Original subtitles

- U.S. Number 31 calling McMurdo. Come in. Over.

- U.S. Number 31 calling McMurdo. Urgent.

Come in. Over.

The Thing was um, my first studio movie.

It was a huge opportunity.

It was released and hated.

- I went to see The Thing opening weekend.

I went with a group of friends,

and the entire theater hated the movie, except me.

I was reading old reviews of the film.

They crushed it.

It was like a hostile reaction to the film.

And really vitriolic toward John, personally.

It is the most nauseating thing I've ever seen on a movie screen.

My agent was you know was like, forget about The Thing.

What if we're wrong about him?

Well, then, we're wrong.

It's a desperate movie without any hope.

What can we do? What can we do?

- I thought we had made a really wonderful film

that was gonna do really well until Universal threw it away.

- All right. Uh, as far as…

- The great thing about horror is that the canon

is decided democratically.

Ultimately, we're the ones who decide what the classics are.

There were a lot of people who went, "Whoa,

wait a minute, I think I really like that."

It was crazy, but that became, "Wait a minute, wait a minute,

wait a minute, wait a minute, wait, wait."

- Those of us who had the foresight

to recognize The Thing as a brilliant piece

of filmmaking have shared that opinion.

It's been 42 years and I'm not sure that I get the film, yet.

You've got to be fucking kidding.

Time is the only critic that matters.

So whatever happened at the moment of release, it's irrelevant.

Here we are talking about The Thing as the masterpiece it is.

- But then to see it over years become the icon that it has,

it kind of goes, "Fuck you guys", you know?

- This thing doesn't want to show itself. It wants to hide inside an imitation.

- Now uh, alarmed, scared, happy, whatever their reactions are.

But it's a powerful movie.

We're gonna find out who's who.

Just a little ahead of its time maybe.

- The novella that John Campbell is famous for, Who Goes There?

was actually under a pseudonym, Don Stuart.

It was a golden age uh, uh, pulp story.

So it was all bronzed heroes and all this.

But the central idea was unbelievable.

This creature from the stars who-- who can imitate anything.

And it comes down, crash lands, and when you let it out,

it starts to imitate us.

- The short story, of course, works from the internal.

The operative line, "Is the man next to me an inhuman monster?", quote unquote.

Seemed like a fine idea for a movie to me.

- Going back and reading that novella gave a-- an appreciation

for how much more faithful Carpenter was to that.

And how skilled he was at picking out what was scary about that story.

John W. Campbell Jr. was the editor of one of those science fiction uh, magazines

that flourished in the uh, '30s, '40s, and '50s particularly.

A lot of famous science-fiction writers got

their start in these magazines by selling their stories.

But Campbell himself wrote the story on which The Thing is based.

- It was in a volume of short stories called,

"Adventures in Time and Space".

Which included, you know, the best short stories,

you know, written to date at that time.

Isaac Asimov's Nightfall, He Who Shrank, Henry Hasse's.

Farewell to the Master, Harry Bates' short story

that became The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Almost among, though, however, was Who Goes There?

- The origin of the original story,

if I remember it correctly, Campbell uh, came back

to his home and he saw his mother washing dishes.

And he had the distinct feeling that that was not his mother.

- His mother had a twin sister who absolutely hated him by all accounts.

And he just grew up with this absolute paranoia

of not knowing, "Is it my mother

or is it this other woman that does not like me?"

- I've heard that Carpenter denies that it has

any influence of Lovecraftian situations.

But Mountains of Madness is right there, right?

And Campbell himself was part of this universe.

And-- and this unknowable, indescribable horrors

is very much in line with cosmic horror.

Lovecraft was the first author I read where there's these

eldritch gods, you know, demigods.

That were roughly as much of an octopus as a human being.

That I think evoked something, again, really primal, a primal fear.

- The Hawks film wasn't the short story.

The Hawks film, you know, dealt with an external monster.

A giant carrot that uh, would menace the people.

One of the things that John did was screen the original Thing for us.

And it was such a different vibe.

The Thing From Another World kind of sits between the old universal horror films

and this new age, the science fiction age.

-Easy. -Here we go.

- Keep it going.

- Keep it going.

It was so propagandistic that it was like, "Oh, come on, guys."

I mean, aliens are one thing, and-- and-- but you're trying

to equate that to another power.

A government power threatening us. Eh.

The Howard Hawks idea of people banding together

against a-- a common foe and everybody being a community.

There's a sort of humanity in it.

-Hold it, doctor. -We must--

You'll freeze to death out there in five minutes. Use your head!

It was scary. That was the big thing.

There's a couple scenes that are just unbelievable.

You know, the jump. Popcorn goes flying.

When Arness blasts that door open

and then takes his step into the-- into the doorway.

And you see him clearing all this stuff away

like it's made out of nothing.

And know what I'm trying to tell you. I'm not your enemy. I'm a scientist.

I'm a scientist who's trying…

- The reason you see the movie that's going on in Halloween

is because that was a videotape that I had.

I really loved how Carpenter recreated that title sequence.

You saw the homage to the original.

They're two very different takes on the same premise.

