Original subtitles

I'm ready.

21 hours.

Suppose he's dead, Hauk.

If I come back without him, you'll burn these things out.

Get 'em both back, Plissken.

Remember, once you're inside, you're on your own.

Oh, you mean, I can't count on you?

No. Good.

In the dystopian future of Escape from New York,

the island of Manhattan has been turned into

a maximum-security prison.

Walled in, the criminals have been left to their own devices.

Once you go in, you don't come out.

However, as this satirical science fiction thriller begins,

the President has jettisoned from a hijacked Air Force One,

and landed in the lawless city.

Escape from New York is one of the key

action films, sci-fi films of the 1980s.

And that is a time when there are a lot

of great films in both of those genres.

The great thing about Escape from New York

is how well it stands up.

In retrospect, and watching it again over the years,

you realise that this is a film that is actually built to last.

It redefines science fiction.

I mean, I think that science fiction had never been like that before,

that the dystopias were either bleak and terrifying, or...

Well, that was it really, that was what science fiction dystopias were,

there was no sense that you could enjoy it or have fun with it.

There was no sense of adventure. It made science fiction cool.

Yeah, it was. It was absolutely bad boy science fiction.

There is only one man with the skills and the cold-blooded determination

to break into the prison and get him out.

Kurt Russell's mesmerically cool

and deeply anti-heroic "Snake" Plissken.

"Tracer test confirmed at 20 hours 17 minutes and 30 seconds."

New York was first colonised by the Dutch.

It was named after an English King, James II, when he was Duke of York.

The Statue of Liberty came later.

It was given to New York by the French.

New York must surely be the most spectacular city in the world.

It's built on several islands and it's split into five boroughs,

but the most famous is Manhattan.

The once great city of New York

becomes the one maximum-security prison for the entire country.

A 50-foot containment wall

is erected along the New Jersey shoreline

across the Harlem River and down along the Brooklyn shoreline.

It completely surrounds Manhattan Island.

All bridges and waterways are mined.

The United States police force, like an army,

is encamped around the island.

There are no guards inside the prison,

only prisoners and the worlds they have made.

The rules are simple.

Once you go in, you don't come out.

Released in 1981, John Carpenter's blackly comic,

genre-crossing marvel is still a sight to behold.

It is the perfect example of the director's gift

for elevating B-movie concepts

into whip-smart, cynical explorations of America.

John Carpenter was a true independent filmmaker,

and a filmmaker who grew up completely fascinated

by two different things,

both of which he saw on television and in the movies growing up.

One was westerns, particularly the westerns of Howard Hawks,

like Rio Bravo starring John Wayne.

And the other was, sort of, the sci-fi programmers,

the B-movies of the era, about alien invasions,

about dystopian attacks,

things like Invasion, USA.

So those two things come to, kind of, inform

so much of his filmmaking going forward,

which is very much science fiction

with the kind of structure of an old-school western.

He is an original because he is one of the first

of the growing band of independent filmmakers,

who can actually not just make their films,

but also create music for themselves.

This is one of the things he comes out of a, kind of,

almost a rock and roll mentality

in a sense of... there's a sense of him

that he's a kind of post-hippy

who has actually gone into movies.

His concerns are the same,

but he's got a kind of an anarchic view of the world.

But he is able to manifest these

in largely thrillers, horror films,

and occasionally, the comedies.

He is most renowned for being the horror guy,

I think he called himself the horror guy,

but that's not strictly true, is it? I don't think so.

I mean, I think if you look at the works that he's done.

Horror does feature, but not, I wouldn't say,

in terms of the number of projects that he's done,

it's particularly high.

It's because, I think, his horror films were so remarkable,

Halloween and The Thing,

incredibly famous genre-defining films.

But I mean, he did an Elvis biopic, you know, he did...

With Kurt Russell Yeah, absolutely.

He's a genre-jumper. He- He's always...

Again, hinting at the western,

but he's always trying out new kinds of genres.

