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Timothy S. Johnston on John Carpenter's film The Thing
104 Plays11 months ago
Joe and Mark are joined by Canadian writer of futuristic and contemporary mystery/thrillers, Timothy S. Johnston.
They discuss the classic 1982 science fiction horror movie, The Thing. Directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell, watching The Thing was a pivotal moment in Timonthy's life.
"It was a watershed moment for me!"
He'd already read the novelization of the movie, and there were themes that appealed to him even then, such as the isolation of the remote research station in Antarctica. He also loved the richness of the characters.
It's an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, says Timothy, which is one of the aspects of the script that drew John Carpenter to the film.
The three have a deep and nerdy conversation about more details of the masterpiece, John Carpenter's career, and what can be learned from it.
For more info on this episode, please visit the show notes page.
Re-Creative is a co-production of Donovan Street Press Inc. and MonkeyJoy Press.
Contact us: [email protected]
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Transcript
Childhood Fears and Influences
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, Mark. Joe, what terrifies you? Actually, no, I've got a more specific question. What terrified you like between the ages of, I don't know, say nine and 13?
00:00:21
Speaker
9 and 13. Okay. I got to think back a couple of years. I'm trying to, I mean, there's like the obvious, you know, things that people are afraid of, like, you know, silly things like death and, and public speaking and that sort of thing. But back then, I, you know, one of the things that terrified me the most back then was the thought of having to sing
Introduction to Timothy S. Johnston
00:00:40
Speaker
in public. Oh, really? Okay.
00:00:43
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And that didn't go away until just a few weeks ago. Now I'm like, okay with singing in public. Well, you're much more grounded than me because I was terrified of vampires. I actually slept. Yeah. I saw Salem's lot about that time. I can't remember what year, how old I was, but I saw Salem's lot and I was like,
00:01:03
Speaker
Well, shit, that's a problem. I'm sorry. I don't normally swear, but that's actually how I felt. There's so much for the clean. Yeah. So much. Oh, well, well done. And I was like, you know what? I think I'll just, I'll, I'll hedge my bets here. I'll have a little garlic next to me when I sleep because I didn't have a cross available. Huh. And are you still afraid of vampires to the same? Not to the same degree. The concept still bothers me quite a bit, especially emotional vampires or, you know,
00:01:33
Speaker
the kind that we actually can meet in life. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. One of which has not joining us today. No. Our guest is not one of those emotional vampires. We've only just met, but I can tell that already.
00:01:49
Speaker
Yeah, not at all. Not an emotional vampire. But my question would be not what terrifies you from the age of nine to 13, but what still terrifies you to this day. And it would be the film that we're going to talk about today. The thing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And we will get to that. But first of all, just to identify you, Timothy S. Johnston, what does he stand for? My middle initial and my middle name, Sefton named after my father. That is a great name.
00:02:16
Speaker
Thank you so much, sir. Thank you for having me today, too. I'm honored. Before we go any further, what else can you tell us about yourself?
Influences and Early Inspirations
00:02:25
Speaker
You're a writer like us, and give us the whole spiel. That's a big question. It's a deep question as well. Born in 1970?
00:02:36
Speaker
raised here in London, raised on Detroit television, science fiction movies of the 70s. Soil and Green, Rollerball, Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, all the best science fiction movies growing up in the 70s. Silent Running.
00:02:53
Speaker
And then during that time, also fell in love with great authors, Edgar Allan Poe, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Stephen King a little later. And just totally and absolutely fell in love with the genre growing up here in London. A watershed moment for me was seeing a movie when I was 10 years old.
Journey to Becoming a Writer
00:03:17
Speaker
And that movie was not the one we're talking about today, but it was Ridley Scott's Alien.
00:03:23
Speaker
And believe it or not, I watched that when I was 10 years old and I watched it in a shopping mall in the audio visual center. They had it on a VHS tape, Betamax tape, and it was playing on constant repeat. And so every day at lunch, I would go across the street and I would watch Alien in this mall in 10-minute segments and I saw it out of order.
00:03:47
Speaker
So I had to piece it together in my mind. But the chestburster sequence, all that, I saw that much, much later, I actually saw the film in its entirety in the correct order. But it was a watershed film for me. It had a huge impact on me. And later on, when I was about 13, I read Jaws, I read The Exorcist, I read The Amnival Horror.
00:04:08
Speaker
and shortly after that I saw the thing on a top loading VHS tape at one of my brother's friend's houses because it was a restricted film and of course we couldn't rent
00:04:18
Speaker
I was only 13, 14 years old at the time, sorry, even younger, 12 or 13 at the time, and could not rent those. So I had to go over to my brother's friend's house to watch this. And it was a pivotal moment for me watching the thing. John Carpenter's the thing. And he was already a name in my household because of Kurt Russell in Escape from New York.