Uh, in that sense, I've always viewed it

sort of like the original Fly and then David Cronenberg's Fly.

Help me.

You never thought about remaking a Hawks film.

Neither did John Carpenter. It was always about making Who Goes There?

- It's not as much a question as it is a command.

"Who goes there?"

And if you don't answer right, they're gonna start shooting.

You don't know the password. You didn't say the right thing.

In this environment, in this story,

Who Goes There? is on everybody's mind.

- Now John had also just made a deal, as I know.

A two-telefilm deal at Warner Brothers.

Two TV movies. Uh, he was already at work on them.

So we're left with a project without John initially doing it.

Universal had signed Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel

to a development deal at the studio.

Their work was to be shepherded by William Friedkin.

For me, in a world in which John Carpenter temporarily didn't exist,

I mean, Tobe would be a terrific idea.

I'd seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre and laughed all the way through it actually.

They were not particularly interested in doing a short story.

They went off and wrote a script very quickly.

It was sort of a nightmare involving a character

like they called, "The Captain". And it was more like Moby-Dick.

I remember very little else about it.

Tobe Hooper, I think, would have gone more for grim splatter.

Mind you, the splatter's pretty grim as it is.

He certainly got the same sensibility of Carpenter

in that they're both kind of '70s guys

whose films are uncompromising.

See, another director they had under contract at the time,

Universal, and that was John Landis.

John was editing Animal House, actually, so we went to see it.

- His version would have been interesting.

I'm not sure he can do something straight-faced.

Can I have a piece of toast?

- I'd attended a preview screening at Paramount

of The Bad News Bears, before it had been released,

which I thought was terrific.

And people have asked me in the past, "How did, you know,

Bill Lancaster come about for this?"

That really was the answer.

Good writing is good writing.

BILL LANCASTER

- Bill Lancaster, who was the son of Burt Lancaster,

and by all accounts had a very unhappy life,

but he introduced something which we weren't that used to

at the time in the early '80s, which was irreverence in the dialogue.

People talking like they normally talk.

They make jokes about serious things.

Bill Lancaster, the writer, I think, did incredible job.

Like he's a unsung hero on that film,

because the construction of that film is-- is very precise.

It was an extremely tight screenplay.

It just moved.

It releases these moments, which continue

to increase the paranoia until the unveiling of what it is.

It's like Jaws.

And that project lay dormant for about a year.

There was something coming down the way, in about a year's time,

that was gonna make the case for us.

I went to the second showing of Alien at the Egyptian Theatre

in Hollywood on May 25th, 1979.

Loved it.

- Angry, because I thought it had gotten there before us,

but excited nonetheless.

Alien definitely opened doors

to serious science-fiction horror.

And we unabashedly sold this movie to Universal, you know,

as the next Alien.

And by that, I don't mean in terms of plot, story

or anything else, but in terms of box office.

…Way. The other way, God.

- When he finally delivered the script, first thing I do,

I-- I put it down and I call John.

"What do you think?"

And he said uh,

"I think it's one of the best scripts I've ever read."

And I said, "Well, are you in?"

And there was a pause and he said uh, "Oh yeah, yeah, I'm in."

Words we needed to hear.

After Escape from New York, I was approached by Universal

to work on The Thing.

And I had mixed feelings,

because I so revered the original.

John had a disdain for the conglomerate kind of filmmaking that was going on.

He plays the curmudgeon, and he is a bit of a curmudgeon,

but he's also a true student of-- of film.

- You know, a lot of people don't know this,

but the biggest influence on Alien is Dark Star.

Your GHF reading is minus 15.

-Doolittle. -Yeah.

I need a…

That is an alien that gets on a ship, and yes,

it's an inflatable beach ball, but Dark Star does become

the blueprint for Alien.

- Assault on Precinct 13

was like the archetypal Howard Hawks, people banding together

against a common foe.

So he's already got people in a limited space.

Halloween was his Hitchcock movie.

The thing that impressed me about John first,

before the film, was a-- a profile

in the New Yorker magazine about John and about Halloween.

And it was about how a minimum of money could result

in a tremendous financial success if you're good enough at telling a story.

And then my career was set.

Then I became the horror guy.

Who is that?

- And then The Fog.

It's the sort of classic ghost story in a way.

Escape from New York is pure speculative, ridiculous science fiction.

By the time he gets to The Thing,

he's taken all these ideas on board that he's worked out

in his other films, and he kind of puts them all to work at once.

- John negotiated then in his contract the ability

to hire uh, three people, Larry Franco, uh Dean Cundey,

and his editor, Todd Ramsay, as a way of insurance.

He went into this with a-- with a big universal-sized chip on his shoulder.

- You could just start with the helicopter flying in and the dogs.

And if you weren't familiar with the original Thing

or Who Goes There?, which probably most people

who saw it weren't, that's one place to start the film and let it develop.

But when you start with the spaceship, you know

we're going to go someplace way different.

And it sets up a level of expectation that is-- is very powerful.

It's this metamorphosis and this slow appearance

and this strange happenings.

Uh, it's a very clever narrative construction, uh, often overlooked.