He once said that he would've loved to have worked

in the Hollywood studio system of the '40s and '50s

because I think he loved being moved onto different genres

and trying to work out different ways of doing things.

Made on a limited budget and shot almost entirely by night,

Carpenter creates an authentic version of New York

as a living underworld.

It's interesting because now when we see Escape from New York

we see it as a really quintessential John Carpenter film,

a film which features Kurt Russell,

who's in many of the Carpenter films from this time,

and a film which is, you know, science fiction,

which features this incredible, kind of, pulsating synth score

created by Carpenter himself,

which is another hallmark of his films.

But really in many ways, at this point,

he wasn't fully formed as any one sort of director.

He'd made this incredible standout horror film in 1978 with Halloween.

He worked with studios a little bit on his own projects,

he did comedy sci-fi,

so he wasn't yet a director that you could pigeon hole

and I think he kind of remained a director

that was constantly playing with

the various genres that he worked in.

He had made a great thriller based on a western,

Assault on Precinct 13,

he had made a very funny science fiction film, Dark Star,

and he had made a horror film, Halloween.

But this was something else.

This was a kind of combination of genres.

This was a a dystopian science fiction thriller

and he was bringing together, I think,

various interests into one single film.

Also what made a difference in Escape from New York

was that it had a political edge to it.

None of his earlier films did.

And this one had definitely

a sort of rage against the establishment.

Alongside a snarling world-weary Russell,

are masters of off-beat performances

such as Harry Dean Stanton, Ernest Borgnine,

Donald Pleasence, Adrienne Barbeau,

Isaac Hayes, and Lee Van Cleef.

I think that the key to its greatness is,

first of all, Carpenter's innovation,

the fact that he is the first, he is so original in this story.

You know, say what you will about sci-fis of the past

or westerns of the past that influenced him, you know,

neither of those things account for the creativity of his story

and his casting with Escape from New York

To cast Isaac Hayes, this striking, flamboyantly-dressed soul singer,

as the lead villain,

I mean, there's so many brilliant touches in this movie

that make it special

and make it, kind of, one of the great '80s movies.

Well, he is a phenomenal improviser.

He's a phenomenal talent spotter.

And he must be one of the most persuasive men in Hollywood.

He has had people act with him

who are at the peak of their careers,

doing the most unusual projects.

He's great at spotting new acting,

or technology talent.

So, he's very, very good at identifying people,

with his producer, Debra Hill, I should state,

people who have got potential

and people who are very, very well known for certain things,

but who'll work with him because he will give them something else to do,

he will allow them to stretch themselves.

But he's also very good at cutting corners

in a way that doesn't really show on screen.

So, I mean, you know,

he decides to shoot a film,

which is about the whole of Manhattan walled off.

And at no point in the film do you realise, really,

that he's not shooting in Manhattan at all.

He manages, he's very good at his use of camera,

at his use of location, at his use of night-time in this case,

at hiding the way that he's cutting corners.

And it really looks like it's a film that costs

far more than the $7 million it cost him.

Escape from New York is as bracing as a shot of whisky.

It is a bitter and electrifying vision of the future.

Turn around. Start back to the island.

Guards on board confirm the kill.

"Circle to base, over."

Security, this is Rehme, we have confirmation we've got them.

We have a kill at mid harbour south of the battery,

two in the water dead.

"Two confirmed." Very well.

Following a movie-mad childhood in New York,

John Carpenter went West to study film.

He dreamed of making westerns

in the mould of his hero, Howard Hawks,

but that horse had bolted Hollywood.

And with the success of slasher classic Halloween,

Carpenter became known as the horror guy.

He was far more versatile than the label suggests,

using genre to turn a sharp eye

on both America and the human condition.

He did end up dropping out in his last semester

in order to go ahead and make a feature film,

but he very much brings

that generation's film school mentality to his work

because he has both the spirit of that sort of '60s, '70s,

grab a camera, make something low budget,

make something kind of grimy,

but also this complete obsession

with the studio, Hollywood filmmakers of the past.

