John Carpenter, writer and director<\/p>\n
In 1970, I partnered with Dan O\u2019Bannon, a classmate at the University of Southern California, on a senior student project. We wanted to make a science fiction movie inspired by Dr Strangelove and 2001. We had no money but we did have enormous ambition. Dan co-wrote it, and he was also its production designer and editor, and he acted in the movie, playing Sergeant Pinback.<\/p>\n
We started off with some money from my parents, shooting on 16mm. It was a very long process of shooting a scene, then pausing to raise money to shoot the next. Dan and I built the sets with help from college friends, and students also acted as cast and crew. The voice of the computer in Dark Star was Barbara \u201cCookie\u201d Knapp, the wife of our cameraman.<\/p>\n
The ice vapour was made with kerosene mist \u2013 which is not something you want to breathe<\/p>\n
\u201cDirty Space\u201d was a choice we made because we thought that, knowing human beings, the kind of sterility you saw in science fiction such as 2001 wasn\u2019t going to happen. Also, of course, it was cheaper. The spaceship was designed by Ron Cobb, a friend of Dan\u2019s. The whole premise, of a spaceship in deep space bombing unstable planets, didn\u2019t really make sense \u2013 the film was always humorous.<\/p>\n
By the summer of 1972 we had 45 minutes of footage, and we shopped it around and got the money to make it into a full-length feature film. We went looking for a distributor and Jack Harris, who\u2019d produced The Blob, took it on. He was looking for a space movie, but there were certain things he wanted included \u2013 a bunch of cliches, such as a meteor storm. We needed distribution, so we did it. I wrote the soundtrack, as well as the music for the song Benson Arizona, which plays over the opening and closing credits<\/a>. The lyrics were written by Bill Taylor, the special effects technician.<\/p>\n The extra footage shot to make it feature-length included the scenes with the alien<\/a>. By that point, we were full into comedy. We\u2019d been using a beachball to represent a planet \u2013 it had a couple of bathroom plungers stuck to the bottom \u2013 and one day I saw it being carried by a crew member. I thought it looked so ridiculous that we should try something similar for the alien! Nick Castle, who played the alien, gave it a lot of character. He later carried on the tradition by playing The Shape in Halloween<\/a>.<\/p>\n Brian Narelle, played Lieutenant Doolittle<\/p>\n Filming was supposed to take a month but ended up happening at intervals over three years. The first scene we shot was in a closet in a student building \u2013 I don\u2019t think the spaceship\u2019s control room set had been finished. There was a women\u2019s group holding a meeting in the next room; the noise they were making made things difficult for us and we were annoying them. Coincidentally, George Roy Hill was filming the swimming pool scene for Slaughterhouse-Five<\/a> in the gymnasium over the street.<\/p>\n The buttons in the control room were upside-down plastic ice cube trays, and my space suit had an inverted plastic dish-drying rack stuck to it. When I was wearing the helmet, I had to act without oxygen. After each line, O\u2019Bannon would rip the helmet off, taking my ears with it, and walk me outside for some cool air.<\/p>\n In the scene in which the crew members are relaxing, Cal Kuniholm, who played Boiler, improvised the trick where he stabs a knife back and forth between his spread-out fingers. He accidentally skewered a finger for real, but didn\u2019t flinch or break character. As soon as Carpenter yelled, \u201cCut!\u201d he went, \u201cShit! Goddam!\u201d You don\u2019t hear the sound of the stab in the film, but I can still hear it in my head. Watching Dark Star now, I turn away when that happens.<\/p>\n \u2018Don\u2019t give me any of that intelligent life crap, just find me something I can blow up\u2019 \u2026 from left, Dan O\u2019Bannon, Cal Kuniholm and Brian Narelle. Photograph: Ronald Grant<\/p>\n Although Doolittle makes a couple of trips to talk to Sgt Talby in the ship\u2019s observation dome, each side of the conversation was filmed at different times \u2013 I was really talking to a light on a stand. I didn\u2019t actually meet Dre Pahich, who played Talby, until the premiere. His voice in the film is actually John\u2019s. John voiced the deceased commander, too, when Doolittle visits him in the freezer for advice. The ice vapour down there was made with kerosene mist, which is not something you want to breathe. Between takes, I had a wet cloth over my face and was trying not to slip and break my ass.<\/p>\n Dark Star opened in 45 theatres: a movie starring nobody anyone knew, that people didn\u2019t understand was a comedy. Dan O\u2019Bannon left a screening where 12 curious people walked in and didn\u2019t know what they were looking at. He said: \u201cFuck \u2019em. If I can\u2019t make them laugh, I\u2019ll scare the shit out of them.\u201d And that was the seed for his screenplay for Alien<\/a>.<\/p>\n A few years later, at San Diego Comic Con, I was introduced to Ray Bradbury. I was thrilled to meet this literary legend, but when Bradbury heard I was representing Dark Star he really let me have it, claiming it had ripped off ideas from his writing. He was wearing these Coke bottle glasses and I felt like an insect being burned under a magnifying glass.<\/p>\n Doolittle\u2019s character \u2013 and the entire film \u2013 is summarised by one line: \u201cDon\u2019t give me any of that intelligent life crap, just find me something I can blow up.\u201d Right now, that\u2019s an attitude that feels even more disturbing. Doolittle\u2019s lack of success when trying to persuade the bomb not to explode<\/a> is also not a monument to our chances of victory over AI. The film has things to say about today that it couldn\u2019t say in 1974.<\/p>\n The 4K restoration of Dark Star is out now on UHD and Blu-Ray<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Carpenter, writer and director In 1970, I partnered with Dan O\u2019Bannon, a classmate at the University of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,270],"class_list":["post-157227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}