Every person I've ever watched this with

who hadn't seen it before starts that movie and goes,

"Why are they shooting at that dog?"

It's just a dog, which makes it really clear-cut.

Make sure that that dog doesn't reach the camp.

Like that's-- that's the premise, basically.

And it's so beautifully efficient and-- and linear.

I love the setting. I love the quiet.

I love the sparsity of-- of the soundtrack.

- Middle of June to the end of June.

Second unit on the Juneau Icefield.

- This was the opening of the film.

Dog helicopter chase and a few selected inserts.

- I mean, it was just a blanket of white snow forever.

And 40 miles across was a mountain range.

And I swear to God to you, it looked like it was 100 yards.

How I got into the shot was just because of the nature

of the fact that we could only have 12 people in the camp.

Oh, I had done some acting work, but not acting,

but John figured I could do it. And I figured I could do it.

I wasn't afraid to get strapped in a helicopter.

The only way that I'm gonna get in trouble is if the helicopter goes down.

One side of the uh, helicopter was painted U.S.,

and the other side was painted Norwegian.

So when they're going one way, it's one helicopter.

When they're going the other way, it's another helicopter.

I was just strapped in, and I had a rifle,

and-- and I was just talking gibberish, you know?

"What the fuck, fucksdorf, blobbity."

I-- I wasn't saying anything.

In fact, we didn't have any sound there, I'm sure of it.

So it was all ADR afterwards.

It's such a compelling image, and it's such a compelling mystery.

UNITED STATES NATIONAL SCIENCE INSTITUTE STATION 4

By the time that dog arrives at Outpost 31, you're hooked.

- John and I, just because we were friendly,

I remember him talking about what he was gonna do,

and he was very excited about it.

They started working, and Larry came to me and said,

"John wants to talk to you about playing MacReady."

And I said, "What?"

Kurt Russell, you don't need to really talk too much to--

he knows what he's doing.

"I don't know, it's this, it's that, it's a monster movie,

I guess, or a suspense or what--"

He said, "No, no, no, it's-- it's-- it's a movie about paranoia."

And that hit me like a ton of bricks.

I said, "Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, wait a minute.

Oh, that's great."

And goddammit, John needed somebody who would

just come in, hit his marks, say a line, do as he was told,

and do it full bore, all in.

And that meant Kurt. Thank God.

I mean, because I think Kurt Russell next to John is actually responsible

for the success of the film more than any other person, you know?

He is, as far as I'm concerned, a highly underrated actor.

I mean, he's done some brilliant performances.

There were some long hours and difficult moments,

but he always had a joke.

You know, yeah, you know, 'cause I'm like a method actor,

and-- and Keith and I are trained actors at Juilliard,

and Kurt would be like uh, "So what are you guys doing over there?

Discussing your motivation?"

It's incredible that even after many viewings of the--

of the movie, he's the one you're looking at,

when you should be looking at the others. You know, I tend to--

Because we assume as a spectator that he's not the monster,

because he's the guy.

- His beard is fantastic.

His hair is beyond-- I mean, it's wild. It's primal.

He's-- he's like a beast himself.

And those eyes are like chips of blue glacial ice.

His eyes are as frosty as the ice that

they dig The Thing out of. It's perfect casting.

In the first scene, he's, I think,

firmly established that he's probably an alcoholic.

And all these guys are up in the hinterland,

probably all of them having their own personal issues.

You wouldn't be in a situation like that if you didn't.

Poor baby, you're starting to lose it, aren't you?

MacReady is the ultimate screen badass.

You know, Kurt Russell is the best at playing badasses.

Not giving a fuck. Salt of the earth.

And he's a helicopter pilot. He's not a scientist.

He plays chess. He drinks his whiskey.

And he's the guy who really understands how to take charge of the situation.

MacReady is very much a Howard Hawks character.

He's hardboiled.

You know, you can imagine in another epoch he might have

been Humphrey Bogart, you know?

He's a whiskey drinker.

He's-- makes him reliable for some reason.

Probably 'cause the directors of these films were like Howard Hawks

and John Huston were semi-alcoholics, I think.

They liked their characters to drink whiskey, too,

'cause it made them real men.

Well, I'd feel better about it if you'd have a drink with me.

It's extreme that a guy who might have to jump

in the helicopter at any time

would not only be drinking but be probably half in the bag.

Other people are panicking. Other people are freaking out.

He just steps in and he takes control of the situation.

And we, the audience, trust him.

Be there in a minute, Doc.

He's meant to be the exceptional everyday man.

Right? Like in any Western, it's like, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

And that's basically the philosophy.

And the sparse writing of that character tells you he will.

- Kurt Russell is to John Carpenter

as Jean-Pierre Léaud was to François Truffaut.

Or Robert De Niro to Martin Scorsese.

The French have a term for it, is actor fetish.

You gotta go back to Elvis and Escape from New York

and we just had a great time working together.

Just gelled ple-- completely.

We were the right mix for director and actor.

- The Thing sort of epitomizes Carpenter through his selection

of MacReady as the main character.

That type of character, that loner character,

the guy who doesn't want to follow the rules,

the guy who kind of is cynical about the world.

You can feel Carpenter speaking through MacReady.

