John Carpenter Quotes
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When I got into the movie business, working with actors was the one thing I was really weak at. I didn't know what to say to actors. They scared me and intimidated me. The actors that I've worked with who have had a lot of experience, or who I've even grown up watching as a kid, were really scary. I was like, "What am I going to say to this person?" But, I've matured. It's fun. I understand what actors do now.
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One could make money and get a career going with a low-budget horror film about killers attacking on holidays. It is always flattering to have somebody copy you.
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From early on, when synthesizers were first introduced into music, I liked the idea that you could get a big sound with them - electronic, but like an orchestra. And I could play it all myself. That was exciting.
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I stopped directing in 2001 for - oh, damn - four or five years, until I did the TV series 'Masters Of Horror.' I had been working steadily as a director since 1970. That's a long time. I was burned out.
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To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.
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When somebody who makes movies for a living - either as an actor, writer, producer or director - lives to be a certain age, you have to admire them. It is an act of courage to make a film - a courage for which you are not prepared in the rest of life. It is very hard and very destructive. But we do it because we love it.
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From a will: And to my communist nephew Oswald, I leave the sum of 10,000 pounds - to be shared equally with his fellow Britishers.
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We've got the prettiest girls in the world here in Los Angeles and there's a great music scene. And I learned what I learned about cinema here in Los Angeles so it's always been really important to me as a city to live in and I love making movies about it.
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When you have no money, you need invention.
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The strongest human emotion is fear. It's the essence of any good thriller that, for a little while, you believe in the boogeyman.
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To make movies you just have to want it enough. You have to have the passion for telling stories. You have to get by the love-of-movies aspect. You can't just be a movie fan.
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We all question our sanity. Everyone has had an experience of loss of control of something.
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Horror found me. I got into the movie business to make westerns.
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Movies are pieces of film stuck together in a certain rhythm, an absolute beat, like a musical composition. The rhythm you create affects the audience.
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It [horror genre] never dies. It just keeps getting reinvented and it always will. Horror is a universal language; we're all afraid. We're born afraid, we're all afraid of things: death, disfigurement, loss of a loved one. Everything that I'm afraid of, you're afraid of and vice versa. So everybody feels fear and suspense.
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In Halloween, I viewed the characters as simply normal teenagers. Laurie, Jamie Lee's character, was shy and somewhat repressed. And Michael Myers, the killer, is definitely repressed. They have certain similarities.
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What scares me is what scares you. We’re all afraid of the same things. That’s why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you’ll know what frightens me.
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First of all, I was a wrestling fan when I was young. Even when I figured out what wrestling was, I was still a fan.
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Horror is always the same. It changes with the culture and changes with technology. The stories are always the same. There are just two basic stories in horror, two simple ones -- evil is outside and evil is in here [points to his heart].
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Fears are all psychological. Being afraid of death, loss of a loved one and disfigurement are all powered by your mind, and that's very powerful stuff.
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I think there are certain subjects I don't want to tackle, that I don't think I could do a good job with. I don't think I'd be good with... broad comedy? I don't know. Maybe I would.
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As a filmmaker, it's about surviving and lasting. So many talented people that I've known in my life - directors and writers - just haven't made it and haven't had a chance.
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I've gone through various periods with superheroes. They work in the right hands, but they don't work in other hands. It's tricky. But any movie is tricky. It's impossible to say, 'This is what you do in any situation.
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Remakes, in general, are a result of necessity being the mother of invention. They can't open movies consistently and break through the advertising clutter that's out there.
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You have to fight really hard for a private life, and sometimes you don't have one. It just gets to you after a while. It's tough.
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What a director does... essentially, it's storytelling, but a director also controls the feeling and the sounds and the texture. It's an act of creation, like a symphony or a painting or a story. But with different tools.
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There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don't understand. Internal is the human heart.
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It's a very good time for horror. This business certainly has changed, but there's still room for serious horror films. Look at 28 Days Later, that's not a tongue-in-cheek picture.
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Horror stories have always worked on film. It's where they work. That's where vampires and ghosts and UFOs are real. They're not particularly real in life, but they're real on the screen. It's the communal aspect of movie-watching.
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Horror has been a genre since the beginning of cinema, all the way back to the days of silent films. I don't think it will ever go away because it's so universal. Humor doesn't always travel to other countries, but horror does.
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