00:04:41
Speaker
Snake Pliskin. Snake Pliskin, iconic character that those two created, Carpenter and Russell. Perhaps one of the greatest director-actor combinations of all time, those two. And so it just was a watershed moment for me. Actually, before watching the thing, I had actually read it. In 1981, the novelization came out.
00:05:03
Speaker
I can't remember if I read in late, sorry, 81. I can't remember if I read in late 81 or early 82. I'm going to stop you there though, because before we get more into the thing, and we will, and because of all the other movies that you mentioned, Mark, brace yourself, this is going to be a three hour podcast. Okay.
Balancing Writing and Career
00:05:19
Speaker
Yeah, that's fine. I want to know more about you as a writer and like in your career to date. Tell us about that and then we'll get back to the thing.
00:05:29
Speaker
You've unlocked a can of worms here and this podcast is just going to be part one of, or one of many, but the books that I'd read, the movies that I had seen, they just kept snowballing from there, the Terminator after that. And then when I was about 17 years old, I decided, you know what, this is something that I would like to do as a career. I would walk into bookstores and I would look at all the books around me.
00:05:53
Speaker
I'd focus on the Asimov section or the Agatha Christie section. And I just sort of set it as a goal for myself to one day become one of those authors in those bookstores. And it took 25 years of hard work and hundreds and hundreds of rejections before my first book deal, which was for the furnace.
00:06:14
Speaker
which coincidentally is an homage to The Thing and it's inspired by Carpenter's The Thing and the imposter theme and Agatha Christie and that is a imposter themed murder mystery set in outer space and it's the first of three books in the series and those came out in 2013, 2014 and 2015.
00:06:36
Speaker
And I'm currently working on another series right now for Fitz Henry and Whiteside in Toronto, Canada. And it is an underwater cold war espionage climate change thriller. Are you now writing full time or is this like a gig at the side or?
00:06:52
Speaker
It's not a full-time gig for me. The possibility of earning enough to make a living while writing is daunting. It's something that I aspire to have, but currently also working in education.
00:07:07
Speaker
Right the same exactly yeah the number of people who are yeah i think there's two robert chase soyer and uh and margaret outwood terry fallace he was oh well now i think he had a whole other career he did he finally he retired actually that doesn't does that count if you retire.
00:07:25
Speaker
No, I don't think so. No. And I think Robert Charles Wilson, I think he was writing full time. So then maybe, yeah, there's probably a few more. I'm pretty sure Emma Donahue. I mentioned her before lives in the neighborhood and I'm pretty sure she's full time. Yeah. Yeah. Another Londoner. Yes. Another Londoner. Yes. There's, yeah. There's actually quite a little artistic community here in London, Ontario. Absolutely. So you've, uh, you've got the one trilogy out. You're working on another trilogy.
00:07:50
Speaker
The second series is six books and the sixth book is due in only two weeks. It's called A Blanket of Steel, the sixth and final book in the underwater colonization series. That's not something a lot of writers are writing about is how unexplored the oceans are because they really are really unexplored. And there's some interesting possibilities in terms of farming on the ocean and mining in the ocean. We're not really doing that yet.
00:08:19
Speaker
Right. Think The Abyss Meets James Bond. It comes from my days of being educated at the University of Western Ontario, also here in
New Series and Themes
00:08:31
Speaker
London. At the time, everyone was talking about global warming, the greenhouse effect, rising waters, inundated coastal cities.
00:08:39
Speaker
And I just got to thinking way back, so this is way back in 89, 90, 91, I got to thinking, you know, we're going to need more resources. We are going to need something to alleviate the pressures on populations on land. And the oceans are a natural outlet for that. Untold resources, mineral and farming, fishing, aquaculture. And I just got to thinking that it makes sense that
00:09:05
Speaker
we would start to develop those resources and it would trigger another Cold War.
00:09:10
Speaker
uh, when, when it happens. And so I, it just all came together. And in 2008, I wrote, um, the war beneath, uh, later picked up for publication, uh, and published in 2018. So the first book was called the war beneath. And it's like I said, it's James Bond meets the abyss. It's, it's, uh, colonizing the ocean floor and every, every city on the ocean floor has a espionage agency and they're all competing for the biggest slice of the pie, so to speak.
00:09:39
Speaker
You keep mentioning all these things that I love. I love James Bond. I love the movie The Abyss. I mean, the ending was a little dodgy, but I love the rest of it.
00:09:47
Speaker
Who doesn't love these things? This is the recipe for life and it's something that I've been looking forward to talking to you about because a good story has incredible power. The ones that resonate the most and have the most power are the ones that have multiple layers and things that we can keep talking about years and years later, like the thing. And I mean, escapism is something that we need today more than ever before.