I don't know what Bill Lancaster and-- and John did in terms

of writing together, working on it.

Just naturally, John might have had some

alter-ego feelings about some of the characters that I played.

I think for MacReady it was more a combination of common sense

mixed with, "What the hell is this exactly?

What am I looking at here? I have a problem.

How can I break this down? Figure this out."

Is there anything with the Norwegians that they're saying?

[speaks Norwegian]

Can we translate Norwegian to hear what they're screaming?

If there's another clue there.

Se til helvete og kom dere vekk. Get the hell out of here.

It's like, "Oh man. They could have saved the whole thing."

I had to work with for two weeks with the dogs,

so I could stand there and accept the dog jumping on me

without freaking out, because I was bit badly as a child.

[speaks Norwegian]

- I was infected at that time. But I didn't know it.

And I didn't know it as a-- as a person in the movie.

And I didn't know it as the actor right away.

I probably was the first one to be infected.

-George, are you okay? -Yeah, yeah, I'm okay.

-Are you? -Yeah. What's going on there?

It was all very murky.

You know, you have a little western town and suddenly um, bad guys come in.

Like the way Garry…

The moment he sees Lars, the Norwegian, coming,

he's not stepping through the door, opens the door and shoots him.

He smashes the window.

So that's like a western, you know, it was like a western sheriff to me.

First goddamn week of winter.

Look, I haven't been able to reach shit in two weeks.

I doubt if anybody's talked to anybody

on this entire continent and you want me to reach somebody.

When we were doing the production design

but with John Lloyd, he's a tremendous production designer,

so we talked about this being a kind of um,

a government installation. Green walls.

We had to repaint them, because Dean came up to me and said,

"Green is not a color that's nice."

About a week before production began, on the large stage set 27

you know, the compound, the hallways, rec room

and everything else, in a rare miscommunication

by John Lloyd, that set had been painted

a little lighter color, a lighter pale, almost hospital green.

John came down, not dressed yet to look at it,

and completely flipped out.

I mean, I've never seen John this angry.

Within an hour, John Lloyd came down and we painted a wall, a test wall,

that colder steel blue gray quality that you see now in the set.

And you spend a lot of time in this movie staring

at those walls as they slowly come in and it makes a big, big difference.

It's not a subtle change.

U.S. Number 31 calling McMurdo. Come in. Over.

The film really had to look real, contemporary,

as opposed to a stylized science fiction um, film.

What were they doing flying that low, shooting at a dog, at us?

- We never moved the walls of the set.

We shot with the camera as if we were in a real,

you know, environment.

- My two favorite words, especially in sci-fi, "What if?"

You know, in this case, it was being presented as very, very real.

It looks like the kind of town that might spring up around,

you know, a gold mine or something.

It's a bunch of guys who look a little rough and tumble,

even though some of them might not be, um, but they're-- they're bearded.

There's-- there's-- there's whiskey in their hands at all times.

This is-- this is very much--

I mean, it's literally a frontier town

because what is the South Pole if not a frontier of some kind, right?

I was wondering when El Capitan was gonna get a chance to use his popgun.

Let's say this was a job listing somewhere, right?

They all decided it was okay to leave society and go be

at the end of the Earth.

The other kind of person that does that is the serial killers. Frankly.

You reach anybody yet?

- Some of the scientists get a pass because it's their scientific world.

But a lot of those guys, you j-- it's like they just don't want

to be a part of society or they need to be removed

from society or they need to be away from society.

You never questioned these bunch of men.

Like, what are-- are they researching?

US ANTARCTICA RESEARCH PROGRAM

The idea of isolating a small group of people

in an enclosed environment and just watching what happens,

it's very-- it's very like a scientist observing lab rats.

- How long have they been stationed there?

It says here only eight weeks.

- Well, that's not long enough for guys to go bonkers.

Bullshit, bwana. Five minutes is enough

-to put a man over down here. - Damn straight.

If you look at the, the script, it really-- it's like a-- it's a play.

It takes place in basically one room

and there's an ensemble of men, like 12 Angry Men or something.

I can't see two slaps in the face provoking him into committing murder.

It may have been two too many. Everyone has a breaking point.

One of the things that I think is really indelible about

The Thing is the cast of characters.

You recognize them the moment they walk on screen,

not necessarily just their physicality, but their character.

Everybody has their own sort of agenda and perceptions

of this world, and you know, we're meeting them after

they've already been there for quite some time. By--

Like when we meet them, there's a sense that they were

pretty stressed before this happened.

Right? Had the alien not landed, something else might have gone wrong.

- There were a lot of characters in the novella.

There were too many characters for a movie, I thought.

So what we did was we cut it back to a reasonable number.

- When submitting the script to actors,

we would let them know, and their agents know,

that we were-- this wasn't just another science-fiction film.

The pretentious phrase that I used with the agents was,

we were treating this like an Elia Kazan film.

John, he comes in with a list.

And he said, "This is who I want for this movie."

And he starts reading the list. And the list is as follows.

For MacReady, Tom Atkins. For Blair, Donald Pleasence.

For Childs, Isaac Hayes. For Norris, Charles Cyphers.

