The Fog of Gore

A. V. Club has posted an interview with John Carpenter:

Director John Carpenter is a veritable anomaly in modern Hollywood: a veteran craftsman who eschews auteurism. Carpenter grew up in Kentucky as a fan of tough genre movies, and went to film school at USC at a time when cinema studies emphasized the old Hollywood masters. After bursting out of the gate with an Academy Award for "The Resurrection Of Broncho Billy," a short student film he co-wrote, edited, and scored, Carpenter prepared himself for a career in the Howard Hawks mold: a life of making lean, truthful movies in a variety of genres. Then Halloween happened.

Indeed. And while the after-effects of that 'happening' have been uneven, I'd have to say that on the whole it counts as a Good Thing. The interview doesn't really cover any new turf, but there are some good nuggets:

AVC: How do you make the leap from being somebody who likes to watch movies to somebody with the confidence to make them? JC: I have no idea. [Laughs.] 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 and move on to another plane, if you know what I mean. You can't just be a fan. 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. And the tools keep changing each year. Anybody can make a movie now, if you have the will. The digital revolution has made it very inexpensive to make a film. Anybody who wants to can do it.

(With all due apologies to von Clausewitz for the title... ) [spotted whilst perusing The Onion this morning].