00:10:13
Speaker
I was bugging you, you know, before we got you on the podcast. I'm like, you know, what are we going to talk about? And nudged you towards the thing and everything. And now that we're actually doing that, I find I have all these other things I want to talk to you about. Oh no, we have to talk about the thing though, because I just watched it. So I'm still, I need
Changing Reading Habits
00:10:33
Speaker
to decompress, so to speak.
00:10:35
Speaker
Yes. Yes. Well, we will, but okay. But first I just gotta, I gotta pick a Timothy's brain a little bit. You're obviously interested in all the same stuff that I am and probably Mark and whatnot. And one of those things is selling books and the importance of story and that sort of thing. So I was out selling books today because one of the things that I kind of believe in is hustling and getting out there and meeting people and talking to them about books and whatnot.
00:11:00
Speaker
A lot of people came by. The first question that we often ask people is, do you read? Do you like to read? And there's a lot of people that say, well, no, I don't read. I want to ask you in your experience, do you think that people still read to the same extent? Is this something that we need as writers need to be concerned about?
00:11:19
Speaker
It's a tough question. Do they still read to the same extent? I think there's always a core group that do, and my family, my daughters definitely do. But audiobooks have grabbed hold of a huge portion of the population, especially commuting population. So where we've maybe lost a few readers in one medium, we've gained them in another. I do know some of the stats. I mean, people are reading more, but fewer people are reading more.
00:11:47
Speaker
So people are still reading, and I think book sales generally are up, but that's from a smaller population. And I will tell you this, from my experience in the classroom, I'll bring the classroom in here, I don't get the impression that most of my undergrads are reading very much. In fact, I hear from all my colleagues that it's really hard to get their students to read even required materials.
00:12:13
Speaker
So I'm slightly concerned about that. And I think you're right to be worried about it, Joe, because I do think we're moving into that sort of post-literate society that some media scholars have talked about for some time. I think we're starting to get there. So yeah, I think it's a reasonable question to be worried about. But maybe as Timothy suggests, okay, so we do the books for the people that are still reading, but then do the audio books for the people that
00:12:40
Speaker
We are creatures of story, like we are the storytelling animal. So that's in our DNA. So that's never going to go away. We just find it reflected in different ways.
00:12:53
Speaker
The storytelling is key to society, key to escapism. And when I talk to creative writing groups or creative writing students, I don't talk about writing. I talk about storytelling, which is what Mark is mentioning now, and storytelling in all forms. So as a writer, I have to absorb storytelling, not just in books, but in movies, in TV, graphic novels, also video games, which I
Value of Interactive Narratives
00:13:21
Speaker
find to be the most immersive form of storytelling that exists. And so my genre, because I write in this kind of speculative fiction thriller realm, my genre of games would be The Last of Us 1, The Last of Us 2, Alien Isolation, Prey,
00:13:38
Speaker
Those are the types of games that I find immersive and the stories that are told in those games are absolutely incredible. And it's not one that a lot of people consider when they talk about storytelling, but it's one that is definitely on the rise.
00:13:52
Speaker
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's a bigger industry than the movie industry now. Am I wrong on that? Yeah, Red Dead Redemption when it was released. I think the opening weekend was $800 million for one game in one weekend. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk the thing, guys. I've been itching for this. I've been itching for this. Yeah, come on.
Impact of 'The Thing'
00:14:13
Speaker
We're running out of time. Yeah, good segue. So story, what is it then about the thing that appeals to you so much?
00:14:20
Speaker
Well, there's another question that I could spend hours on this. So I mentioned when I was 12 or 13, I saw the thing, top loading VHS, had to go to my brother's friend's house, but I'd already read it first. The notions and themes that the story has appealed to me in ways that I've thought about ever since. First of all, the isolation.
00:14:44
Speaker
The environment, you know, just as a Canadian and Canadian author, everyone says Canadian authors are obsessed with the wilderness and remote hostile locations. You know, it might be true because it's true of me. And when I watch that movie, I feel a connection and a kinship with that. The feeling of isolation and character.
00:15:04
Speaker
The way the characters are unveiled in this movie, I just absolutely love. And you can't actually watch the movie and hear much of their backstories. There are no backstories really given. However, as a writer, I'm plagued by this. Whenever I watch a movie, whenever I read a book, I think about what was the author or the director or the producer or the writer thinking when they did this.
00:15:29
Speaker
Okay, so before we get into that, for those listening who may not have seen the thing, and I know, Mark, that you have just seen it recently. Huge spoiler alert because I'm assuming we're going to spoil a bunch of stuff. Okay, so let's assume from this point forward they have paused and they've gone away and they've seen it and now they're back, but there's still some who haven't seen it. Brief synopsis of the plot.