You know, it's Halloween.

I guess everyone's entitled to one good scare, huh?

You're beginning to get the picture. It was John's stock company.

I went to John.

And I said, "I think you're making a mistake.

You have for the first time the money and the chance,

you know, to go after, you know,

whoever it is you really want to go after."

How many in their party?

We started with 10. There'd be eight others left.

How do we know?

Guys as crazy as that could have done a lot of damage

to their own before they got to us.

The film was greenlit six months, you know,

before John actually came aboard.

And during that time, Universal's casting department,

explored a few front-rank options.

Would Clint Eastwood be available? Harrison Ford?

We liked a lot of actors who came in to meet,

like Ed Harris or Scott Glenn. They all passed.

Reason usually was they didn't

want to play second fiddle to a monster.

Jack Thompson was suggested by his agent to play MacReady.

This is right after Thompson had won the uh,

the Best Actor award for Breaker Morant at the Cannes Film Festival.

The only actor I can remember who could carry a film,

who was interested in doing it at the time, was Sam Shepard.

He'd read the script and liked it.

The studio asked John to consider Kevin Kline.

They thought he was something, offered a little bit

in terms of box office.

I just cannot believe any of this voodoo bullshit.

- Childs. We considered Frank McRae, Ernie Hudson, Isaac Hayes.

Oh, shit.

Tom's backup for the role, as we out in New York, was Brad Dourif.

He and Brad were always up for the same roles, you know, at that time.

MacReady, I know Bennings. I've known him for 10 years. He's my friend.

- For Garry, we thought of Kenneth McMillan, Kevin Conway.

An interesting idea was Richard Mulligan.

Lee Van Cleef was a thought

of John's original Escape from New York list.

We had also thought about playing Garry as a contemporary of MacReady's.

Wonder if there was any dramatic mileage to be had doing that.

And for that, we thought of Powers Boothe.

Oh, come on. Four stitches. Barely grazed you.

- Copper. John wanted Richard Dysart.

I favored Brian Dennehy. And John loved Dennehy, too.

He originally came in for MacReady.

He was gonna be a backup for Wilford Brimley,

or Blair had will not signed on.

Right about this time, Roy Arbogast comes to my office,

the mechanical special effects foreman, and says,

"I'm gonna quit." "You're going to quit, Roy?

Why-- why-- why are you going to quit?"

"Rob Bottin has told me that John Carpenter has asked him

to play Palmer.

And I'm telling you that if he plays Palmer,

he's not gonna be doing any effects work, and I'm not gonna take up the slack."

I go to John. And I say uh, "Did you ask Rob to play Palmer?"

And John says, "No, no, no, no, no.

Rob asked me if he could play Palmer."

And I said, "Well, you didn't say no?"

And he said, "Well, I said I'd think about it."

Casting is an interesting thing.

And I think one of the things that's really interesting

about that movie is for me, for my money, I think John cast it perfectly.

First of all, he hired probably the best actors.

I mean, it sounds like I'm bragging.

I don't mean me. Uh, you know, I'm good.

But he got Wilford Brimley. He got Donald Moffat.

He got Dick Dysart. He got Charlie Hallahan.

And by sheer talent, he pulled together a group of people.

Joel Polis. I mean, Richard Masur.

The chemistry, it was palpable.

-I have to talk to you. -I'm tired of talking, Fuchs.

I just want to get up to my shack and get drunk.

Each of those actors, from Wilford Brimley

to Kurt Russell, they are notes

- and they are an American symphony. -Yeah.

It's most every type of person that is in America.

And that's why I think it's very profound, the movie.

Now how does this motherfucker wake up after thousands

of years in the ice?

And how can it look like a dog?

- I don't know how.

They're brilliant.

They made the movie, 'cause of their humanity.

- John gave us the gift of two weeks' rehearsal,

and he had to fight for that, but he did fight for it.

And we just sat around the table, no props, no nothing.

Um, and we read this-- read through the script repeatedly,

but we also talked a lot. A lot.

We talked about premise, and we talked about, you know,

character development and plot development.

At one point, I wrote a note.

There's a blackboard, a piece of chalk, and a big table,

and some chairs. That's all.

And I wrote on the board once, "You don't need a weatherman

to know which way the wind blows."

♪ The wind blows ♪

Every time you solve one issue, then something else comes up.

And then, so, you know, so we're constantly making these adjustments.

[overlapping speech]

- Keith and I were the two big guys.

We struck sparks off each other right away in reading stuff.

And we started like, staring each other down around the table.

Not personally, but a little bit personally. You know?

And there's stuff like, where I pull the knife on him

when he reaches for the gun and everything.

That-- we totally invented that. That was not in there at all.

I was very aware of the fact that John and I were in cahoots.

And we'd done two movies together.

And while that's great, but it can make the--

you have to be careful, it can make the other actors feel like,

"Hang on a second here." You know?

I know you guys, you know,

but we never worked together here, so part of my thing

as a part of that crew was to try to make sure

that didn't get out of hand in any way.

And finally, after two weeks, John said, "Okay, look, fellas.

This is it. This is the script we're shooting.