John Carpenter's preoccupations are many and varied.

In a sense, he is extremely interested in

masculinity at the frontier, I suppose, you could say that.

He is very paranoid.

I mean, I guess a lot of his films are about

fear and paranoia and looking over your shoulder.

He does not like to overwhelm you with violence,

but he likes to make you feel deeply unsettled in his films,

so that you're always convinced that something bad is about to happen,

so he's very good at teasing.

And he's satirical

in a dark way about whatever he thinks

is particularly atrocious about the times,

whether that be in the case of Escape from New York,

when he wrote it, Watergate and President Nixon,

or through to the excessive consumerism of the '80s

in films like They Live, he always...

He was never making his films a story in isolation,

it was always commenting on the time that he was writing the script.

In recent months, members of my administration

and officials of the committee for the re-election of the President,

including some of my closest friends

and most trusted aides,

have been charged with involvement

in what has come to be known as The Watergate Affair.

These include charges of illegal activity

during and preceding the 1972 Presidential election,

and charges that responsible officials

participated in efforts to cover up that illegal activity.

Originally written in 1974,

Escape from New York was a conscious response

to Vietnam, Watergate and the Nixon Administration.

Fuelled by the rise of vigilante pictures such as Death Wish.

By disguise, it was also a western.

The tale of amoral outlaw, "Snake" Plissken,

who is tricked by the authorities

to cross into the urban chaos of Manhattan,

and rescue the President.

Carpenter wrote the first draft of Escape from New York

at film school in the mid-70s in Los Angeles.

And it was a result of various things.

It was certainly a result of

the fall of Nixon and the Watergate scandal,

because that had affected, you know, a great deal of Americans anyway.

And he was, sort of, raging at that,

the betrayal of the nation by the President.

But also, he had seen...

you know, America was in a recession,

it was- it was in a very difficult position at that time,

and he was being influenced by all kinds of things going on around him.

And I think that he used Escape from New York

as a kind of metaphor

for the imploding elements of American society.

By the time he actually got around to making it, of course,

which was 1980-1981,

it was actually even more relevant.

I believe they should impose the death penalty

as an option to judge and jury,

and I believe they should use it...

Mayor Koch is asking the Federal government for help

in this war against drugs and a Federal death penalty

for drug dealers.

He says the city will do whatever it can,

but an epidemic is an epidemic,

and an epidemic of crack in New York is now out of control.

Deemed too violent and weird by the nervy studios,

the script lay dormant for years.

Meanwhile, Carpenter made a succession

of independent genre hits.

Not only Halloween, but Dark Star,

Assault on Precinct 13, and The Fog.

Alongside his producing partner, Debra Hill,

he could work miracles on a small budget.

Finally backed by Joseph E. Levine's

canny Indy AVCO Embassy Pictures,

Escape from New York was science fiction

with a startling emphasis on character.

You mentioned Debra Hill, but how important is she?

She's his producing partner right from the beginning of his career.

How important is she to the success of that time?

I mean, she's not just his producing partner,

she's his co-writer, she's occasionally second unit.

In the first Halloween,

her hands are the young Michael Myers' hands,

she's absolutely hand-in-hand with him.

They had a relationship which was more than working for a while,

but when that stopped, they continued to work incredibly well together.

She's very good... She, if you like,

they are... They work so well together

that it's almost hard sometimes to work out exactly where

he stops and she begins.

She is, again, also equally involved in identifying

James Cameron as a talent.

They're both very good at spotting these people.

And which one of them was it who spotted Jamie Lee Curtis?

Well, possibly Debra Hill, but maybe not, you know,

she's just able... also able, I think,

and this is one of the crucial points, working with Debra Hill is,

she's very good at encouraging him

to give female characters

strong motivation, strong roles,

and not just being a boys' director.

So he was a big admirer of Howard Hawks

and there was the Hawksian woman, but he takes that a lot further.

Very few of his female characters

have no agency at all.

We got a deal somewhere else.

No glider.

We've got the President,

and the Duke's taken everybody out of here.