00:15:51
Speaker
Okay, a group of characters, remote location in Antarctica nearby. There's a disaster at the Norwegian base. A dog makes it to their outpost 31 and sets in motion a horrifying ordeal.
00:16:11
Speaker
that these 12 characters on the ice have to deal with. I mentioned Agatha Christie earlier. It is an Agatha Christie style murder mystery. It's one of the things that drew John Carpenter. Yes. It's one of the things that drew John Carpenter to it. He didn't want to make a monster movie like Frankenstein. He wanted to do a murder mystery like Agatha Christie's and then there were none.
00:16:31
Speaker
And at that point, all hell breaks loose in the camp as this mysterious creature is unleashed on the 12 people at outpost 31. The thing that I take away most from the thing and the reason why I wanted to talk about it with you guys today on your podcast is what I learned from the thing when I was growing up and what I've learned about the production of the movie and what I've taken away from that.
00:16:59
Speaker
And to do that, I have to describe the timeline of the making of the thing. So John Carpenter said it's the movie that he had the most production time on of any film. So he started in January of 1981 and it was for a June or July release in 82. So he had about 18 months on this.
00:17:19
Speaker
They began a second unit filming in 1981 in the summer, in June on Juneau Icefield, filming the scenes of the dog running from the Norwegian base towards Lake Coast 31. So they began filming in second unit stuff in June of 81. And they started building the sets in Stewart, British Columbia in the summer, so all the snow will fall, and then they're going to film that in the winter. So the snow is on the roofs of the set.
00:17:49
Speaker
So they film all the interiors in July, in August of 81. And then John Carpenter gets something that few directors have the privilege of ever getting. He gets a five week span, a break between the end of the interiors.
00:18:03
Speaker
and the exterior filming. So during that five weeks, Carpenter assembles a rough cut of the interiors of the thing.
Importance of Concise Storytelling
00:18:11
Speaker
John Carpenter looks at the cut and he's devastated. He feels the movie that they're trying to make that is in his head is not there. He feels it's not moving fast enough.
00:18:23
Speaker
The power of this creature is not coming off. The assimilation, the taking over of people is not clear enough. The lesson that I get from this, and it's something I've thought about in great detail for years and years now, is John went to work eviscerating his own picture. He cut, and he cut, and he cut. The actors were not thrilled by that. They found out at the screening in summer of 82,
00:18:50
Speaker
When it came out, a lot of the actors were a little upset because there was all this, you know, banter back and forth, child's in polymer and so on. It all ended up on the cutting-room floor. And there were also some death scenes that ended up on the cutting-room floor because Carpenter felt they were too much like Halloween, like his movie that he had done, Halloween. It was more of a horror than a murder mystery or a monster movie. So during this five-week period, he assembled a new cut
00:19:17
Speaker
But he had done a radical change in his own film and he had to then repair it and drive the story forward about the thing and the assimilation and what this monster was actually doing. And he had to drive that forward with the exterior shots that he did in December. So some of the shots that he added in December, which are not in the script that Bill Lancaster wrote, the scene of Benning's death. That was an exterior shot that they filmed
00:19:44
Speaker
in December up in Stuart, and they actually went inside the set that had been built, but it wasn't heated, it was freezing cold. It not meant for any interior shots, but they filmed that scene there just to explain what happened to Benning's because they had cut that earlier death. They also had to take care of Fuchs, and Fuchs' death, which happened on the ice, they found his remains.
00:20:05
Speaker
And then they added a few inserts after that when they got back from filming in late December. They added the scene with Gary in the same room where Gary says, but Benning's, I've known him for 10 years. And Kurt explains, Kurt has to explain a little bit, that's not Benning's, that's one of those things trying to take him over.
00:20:26
Speaker
What I've learned from this movie over the years and just looking at how it was made and how it ended up being this absolute masterpiece is that Carpenter wasn't scared to take his own work. And I use the word eviscerate. He absolutely did that. He eviscerated his own work. The interior shots that he had done, he did a radical change. He had to convince the people around him that it was the right thing to do.
00:20:49
Speaker
He had to convince the actors that it was the right thing to do. He had to convince the studio, who at this point, he was adding scenes that there wasn't even a script for it. It wasn't even in the script. So he was doing so many changes to his film, and I've learned something important from that, and that's if there are pieces in the narrative.
00:21:09
Speaker
that aren't driving the story forward, then they should not be there. There's no reason for them to be there. And if you look at the thing, there isn't a single scene that isn't driving that story forward. Now, after his changes, it's just an incredible message that every storyteller, not just writer, but storyteller can get from that is that objectivity is
Editing and Objectivity
00:21:35
Speaker
so important in writing. It's hard to get it from people around us. We don't get it from friends, we don't get it from family, we don't get it from people that know us. Sometimes we have to do it ourselves and be harsh with our own work. I've read once, I can't remember his name, it escapes me now, but the author said he would write a manuscript, put it aside for six months and come back to it in six months and read it. With fresh eyes, yeah. With fresh eyes, yeah, just because you have to be objective.