This is what we're gonna do."

I ain't going with him. I'll go with Childs.

-Hey, fuck you, Palmer! -I ain't going with you!

I don't remember feeling any tension between myself

and other-- other actors.

I may have repressed that, but on the other hand,

I wouldn't say we were a band of brothers, because we weren't.

It was a film about a bunch of guys stranded in this place

and this weird thing happens to them.

And we-- we all went at it very realistically.

That female energy is missing,

which adds to a much more oppressive environment.

- Much has been said, which is fascinating,

that the single female voice in the entire movie is

at the very beginning. It's a machine.

- Checkmate. Checkmate.

And it's silenced immediately.

You know, it's the computer playing chess

and it's, "Shut up, bitch. This is gonna be about men."

Cheating bitch.

- That's my wife at the time, Adrienne.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

That was just probably pillow talk.

"Hey, can you come do this?", you know?

- It's very much fueled by the power of these men.

And it is a competition of who is the alpha male.

And survival depends on it to a degree.

And the two most dominant men in the pack are the ones

that survive at the end.

- There was also images of women all over the-- the camp.

When they watch a game show, there are clearly women in that.

There's a cut scene where Kurt Russell's getting around with a blow-up doll.

There was clearly an idea that they had to reference that

there aren't any women there.

I did formulate a theory at one time that The Thing was

kind of like the only female cast member and this is possibly

why they're all so afraid of it.

It was very much into body changing, body horror.

The idea of-- of men being invaded by this

sort of female Id type creature just sort of adds

to the horror in a way.

That's fascinating! I never thought of it.

Oh my God.

That-- you completely blew my brain right now.

I'm sure John would hate this, but the fear

of something female hiding inside a man

to the degree that we have to destroy it and burn it,

that is a really fascinating read. I love it.

- They don't talk about women.

They don't talk about their past.

There is not enough time to do that.

So backstories aren't told.

It engages you as a viewer to not bog the viewer down

with backstory or handhold them and feed them every little bit

of info you need.

Instead of becoming passive, the viewer becomes active.

You-- you're engaged in the dilemma of these people.

You want to know more and you're paying attention.

- Garry, a 30-year army man who worked up through the ranks to become an officer.

- When they released the TV version,

because it's all body horror, and they weren't going

to let any of that get onto the TV screen,

so they so heavily edited the film,

they had to go back and kind of start throwing in scenes

that had been cut out.

Clark?

And the weirdest thing you get is the voiceover.

- MacReady, a top helicopter pilot,

worked for Hughes Aircraft as a test pilot until he got

into a confrontation with top management and resigned

to take this assignment.

It's kind of ruining the whole mystery of the film

by blatantly telling you what everyone does

and why they're there.

- Palmer, second string chopper pilot,

crack mechanic who hopes to start up his own business

as a mechanic, upon completion of this assignment.

- John, I'm not really sure

how important it is to him

to understand the characters psychologically,

what's going through their minds,

what is their mental state or even spiritual state.

Hell no. That's too hard.

That's too much trouble. I let them do it.

Mac, it may not clear up for a week.

-Yeah. -And we're the closest ones to 'em.

It's all right by me, Doc. I'm just letting you know.

I remember Richard Dysart said he was a Russian spy.

But none of that stuff's on the screen, so that's fine.

It's up to you, Mac.

If you don't want to fly, we don't fly.

Nauls, will you turn that crap down?

I'm trying to get some sleep. I was shot today.

Peter Maloney was the right guy to play Bennings, I think.

And that's not necessarily a compliment.

- He's not a very sympathetic character,

but I think also he's another one who's out of his depth

as part of the genius of the casting.

Most of these guys belong in an office, not in an outpost

in the middle of Antarctica.

All these actors put their characters across so quickly, so economically.

He gets shot in the leg, and then he starts whinging about it.

He was just a nice man. Peter was sweet.

Peter was another fun person to talk-- kind of soft-spoken.

Clark, will you put this mutt with the others where he belongs?

I got a call to audition for this movie.

And so I went up to the Coca-Cola building on Fifth Avenue.

And into these chambers, I think it was a boardroom.

As far as I remember, there was no script at this point.

John was there.

A group of us were taken in at the same time.

An outline for a scenario to be improvised was laid out.

And then we did it. We actually had a battle in the room.

We knocked over the table. We knocked over the chairs.

We threw things around. It was really wild.

And we were inspired by wanting to get the job.

There was never any offer other than Bennings to me.

So I was a weatherman.

Environment. Weather. Very important.

-Bennings? -Winds are gonna let up a tad

next couple of hours.

A tad?

Telling people about the wind that's coming up

and maybe you shouldn't take off in that helicopter.

So you're a scientific outpost and you need some scientists there.

Clearly the creature itself sees them as a problem,

'cause who does he start looking-- uh, going after first?

He starts going after the scientists.

The people that are gonna uncover him.

♪ Let the darkness fall ♪

I think one of the signature things on Halloween was the use of the Steadicam

to uh, continuously move the audience through the environment

as if they might be Michael Myers, keeping it suspenseful.

And the success of that gave us the idea that

the moving camera was something that, you know,

involved the audience with the story.