Never happen, baby.

You see, I know something you and the Duke don't know.

Only got so long before Mr President doesn't mean a whole lot.

You're lying.

Maybe he's not.

Despite pressure to cast Charles Bronson or Tommy Lee Jones,

Carpenter fought for Kurt Russell,

who had led his excellent television biopic of Elvis.

Indeed, there is something of Elvis in Snake.

Russell was eager to rid himself

of a lightweight image left over from his days

as a Disney child star.

It was his idea to give Snake an eye patch.

A director-star partnership

was established as productive

as Scorsese and De Niro.

So, John Carpenter met Kurt Russell

when he cast Russell as Elvis

in the 1979 television film

about the singer, something which might seem

a little unusual for Carpenter's general interest,

but apparently Carpenter was a big Elvis fan

and the two got along very, very well

in spite of the fact that Kurt Russell was really

at that point largely known for pretty light-hearted,

family-friendly Disney films.

You know, a bit of a heart throb,

and yeah, it was kind of perhaps

counter intuitive to cast him in the role of this grizzled,

tough, ex-soldier convict

known as Snake Plissken, wearing his eye patch.

The character of Snake Plissken is fascinating.

In fact, he is based on a real person.

There was a boy, or a friend of a friend of Carpenter's,

who knew a high school boy, a bit of a tough guy,

and his name was Snake Plissken.

And not only that, he had a snake tattoo.

So, Carpenter had actually used that name.

Wonderful. He's basically

a highly-decorated veteran

who had never been sort of

not truly appreciated, especially at the time.

The young generation were protesting against the Vietnam war,

so they felt that they had to find something else.

He simply went to the dark side

and he was involved in a huge robbery and was betrayed.

So he's basically a criminal who,

he was a hero who has now become a criminal

and is about to become, of course, an anti-hero.

Finding the perfect Snake Plissken

is the ultimate challenge in terms of getting this film right.

Because you've got to have a character who is essentially

incredibly anti-heroic,

who is misanthropic,

but also, the audience have to root for him.

So you have to have that innate contradiction,

but we are compelled by him.

How did Carpenter find the perfect Snake Plissken?

Up until that point, Kurt Russell had been a child actor,

he had actually met Elvis

when they were working in It Happened in the World's Fair,

and he had worked for Disney, he had been a comedy actor really,

a light comedy actor.

He wanted to shed that.

He wanted to become an action hero.

What I think is... I personally think is critical however,

is that Russell brings with him

that lightness of touch, that slight hint of comedy.

Because, and I think that if you had

a genuinely dark, genuinely psychotic

death wish-style Snake Plissken,

the film would not be as loveable or engaging.

What you have to have is someone who has got an air of comedy,

an air of defeat about him, an air of sort of...

...empathy based on his...

his anti-heroic failure, in a way.

There's something about him that is not hard enough

and that's why we really warm to him.

It's kind of a world-weariness - we can all relate to, isn't it? - Yes.

It's a "nothing goes for me." Nothing works, right.

I mean there is... It's almost as if, I mean,

most of the caper that he tries to pull off goes wrong.

He gets lucky in a number of scenarios,

he's absolutely not an Arnold Schwarzenegger-style

"I'm going in, I've got it, I'm taking the President out again."

Snake Plissken was drawn from the heritage of mythic western loners,

such as John Wayne's Ethan Edwards in The Searchers,

or Clint Eastwood's The Man With No Name.

He was also given a dose of John Carpenter's

anti-authoritarian foreboding.

He is a former Special Forces soldier,

disillusioned by the betrayals of the world.

"All that matters to Snake," said Russell,

is the next 60 seconds,"

which is exactly what makes him magnetic.

Carpenter had been building a stock company

of salty character actors to fill his gritty violent worlds.

He also wanted an echo of real New York eccentricity

in his rogue's gallery.

So we get Ernest Borgnine as old timer Cabbie.