00:22:03
Speaker
we get so attached to our own work. But now you're talking about a particular type of storytelling, fast-paced, taught, suspense. There are, just believe devil's advocate, there are more languorous forms of storytelling and there does seem to be an audience for them. You're not suggesting that every story needs to go through this process.
00:22:28
Speaker
I'm coming from an eye for my own genre, like commercial, thriller, speculative fiction, sci-fi, fast-paced espionage, Cold War, which I mentioned. So there's places in every genre for everybody. But from my own standpoint, this is what, this is my opinion about my genre, which the thing is definitely a part of.
00:22:51
Speaker
I always say to my students – I mean I don't actually teach a course in creative writing. I just teach a course in journalism, but when I'm referring to my own work, I say if it doesn't help drive the story forward or if it doesn't do something that really illuminates the character or significantly improve the theme of the piece, then it probably has to go.
00:23:15
Speaker
But it's impossible to do that though if you've just written it because you know what you're doing and you know you're thinking at that point. So you've got to go away like you say six months or whatever much time you can afford to do that and come back to it or hire an editor.
00:23:34
Speaker
This is why we have editors and producers and directors of drama churches. These are people who are there to help us to see those problems and make those fixes, help us at least suggest where there's a problem. I always say to people like, just because I see this as, here's the solution I provide, that's not necessarily the solution you want to provide, but just identify this as a problem in the story. There's a problem here.
00:24:02
Speaker
Yeah. The amazing thing is that Carpenter did this himself. What had he had already done? Because to me, that sort of just indicates that someone who's made that leap from being an amateur, essentially, to someone who's a professional and really understands their genre and understands their storytelling capabilities and can look at it objectively. I think that takes a leap. I think
00:24:27
Speaker
Not everyone makes the leap, but I think most people who do it for a living do. Or they wouldn't be successful. Yeah, I think they'd be successful. And of course, Carpenter's consistently successful. Yeah, he's a great storyteller. We mentioned before that the podcast, we started recording actually that one of my favorite Carpenter movies is Big Trouble in Little China.
Reception and Legacy of 'The Thing'
00:24:45
Speaker
Yeah, me too. I'm with you on that one. That's one of my favorites. Just love that. So another Kurt Russell and Carpenter combination. But something that's plagued Carpenter though
00:24:55
Speaker
is the success hasn't been there when the movie's released. So when the thing came out, it was not successful. It was up against ET, which was another alien, but it was a feel-good, happy movie, which is what people wanted. And the thing did terrible. And it's only in later years that the audiences caught up to what Carpenter did. And now it appreciates the movie to an extent which they could never have predicted back then.
00:25:24
Speaker
Big Trouble Little China is another one. It didn't do well either. I might be wrong on this, guys, but I think it was competing with Ferris Bueller's Day out when it came out. I have a question, though. Do you think there's any possibility, and I could be totally wrong on this, that it's the special effects that's the problem? Because in both movies, the special effects are just so
00:25:47
Speaker
over the top and unrealistic that I think, I don't think so. No, they just looked so bad and it looked bad in the day like ET. Yeah. Like there was only that one special effect. It was just ET and it was pretty believable. And Spielberg's a master of hiding that as well. And I just don't think that Carpenter, I mean, I mean, I know I'm going to get massively flame for this, but I just don't think.
00:26:17
Speaker
He had that same touch with the special effects. I think his vision exceeded what they could actually create, which is why he probably had to cut so deeply in that first set of shots. The scenes that they were cutting were interactions between characters.
00:26:37
Speaker
The effects that Rob Botin did were universally acclaimed at the time. And I have to disagree. I think they still stand up to this day. Oh, really? I don't think so. It doesn't matter that everyone's like, that's amazing. It still wasn't believable for an audience. Why didn't that matter for people like us who love it?
00:27:00
Speaker
Because we can look past it because we're watching the story. We're enthralled by the story. We have imagination. We can see that what they're trying to do with those things. So like, and actually I still find, I can't really name the character who's the head that turns into the spider.
00:27:18
Speaker
That, yeah, that's Norris. I'm sure that deeply scarred my brother. So audiences were not prepared for this. They, and repeatedly people in the production have said that it made people uneasy watching it. And that's not what they wanted in a summer movie. They wanted something like 80, which was feel good, happy movie. And critics, one of the critics at the time called John Carpenter, like, like, uh, something about Gore that he just loved. Like he just loved Gore.
