John Carpenter Slams Studio for Ruining His Vision

John Carpenter, known for his knack for cult classics and a string of influential films, has never really had the luxury of being left to his own devices by the big studios. While he’s delivered some absolute belters like Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape from New York, and The Thing when given a bit of freedom, his time working with major Hollywood players often left him feeling sidelined and frustrated.

Take Big Trouble in Little China for example. The folks at 20th Century Fox didn’t quite know what to do with it, so they started meddling. But it was his experience with New Line Cinema on In the Mouth of Madness that really pushed him over the edge. Carpenter recalled,

“the head of the studio wanted to gut it and throw it out, said it didn’t work.”

Even though his later films, apart from his last, The Ward, were distributed by big names, most were actually funded by smaller, independent outfits.

Early Frustrations and Studio Meddling

Carpenter’s run-ins with studio interference started early. After wrapping up his first feature, Dark Star, producer Jack H Harris picked up an 11-page treatment Carpenter had written, simply titled Eyes. When Columbia Pictures got involved, Carpenter was asked to turn it into a full script. But before the cameras rolled, David Zelag Goodman had heavily rewritten his drafts, and the project morphed into Eyes of Laura Mars.

The finished film starred Faye Dunaway as a fashion photographer who suddenly finds herself able to see through the eyes of a serial killer. The killer is targeting people close to her, so she teams up with the NYPD to try and catch the culprit, even though she’s got no idea who it is.

Carpenter’s Original Vision Gets Lost

Carpenter wasn’t shy about his disappointment. He explained,

“They got some things wrong, I thought. The original idea was that, for whatever reason, you can make it psychic, whatever, this woman begins to see through the eyes of a murderer. If that were true, if that really happened, all sorts of things would happen to her. When the killer moved, she wouldn’t be able to. She’d be on the floor, fall over. It would be a visual that’s not controlled by her.”

None of that made it into the final cut, and Carpenter was left frustrated that all the suspenseful elements he’d imagined were stripped away.

He summed it up bluntly:

“They just fucked it up in that sense. The explanation was on a TV set, I remember. They pointed to it. ‘I see this’. Come on.”

Left Out and Let Down

Carpenter’s only credit on Eyes of Laura Mars was as a co-writer, and he was never in the running to direct. Still, the experience left a sour taste.

“It wasn’t a pleasant experience,”

he admitted.

“The original script was very good, I thought.”

Once the project was out of his hands, he didn’t mince words about what happened:

“It got shat upon.”