Harry Dean Stanton as Snake's

treacherous former compatriot, Brain,

and Adrienne Barbeau as tough mole Maggie,

with Isaac Hayes as the self-elected Duke of New York.

Behind Kurt Russell, there are a whole range

of wonderful cult actors.

We look at Ernest Borgnine,

who was absolutely superb as the cab driver.

We have Isaac Hayes,

who plays the Duke of New York,

basically the sort of self-styled

head of this prison.

We have Harry Dean Stanton as Brain,

who is the guy who in fact betrayed Snake Plissken

in the outside world, but he's the one who creates

petrol, gasoline.

We have Adrienne Barbeau as his girlfriend,

and we have most eccentrically of all perhaps,

we have Donald Pleasence

as the President of the United States.

Now, you put all these together and you have probably a sort of...

just a dream cast of cult actors,

all working together for the same reason.

And that, that gives it a kind of new look

because there are no recognisable stars.

He also, because he was a huge fan of spaghetti westerns,

Italian westerns, cast Lee Van Cleef.

Some of them have cars. They took old junkers

that were left behind and converted them to steam.

We think they may also have a gasoline source in there,

and power, you know, greenhouses, rigged-up generators.

Some areas have street lights.

The crazies, they live in the subways.

Complete control of the underground.

They're night raiders.

Tracer, send a radio signal for 15 minutes.

If you push it, we can track you on radar,

just like Leningrad.

Of course, the face of America's police state

was to wear a sneer colder than any behind the prison walls.

Who better than Lee Van Cleef to play Hauk,

the police force commissioner, bringing a reminder

of Sergio Leone's black-hearted gunfighter.

The twist is Donald Pleasence's President is dispensable.

The real target is the tape he carries

containing nuclear secrets that could save mankind.

I think one of the glorious talents that Carpenter has

is his casting, not only Kurt Russell,

but if we think about kind of the denizens

of the maximum-security prison,

it's just a wonderful array of great character actors.

Yes, so the Duke of New York is played by Isaac Hayes,

who until that point had been a musician.

He knew that Isaac Hayes had this phenomenal presence

and got him into that role.

Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie, absolutely fantastic,

but he was also, if you look at Lee Van Cleef and Donald Pleasence,

two characters with a strong western tradition

and a strong western history about them.

Pleasence had had a bit of a career dive,

but he had been rescued already by Carpenter in Halloween,

and Lee Van Cleef, again,

these are actors who relished the chance

to try something that wasn't on their usual roster of roles,

and he got great things out of them.

And in a sense, the more baggage they bring, the better.

Yes, I mean because

we know Lee Van Cleef incredibly well,

we know the kind of person he's going to be.

Apart from Liberty Island and a few vistas,

New York was too expensive, and ironically, too modernised,

for the ravaged city that Carpenter had in mind.

So location manager, Barry Bernardi,

was instructed to find the worst city in America.

The answer was a patch of East St. Louis,

recently gutted by fire,

and plagued by mosquitoes.

A setting supplemented by truckloads

of wrecked cars and clapped-out fridges from local landfills.

So with a limited budget that they had,

they realised pretty early on that they weren't going to be able

to shoot most of the film in New York city

as originally planned. It was too expensive,

it was too difficult to get permission,

and also the state of degeneration that the city had to be in,

even though it was early '80s late-'70s New York

and it looked rough, it didn't look rough enough

for it to be this dystopian environment.

It was going to cost too much for them

to make it look that bad, essentially.

And so the production team went on a tour,

which they were amused to refer to afterwards

as a tour of all the worst cities in America,

to try and find some place that looked bad enough

for them to, you know, make it sort of dupe New York.

Eventually, they landed up on East St. Louis,

which had a lot of derelict buildings

and had a lot of buildings that looked like they could be New York buildings,

and also, crucially, back in '76,

it had a really bad urban fire,

and so that kind of allowed them the location

to create New York,

and it's pretty amazing that they do so because, you know,

aside from not seeing too many famous landmarks,

you do really believe that it is Manhattan.