00:27:47
Speaker
and that's all the movie was, but there's so much more to the movie. I want to read something to you guys if you'll bear with me here. This is critic, New York Times critic at the time. This is a review from Summer of 1982. John Carpenter's The Thing is a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction and makes something that is fun as neither one thing or the other. Sometimes it looks as if it aspired to be the quintessential moron movie of the 80s, a virtually storyless feature.
00:28:16
Speaker
There may be a metaphor in all this, but I doubt it. The New Thing has been written with no great style by Bill Lancaster and directed by Mr. Carpenter without apparent energy or the ability to share his interest with us. The Thing, which opens today at the Rivoli and other theatres, is too phony looking to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk.
00:28:37
Speaker
So I mean, this is audiences and critics at the time that just didn't get it. They didn't get the story. There are needles going into arms. There's scalpels going into bodies. There's dogs being shot in it. It does make audiences very uneasy, but there's so much more to this at the time. The one thing that really bothers me about this is part of this review says there may be a metaphor in all this, but I doubt it. The metaphor is on screen.
00:29:05
Speaker
in front of everybody to see. And it's on posters behind them in the rec room as well. There's World War II era posters about STDs in the background. And at the time that they were filming this, Carpenter and crew knew about HIV and the AIDS epidemic, which was
00:29:24
Speaker
on the rise in the early 80s. And they knew that this was a metaphor for that was this, this fear, this paranoia of everybody at the station. The metaphor is there's also, I mean, there's also the metaphor of alienation. Sorry, no pun intended. It's alienation, right? They're, they're, they're alienated from their society to the point that the living in this remote place, and then they're alienated from one another. They can't really even get along, even when it's light, it's literally life and death.
00:29:54
Speaker
and they can't get along. Now how much of that is in the original short story that it was based on?
Adaptation and Themes in 'The Thing'
00:30:02
Speaker
John Campbell wrote the short story that this is based on. So he wrote that in 1938, who goes there? And I've read it as well, but not before I saw the thing, but after I saw the thing, I read it by John W. Campbell Jr.
00:30:23
Speaker
It features character named McCready. It features all the characters there.
00:30:27
Speaker
And then when they made the film called The Thing From Another Planet, it was a Howard Hawks production in the early 50s. It was a totally different story. It was more of a Frankenstein type monster movie. And when Carpenter decided to revisit it, they decided to take the Agatha Christie spin, and then there were none spin, but go back to the original. With the original themes, the imposter theme, the paranoia, the thing could be this person next to me or this person next to me here.
00:30:56
Speaker
which is his original intention in making of the movie. And it's something that didn't come out in that first those first round of interiors that he filmed.
00:31:04
Speaker
He's so lucky he has such an amazing cast because I think they had done all that interior work in terms of who their characters were so that we didn't need all the pieces that he cut, right? We kind of understood who all the characters were just cause the actors are so good. And like, just, if you look at the cast list, it's amazing. Like just who's in that, who's in that cast. It's all of like.
00:31:29
Speaker
The character actors of the 80s and 90s are in that and it's amazing to watch them at work. They really are so good. Something which is fascinating about the movie too, which enthralls me, is the ambiguity in the film.
00:31:45
Speaker
Oh, the ending, especially. The ending, especially. But there are pieces in that film that that make you think and you go back and forth, back and forth. Maybe it was this, maybe it was that, maybe it was this. One of the pieces was the shadow on the wall when the dog is walking down the corridor. Yeah. You see the shadow on the wall. So I've gone over and over in my head. Who is it? Is it Norris?
00:32:06
Speaker
is a Palmer, is a Norris, is a Palmer. I found out years and years after the fact that it was none of the cast. They had actually got a stunt coordinator, Dick Warlock, who was on the film to play the role of the shadow. And the reason is they wanted it to be ambiguous. They wanted it to be no one and everyone, to increase that sense of paranoia.
00:32:29
Speaker
It was ambiguous. You mentioned the ending. Absolutely ambiguous as well. It's just these layers to the film that when you watch repeatedly, again and again, you notice these things. It's such a fascinating exercise, the whole movie. John Carpenter, famous for scoring his own movies, did not score this movie. This was Ennio Morricone. Yes. Did that help or hurt the movie?
00:32:57
Speaker
That's a great question because I can't speak for John Carpenter. I loved it. I love the score. John Carpenter apparently was very, very happy with the score as well. Ennio Morricone scored it in Italy and then flew over to do the orchestral pieces in California with John. But then when they were doing post-production, they fit the musical pieces into the scenes.
00:33:22
Speaker
One thing that a few people don't know is John did the music at the start when the UFO crashes in Antarctica.