Were they The Thing?

But we never really completely explained anything.

You want the audience to become involved personally.

Carpenter, he knew everything he wanted

to shoot and could actually lay in layers

of meaning within a shot, with a mise-en-scène of a shot,

in ways that isn't in his earlier work.

- And I think he was--

It's not fair to say at his peak, because he did a lot of great things afterwards.

And before, but somehow as--

I don't know, just as a visionary, he seemed

to be in p-- he was in peak form, you know?

Well, the audience knows that the dog is different

than an ordinary dog.

- Clint Rowe was the dog handler, and there were two dogs,

but one in particular was fantastic.

- And he was half wolf.

A wolf doesn't necessarily growl or bark.

A wolf looks at you, and then he goes for you.

And Jed had that.

There was no emotion behind it, but it looked exactly the same

as when there was emotion behind it.

When we would shoot his scenes, we had to do a minimum crew,

and we'd all sit around the camera very still

and let him come in and sniff us all, and get used to us.

- Clint comes in to the sound stage,

where we're doing the table work and he comes in with Jed, and--

and he sits all the way over against a wall.

He said, "I want to bring Jed in.

I wanted to bring him in and introduce him to the cast."

So I brought these guys in one at a time,

and everybody did well except Charlie Hallahan,

who was terrified of him. And he was like, shaking.

And Jed was fine around him, but Charlie was like, nervous as a cat.

Clint came over, and he handed a treat to Charlie

and he said um, uh, "I'm gonna have him sit

in front of you and then just give him the treat."

And he went, "Jed, sit." And Charlie went like this.

And he threw it. And then--

and then Jed went, "What the-- what was that?"

But the other one was Kurt.

He wouldn't do anything around Kurt.

He just kept looking at him and backing away.

Clint is saying to him,

"Have you been around horses lately or something?"

He said uh, "Not in a while."

He said, "What about those boots you're wearing?

Have-- have they been around?

Yeah, you know, have you worn them around horses?"

He said, "Yeah, but I mean, I've worn them a lot since then."

He said, "It doesn't matter. He doesn't like horses.

He really doesn't like horses."

Yeah, I kind of remember that dog was not--

I didn't care for him too much, and he didn't care for me too much.

I don't know why. I don't know. It was like, "Eh".

This dog came down the hallway. He's walking towards me.

He's looking to the right, and he crosses lens,

and we're tracking back with him.

He-- once again, he crosses lens with his eyes

and goes in the door.

It's unbelievable. Humans can't do that mostly.

And he was incredible.

♪ Writings on the wall ♪

The use of Stevie Wonder's Superstition

with his line about shadow on the wall is

incredibly on the nose, but works.

♪ Ooh, very superstitious ♪

When the dog comes into the room early, and there-- there comes--

there's one guy, there's a shadow on the wall.

That guy is not in the movie. That sha--

If you look at that shadow, it doesn't match anybody

-in the movie. -Yeah, but it's a shadow.

Oh yeah, it's just a shadow.

The intelligence of the dog looking.

-Yeah. Oh my-- -Astounding.

-Yeah. -'Cause he's smart.

It-- it was-- every time the dog looked at anything,

-you could see wheels turning. -Yeah.

It was amazing. Which suggests to me that The Thing isn't just some sort

-of instinctive organism-- -Predator, yeah, yeah.

-But it is actually thinking. -Yeah.

And the dog really sells that.

The one thing we know about the shadow on the wall

is that this-- the person has hair.

So it can't be Childs. It's kind of woolly hair.

I think it's probably Norris.

I think this may be the point where Norris became infected.

Haircut-wise and shape of the face,

I think it has to be Palmer. But who knows?

- And it's always been suggested that was Norris.

It looks a lot like him.

We now know it wasn't that actor at all.

It was actually a-- a stunt double.

He was the guy because they didn't want a known

physical shape to make the shadow.

One of the fascinating things about the journey of the movie

is you never knew at any one given time where it was.

The thing I discovered is the less we know

about the mechanism of The Thing, the better off we are.

How The Thing worked, how it worked mechanically

within the story, how it would possess people

and how it would move was always a developing situation,

even though you read the script.

I remember um, the Invasion of the Body Snatchers,

the original, they did a really good job

of this seed pod growing into you.

And supposedly, when you're asleep.

We didn't get into any of that in The Thing.

It just sort of happens off-screen, which is, uh, I think, the best.

As I was cutting, uh, things were revealed to you

and you go, "Oh, whoa, what about this? Or what about…"

Now, gee, you know, I didn't expect that

it would be like this.

It becomes its own interpretation entirely

in the director's hands and in the actor's hands.

Easter egg mentality, you know, didn't exist till we made

the movie, you know?

We had hoped an audience would come once, maybe more than once,

um, to see it, but you know,

it was designed on a macro level, not on a micro level.

- Carpenter wants to give us enough information,

but not so much he's spoon-feeding it to us.

Very few directors can pull that off.

John Carpenter, David Lynch, Christopher Nolan.

If you want my honest opinion, I think John knows exactly

who is who and who was what.