Not only was it... did it already exist,

all they had to do was sort of throw a few

crashed cars on the street, light a few braziers here and there,

and you had your dystopia, you had your...

your wonderful sort of set.

It was there. It already existed.

Because they allowed them

to film at night,

and have complete run of the place,

that was a great gift, it means that they,

Carpenter and his crew and the actors,

could actually do pretty well what they liked there.

And you know, at the end of it, they cleaned up the streets,

they took all the stuff out that they had thrown onto it,

like sort of smashed-up televisions, cars all over the place,

and finally, it was regenerated.

It was a fittingly gruelling production.

Almost the entire shoot took place by night,

with St. Louis agreeing to turn off 10 blocks of electricity.

For almost two months, they barely saw daylight.

This is a hybrid of noir and science fiction,

set in the parody of society

as formed in the rubble of New York.

The inmates may be running the asylum,

but they haven't quite let go of the Big Apple.

So, how does a filmmaker

go about creating a dystopian New York?

Well, they can't get into New York for a start.

I mean, surprisingly, and this is testament to how much

of a golden tongue John Carpenter must have had,

they were the first film

to shoot on the island that had

the Statue of Liberty. - Liberty Island. - Yes.

So they did get onto that part of New York,

and that allows them to set up the fact

that we believe they're in New York.

The rest was done with models, special effects, and an enormous,

an absolute wreckage of a quarter of a city.

And the city authorities were very, very obliging,

so the film production company

bought a bridge off them for a dollar,

and sold it back to them at the end of filming.

They asked the city if they would mind turning off the lights

during the night so they would... 10 blocks apparently, yeah. Yes, absolutely.

And so they then dressed it to look like New York.

There's a brief reference in fact at one point,

something terrible in Plissken's past happens in St. Louis,

which I think is their affectionate tip of the hat to the city,

but yeah, it was basically, they found those parts of that city

that looked a little bit like New York and shot it there.

And it was a gruelling shoot, because effectively

I think 80% of it was done by night.

They barely saw daylight.

I mean most of it, yeah. I can't think of...

I can't think of any sequence off the top of my head, I'm sure there are.

There's a sequence where helicopters land in Central Park briefly.

Yes. But almost everything else is shot at night.

It was very important for Carpenter, who was very detail-oriented,

to make sure that they got the special effects right.

He originally wanted computer graphics,

but he bumped up against the kind of budget limitations

that he bumped up against before.

So he did the next best thing, which was turn to a really kind of

cracker-jack team of special effects people,

including some people from Roger Corman,

the legendary producer's own company.

There are basically two environments in Escape From New York.

There's, of course, the interior of the prison

and then there's the outside world, which is high-tech,

it's very clean, it's very sort of, you know, sterile,

and the chief commissioner, played by Lee Van Cleef, is...

I mean, he looks more like a villain.

He's dressed entirely in black, he's got a sort of wonderful

shiny earring in his ear, and he is absolutely corrupt.

He lies straight away to Plissken,

he gets him, he virtually blackmails him

into taking on this sort of task,

suicidal task,

like a sort of one-man dirty dozen, as it were, the dirty one,

and then says, "Oh, I've just got to put something here.

It's an anti-venom device,

so in case anybody tries to poison you in there."

And in fact, it's not. They're two miniature bombs,

which are timed to go off within 24 hours.

So then, not only do you have the fact that he's lied to him,

that he's actually pressurised him into doing this,

but then, of course, you've got the ticking clock,

which, you know, ramps up the action even further and the suspense.

In an interesting way, what is going on is that,

within the walls of the prison, they are rebuilding society,

they are rebuilding New York. There's a kind of charming sense of,

they can't quite let go of the Big Apple.

Yes, I mean there is this kind of car that the Duke is in,

which has got chandeliers at the front, there's...

I mean, the cabbie is still driving a cab in the normal way.

What there is, which John Carpenter gets quite early on

in his career from George Romero is the zombie characters.

And so, there are the citizens of New York who are faceless...

The crazies, I think they're called, yeah.