Lessons from Carpenter's Editing
00:33:31
Speaker
That's John's music, John Carpenter's music, and also the new scene of Bening's death
00:33:38
Speaker
John Carpenter also scored that. So he had to match up Ennio Morricone's music. He did it with synthesizers and that entire scene, which is not in the script. John wrote it, John directed it, and John even scored it, which few people are on the way of. But it adds to the texture of the film. But you're right. I mean, he scores most of his movies. Usually he did it at the start because of budgetary reasons that he couldn't afford to hire someone. So this is Halloween.
00:34:07
Speaker
When he showed Halloween to the studio the first time, or the distributor, they didn't get it. They didn't like it. They didn't find it scary. And he said, just wait till I have the music.
00:34:19
Speaker
And then he added the music, showed it to them again, and they said, you were right. The music, yeah. You nailed the music. His Big Trouble Little China score is iconic. It's incredible. Prince of Darkness. What I think is one of the, if not the, scariest movie I've ever seen. Score just adds to it. It's incredible.
00:34:39
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my question was a little tongue in cheek because Ennio Morricone, after all, the good, the bad, and the ugly, countless other classic scores. But totally different genre, right? Like here you are doing sci-fi, here's this guy doing sci-fi horror, but it totally paid off. The heartbeat.
00:34:55
Speaker
Um, at the start when the, when the dog is running across the ice field, uh, more company's heartbeat, just amazing, amazing, totally fit that the, the desolation, the bleak, uh, outlook for the characters, uh, as well as the environment. This movie just speaks to me on so many levels along with all the other films that I saw growing up and the books that I was reading, they just all kind of came together and like contributed to, uh, to my creative journey.
Practical Effects vs. CGI
00:35:23
Speaker
Now the next obvious question of course is the remake. What do we think of the remake?
00:35:29
Speaker
Okay, I'm going to get into some real nerdy stuff here. Wait, are there spoilers? Are they going to be spoilers? You don't mean remake, you mean prequel. You mean prequel, right? Because the new one was actually what happened at the Norwegian base right before. Oh, okay. That's fun. Okay. See, I didn't know that actually. I just saw the name. They used CGI instead of rubber.
00:35:56
Speaker
And the CGI was worse. It didn't work because it took the audience, me at least out of it. I believe even the flamethrowers were CGI in some cases, but I'm going to get really nerdy here for a minute and split face the, uh, the, uh,
00:36:15
Speaker
The the carcass that they carried back from the Norwegian base to a post 31 and then they unveiled it and Wilfrid Brimley was looking at it And yeah, do you know what I'm talking? You just saw right mark, right? Yeah, there's two like one face over to one side. Yeah
00:36:32
Speaker
So for me that carcass which Rob Botin sculpted and created is a metaphor for the entire film and it was brilliant because it was about the crux of the film is right there. It's one half of the face was human and the other half was morphing and changing and monstrous and it's a metaphor for the evil, the danger, the thing that exists within
00:36:58
Speaker
All of us. All of us. But in this case, the people who were infected or assimilated, that one carcass kind of showed the entire film, this human morphing into this monster that's showing the evil within. But in the prequel,
00:37:14
Speaker
which was filmed later with Mary Elizabeth Winstead. It's actually two people that are fused together as they're being killed. And that, to me, ruined the entire message of that split-faced monster. I hate when they do that kind of... And it ruined the metaphor. But I've never heard anyone else say that. I'm not sure if that's something that other people feel as well. But you know what? That's the same...
00:37:40
Speaker
as, you know, the whole Star Wars, the force. Oh, mid-chlorians. In the original, yeah, like the original trilogy, anybody can have the force, but then, oh, no, it's actually, you have to have this special whatever, you know? Yeah, just undermines the whole wonderful concept. Yeah, it does kind of destroy the mysticism of it. Yeah, I do know people that resent and object to the concept of midi-chlorians. Yeah, well. So that was in Alaska where they did those Icefield Chuts.
00:38:09
Speaker
And the rest of it was Stuart BC. And this is amazing. This is amazing, Mark. When they filmed the scenes of the dog running through across the Juneau Icefield, they included a blue barrel. And the blue barrel
00:38:25
Speaker
the dog running past the blue barrel, they connected it cleverly with the Outpost 31, which they filmed in St. Albisi, by adding some blue barrels to the outskirts of the Outpost. So the dog running past the blue barrel in June in Alaska.
00:38:41
Speaker
suddenly connected to the dog running past the blue barrel in Stuart, British Columbia, uh, six months later. Wow. Right. And it was seamless and it was incredible. Yeah, it was really good. You're well done. You had no idea that there's two different locations separated by kilometers. It was well done. Well, cause to the point that when I watched, I mean, I watched the end credits cause I knew we were going to be talking.
