because they are on the street and they take their examples from there. The films have nothing to do with that, they are just fantasy things. Of course, in this book Carpenter himself talks about some American directors who are not real directors, they are taken to make some film as they were robots, and obviously they make harmless films, because they do those for the majors, and the majors want them to be made in that way. Anyway it is never the director who changes the world. There are concrete historical events, then the director can retell them. When we portray the horrors and the fears of society, we document existing things, we tell the truth. I don't believe in a militant cinema, acting on reality, at least not up to this point. I have to say that, in my boyhood, I grew up inside a kind of Italian militant cinema and this pushed me to do the opposite.

CARPENTER: Don't you think that cinema transformed the world, in a way? Don't you think that it brought us places never seen before, although just by imagination? Don't you think that the cinema has been the art of this century? And even though it does not change the world, don't you think that it moves us, frightens us, changes us as people? Don't you think that the movies are such an important thing, such a part of our humanity that we must not forget their power, their ability to make us dream? How would the world be without cinema? That's why I think that, although the cinema does not change the world, it does transform me, my life, and I'd hope my films did the same to other people. The cinema allows you to talk the same language with other people, to reach them. This is the power I am talking about, the power of the art that goes beyond everything. Having said that, I suggest we get drunk together and watch a match on Tv!

ARGENTO: Of course, but, put in this way, it seems that Carpenter is absolutely right and I am absolutely wrong, but it's not. I was talking of another aspect: the cinema did change my life. As I told you, when I saw 'THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA' for the first time in an outdoor cinema, my life changed. The only reality that exists for me is that of the cinema. Once I read an interview with Stanley Kubrick, in which he talked about the beauty of Greece, of the Parthenon, of some streets in Athens, and the journalist said to him: "Gosh! You do know Greece so well! How many times have you been there?". And he replied: "Never, not a single time, but I saw a lot of movies and documentaries". What the cinema reflects is something deeper than the reality.

translation from the Italian by Francesco Locane

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