And they are just a threat... they're the real threat,

because they're not really sentient.

All they do is attack and tear apart and kill,

so that becomes... that's the horror film element

and the zombie element. I mean, there is an element

of this film where it's a little bit like a zombie film,

it's a little bit like... It's Carpenter's horror trick.

Yeah. What happens to society when it fully breaks down

and there's a zombie presence there.

But they're not strong enough to be...

They aren't the greatest threat in New York

because New York society has organised itself

over the top of them, and all they've got is tiny corners.

They've got the sewers and Broadway and they've got a couple of places,

but most of the time they don't really have...

they're just what happens if you fall out of the safe zones.

Through brilliant filmmaking sleight of hand,

Carpenter creates a convincing dystopian New York,

extrapolating the breakdown of civilisation.

Using existing architecture, it feels real.

It is significant to note that a young James Cameron

was part of the team hired to provide the visual effects.

Such is the surreal sight of the World Trade Centre

onto which Snake lands his glider.

Right on course.

Carpenter's view of humanity is undoubtedly pessimistic.

As crime soars in America, somewhere in the background,

the Cold War has boiled into World War III.

Yet, the misanthropic presence of Snake is tremendously compelling.

He establishes the film's ice-cool but complex tone.

Here is a man striving to survive in an America

divided between anarchy and fascism.

John Carpenter is one of those genre picture directors

who can actually use the genre to express a wider view,

a more important view, perhaps even deliver a message.

But not so that it becomes

sort of politically in your face, not that it becomes dogma.

He does it in a more subtle way.

He does it through the characterisation.

He does it through the interchange of characters.

You can see why some of them are trustworthy and some aren't.

Something that Carpenter excels at

is taking a sort of disreputable genre,

certainly when he was growing up, science fiction films

and horror films were the stuff of drive-in movies,

they were the stuff of teenagers,

they were not taken seriously, they were never nominated

for Academy Awards or anything like that.

But Carpenter took them seriously enough

to put artistry and care, not only into the technical side

of their visuals, how they look, the effects,

but also in terms of their messaging.

He also came up at a time when, you know,

things were very tumultuous and he had strong views

about the way the country was being run.

You see that fully with the film which is explicitly political

with They Live in 1988,

but Escape From New York has elements of that too.

It has elements of deep cynicism about the powers that be.

Carpenter again proved that his brand

of tight and thrilling independent cinema

could thrive in the mainstream.

On a budget of 7 million dollars,

the film would make nearly 26 million.

He had forged a grown-up, genre-based storytelling

that appealed to large audiences.

Critics got onboard too.

Etched in satire,

Escape From New York is a commentary on the nature of freedom.

In what sense do you feel that Snake Plissken,

although played by Kurt Russell,

is kind of channelling John Carpenter?

I think there is a very strong argument again to be made

that this film is an analogy for the making of this film, in a sense.

I mean, if you think of Plissken as being Carpenter,

weaving his way through all this chaos and confusion,

trying to put together what he can to make things go

according to plan, and all around him the sort of wall

of disapproving Hollywood who really want nothing to do with him,

making devil's bargains with him that he knows he can only...

he can't get anything out of, I think he identifies very closely.

I think it was either... I think it was Debbie Hill who said

it was really hard to be sure where Plissken ends

and Carpenter begins, that he wrote himself

very strongly into that character. And there's this wonderful motif

of Plissken constantly having to make things up as he goes along.

The situation falls apart and he has to kind of redo his plan.

Which is how he made, how John Carpenter made films.

Everything about that is how John Carpenter made films.

And he was... It's not quite autobiographical,

but it's very much about himself,

and the problems of being an independent filmmaker.

Escape From New York does serve as a kind of,

like a lot of the great science fiction really does,

as a kind of vision of the future

which is what we don't want to happen, right?

We don't want things to continue along this track.

And you know, you see that certainly in this film,

which imagines the crime rate just going up and up and up and up

until it becomes completely unmanageable.