Carpenter and Russell Collaboration
00:39:04
Speaker
So that's how I knew John Campbell wrote the short story cause I saw, Oh, basically what? Oh my God. I didn't know.
00:39:10
Speaker
that it was filmed in Stuart, BC. And then I saw Juneau, I was like, oh, that's how they did that. But God, it was well done. The concept of cutting the fat, getting rid of everything that that doesn't drive the story forward is something that I've taken with me to with my own writing.
00:39:25
Speaker
And whenever an editor says to me, Oh, do we really need this line or door? Can you cut this paragraph down by a third? Because it's really like I listened to those comments. I don't ignore them. I take them to heart and I say to myself when in doubt, cut it out. I say that all the time when I'm writing and then when I'm editing and when I'm
00:39:45
Speaker
When I read the editor's line edits and when I read the editor's story edits, when in doubt, cut it out. And there are films that follow that to a T. Ridley Scott's Alien is one of them. You know, like every single scene in that movie is just driving that story forward. And then there are movies that I watch when they're meandering and I just feel like, oh, there's a lot of filler here. I mostly agree with that.
00:40:10
Speaker
But then I think of books like Little Big, John Crowley, which would do meander, but the meander in a beautiful, engaging way. But I think for the genre that you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. There's an audience for what you're talking about, for sure.
00:40:24
Speaker
Now, like so many of the things that we talk about in this podcast, I had meant to get to this movie before the recording. Life didn't work out that way, but now I'm like super jazzed to watch it over the next little bit. So really looking forward to that. The thing prequel has its merits as well. You should check that out too. It does add texture to the story despite, you know, it has some drawbacks to it or some things that I don't fully agree with.
00:40:48
Speaker
It adds to the whole context of the story as well. My list is so big that you're simply going to have to sell it better than that. The weird bit of synchronicity for me is that last night I watched the new episode of Monarch, which is they've taken the monster movies and they've done a TV series on Kurt Russell's and that. I watched Kurt Russell and then as afternoon I finished watching the thing is like, okay, he's still fighting monsters. What a guy.
00:41:14
Speaker
Listen, Kurt Russell is a living legend. And if I was in charge of a movie studio, I would be grabbing Carpenter and Russell and just throwing money at them and saying, please, anything you want, you do it, you do it. Exactly. And Mark, any final thoughts, questions? No, we did it. We did it. I mean, don't flame me too badly for what I said about the special effects. That's all. That's my only plead.
00:41:40
Speaker
Well, you know, to my knowledge, uh, so far where I think we're over the 30 Mark, uh, with these podcasts and you haven't been flamed yet. Not yet. No, that's, you know, yeah. Maybe good, maybe that. Timothy S. Johnson. Thank you very much for joining us. Listen, it was an absolute pleasure. Um, I love talking about, um, movies. I love talking about my genre. I love talking about writing. It was a pleasure to be here and, uh, anytime, anytime just, uh, send an invite over to me.
00:42:09
Speaker
I'd be happy to engage. We did talk about Alien. We talked with Tim Blackmore about Alien. I'm so glad we talked about it already because it's a touchstone kind of film for our generation anyway. Three of the greatest films of our generation, right? Alien, The Thing, The Fly, Jeff Guillam, The Fly. All right, on that note. Help me!
00:42:34
Speaker
I'll come back and talk with the fliacin panel. Absolutely.
00:42:50
Speaker
You've been listening to Recreative, a podcast about creativity. Talking to creative people from every walk of life about the art that inspires them. And you're probably wondering, how can I support this podcast? I am wondering, Joe, how can I support this podcast? I mean, apart from being on it.
00:43:06
Speaker
There's no advertisements in this podcast. There's no tip jars. There's nothing about like buying us a coffee or anything like that. But there is a way that you can support us. And what is that? It's not about supporting us. It's about supporting the people that we're talking to. I think most of the people we've talked to are artists of some description and they probably have some kind of artistic product that you could buy. And if you enjoyed it, maybe you can review it for them.
00:43:30
Speaker
Oh yeah. But maybe us too? Yeah, you know what? Us too. It wouldn't hurt. They could buy our books. And how do they find us? Recreative.ca. Don't forget the hyphen. There's a hyphen in there. Re-creative. I took your line, sorry. Well, because I stole your line. So yes, re-creative.ca. Janks. Oh yeah, you heard that. I stole your line again. As well, if you like what you've just heard, you could consider subscribing to the podcast. And leave a comment if you like it. Thanks for listening. Spread the word.
00:44:15
Speaker
Recreative is produced by Mark Rainer and Joe Mahoney. Technical production of music by Joe Mahoney, web designed by Mark Rainer. Kira Mahoney edited this episode. Show notes in all episodes are available at recreative.ca. That's re-creative.ca. Drop us a line at joemahoney at donovanstreetpress.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.