And so, it is a situation which

you can respond to by either saying

you get authoritarian forces to come in and completely crush the city,

which is kind of what, I think, were it up to the President,

that's, you know, of the film, that would be what would happen.

But Snake Plissken is a different force in that film.

Snake Plissken is suggesting there is still hope for this place.

We all enjoyed it at the time because it seemed like

it had come out of absolutely nowhere, you know?

We had never seen anything quite like it, in style,

in content, in... It was enormous fun too.

I mean, it's just enormous fun.

In retrospect, because of the nature of what it's dealing with,

society hasn't changed that much.

It's sort of moved and shifted, but it's...

the elements of Escape From New York

are still with us, they're still relevant.

The warning signs should still be with us.

And I think that that is a mark of

not only its just... maybe accidental longevity,

but the fact is that he got it right first time around.

Without question, Escape From New York

is one of the most influential science fiction films ever made.

We feel its gimlet-eyed view of the world

in Fight Club, The Matrix, The Minority Report and more.

Cameron based much of The Terminator on this cult New York thriller.

His cyborg assassin was modelled on the nerveless Snake.

And Carpenter replayed its themes throughout his career

in films such as The Thing and They live.

So if you can,

give me an idea of how important a film,

a science fiction film, Escape From New York is now.

You know, in terms of the 80s, in terms of genre,

in terms of its influence, but just the fact

that we're still talking about it so many years later.

I think that Escape From New York

is one of the most important science fiction films of that era.

There are a couple. There's...

I guess, Star Wars stays in its own lane a lot.

What Escape From New York does is it creates almost everything else.

It creates that idea of the hero in the dystopia,

tough guy with an edge or with humour or off-beat lines,

the idea that hero or the villain always has to be a little bit funny,

so that seriousness of the 70s is killed by Escape From New York,

and there is that constant comedy.

I mean, the Schwarzenegger lines from Terminator

come from the comedy of Snake Plissken.

And on it goes through all of those heroes, really,

that it redefines science fiction.

I mean, I think that science fiction had never been like that.

Escape From New York kind of provides a template in some ways

for countless action and sci-fi movies,

not just sort of throughout the 80s and 90s,

but going forward to today. I mean, how many films in your life

have you seen where it opens with some sort of text

about a future year

and the fact that society has fallen into some sort of anarchy

or dystopia as a result of war, or the breakdown of resources?

And then our characters are set against this backdrop

to go on a rescue mission,

or to get an important kind of resource.

I mean this is all so familiar, it feels like a cliche.

But Escape From New York is one of the first films

to really do that and to really commit to that premise.

There is no doubt that Escape From New York

was a blueprint for...

the kind of films that came out that showed

a renegade figure fighting authority

and fighting the establishment.

Certainly in terms of a particular environment,

whether or not it was dystopian, whether or not it was just

a kind of, you know, an element in a film.

But the... It was the lone figure.

This was it. It absolutely goes right back to the western again,

but what Carpenter did

was to create a kind of new side to this genre.

It's the antithesis of every single Hollywood hero's journey.

There is no hero's journey. He is Snake Plissken.

He remains... He remains unmoved.

Like the dude, you know, nothing has changed for him.

He's gone through the most outrageous and extreme

series of circumstances and he comes out

and he is exactly the same as he was when he went in.

He did the deal, he fulfilled his half of the deal,

and that's it, won and done.

And I think that that's... there's something about that

that you just don't expect because you always expect

the final ten minutes of the film to be the redemption sequence,

to be the... "Ah, he's a good guy after all,"

or "Ah, look, he cares about the humanity or the world."

And you go, "No, no. Absolutely not.

He doesn't care, he's just Snake Plissken."

As well as being a dystopian landmark,

Carpenter's inverted prison movie

is part of a wave of Vietnam-influenced,

anti-establishment classics.

The disillusionment of Easy Rider,

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, or Taxi Driver.

In a sense, his work owes more to the 70s than the 80s.

The perfectly nihilistic ending

sees Snake Plissken destroying the crucial tape

and striding into the night.

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