And if you watch the movie, you can make your own deductions.

But it doesn't matter.

I mean, it really doesn't-- it really doesn't matter.

My God. What the hell happened here?

- Richard Dysart as Copper, another actor who I think would

seem more at home in a suit in an office.

And indeed, he was later a regular on L.A. Law.

Anybody there?

Hey, Sweden!

They're not Swedish, Mac. They're Norwegian.

- You know, Dysart is a really, really accomplished actor.

Almost classical old school type feeling at that time. 1980.

"Somebody got to the blood!"

Somebody got to the blood!

I just liked his whole-- his whole--

his whole way of playing-- playing Doc, you know?

-Would that test have worked, Doc? -Oh, I think so, yes.

- The detail of the nose ring.

Nose rings in the early '80s were not nearly

as common as they are now.

It's a sort of indication that, you know, he's a bit eccentric.

- Dysart was an old friend of mine.

I had gotten drunk with him on multiple occasions.

I had smoked an incredible amount of dope with him.

Not nearly as much as he smoked, 'cause he smoked a lot of dope.

But a great, great, great actor. And Dysart had a really good run.

Principal photography with actors began August 24th, uh, 1981

on stage four, at Universal, with the Norwegian camp.

106 degrees outside, in the midst

of a huge summer heat wave in the San Fernando Valley.

38 degrees on the stage itself, because yeah, it was refrigerated.

Yeah, the refrigerated bits are--

or was, in particular, the-- the Norwegian camp.

And we were very careful to light it,

so you could see the-- the breath.

Really gave a sense of authenticity.

We all got sick on the movie, because of the refrigeration.

But it was mild refrigeration. It wasn't the real thing.

We went down to an ice house in midtown L.A.

to see about building a set in there.

It was intolerably cold.

We built uh, Hollywood refrigeration.

Beverly Hills refrigeration, I think.

Portable video unit. Anything?

It's all in Norwegian.

The entire idea of the cold being the 13th character,

you know, it had to always be with us.

It wasn't enough to make it look cold.

But as John Carpenter put it, "How do we get it to feel cold?"

- Cold is the character.

Cold is what kept this secret from us.

And then we made the mistake of waking it up.

And cold is what will kill us in the end, in the movie, you know?

It's everything that is waiting for us outside.

So the contrast between the hell, and the fire,

and the screams, and the bloody fluids in the inside and the quiet,

endless, eternal cold waiting for us outside

is what makes the movie.

- The depiction of the Norwegian base, which is visited by MacReady and Copper,

trying to find out what the hell happened there.

It's like The Snow Queen.

It's like everybody's frozen and dead.

Like Sleeping Beauty's castle.

That has the feel of like a, almost like a ghost ship kind of entity.

I think it's Carpenter leaning into his love of cinema

and his love of genre cinema that works as a shorthand for the viewer.

It kind of gives the whole story,

a sort of mythical aspect, which I used to call, the--

the-- the "Chinatown syndrome", in that this thing has happened before.

Mac!

They find the guy that was frozen and had slit marks on his wrist.

We called him, the "sweet guy".

And we had taken an impression of our mold maker,

Gunnar Ferdinandsen, an expression like this.

And the alginate went down his throat.

And Gunnar did not move.

When they removed it, this big trail of alginate came out.

Frozen blood uh, dripping from-- from a Norwegian dead scientist

is so horrifyingly beautiful.

And I think that it did feed from art around it,

like the bacon of it all, the Goya of it all.

And we took some clear fiberglass resin and I tinted it the color of blood.

And Rob asked me if I could get some intestines.

The company went up to Stewart, British Columbia.

And that stage was closed off. And it was during the summer.

We get a call from Universal Security.

There's a s-- a smell, something's dead in there.

It's-- it's-- it's disgusting smell.

So we sent Erik Jensen down there.

And uh, he found that box of in-- pig intestines.

That-- it had a stench, it was unbelievable.

Stunk up-- stunk up the whole set.

Come on, Doc.

There's a sense that a lot of these men have been in Vietnam

and are a bit battle-hardened and possibly have trauma.

And I think MacReady is one of those people that has already

been through some sort of hell.

And he's one of the first, possibly the only member

of the crew to actually get a grip of what's happening.

He kind of understands it at a primal level.

I was kind of looking in my last viewing if there were

dog tags somewhere for him. I was looking for them.

Because it's so obvious that this man knows

how to survive a battlefield.

- Certainly, the timing lines up.

Everybody in that camp probably saw some action somewhere.

They're all over 30.

So that means 10 years earlier they were of draft age for Vietnam.

Or in the case of some of these guys, they were draft age for Korea.

I think it is very much a Vietnam movie, you know?

I think that's part of why it's all men.

You know, there is

the way they look, if you put those men together

and you just put a uniform on them, they're very much marines in Vietnam.

So I think it's very much a-- a child of the disillusionment.

Yeah, I think the film is, you know, a compendium of influences.

Burdened by the Vietnam War, actually.

Um, I was trying to get out of it.

All of us, and including John, and we were draft eligible

during that time, uh, the war.

I mean, I had a draft lottery number.

- That's the helicopter pilot. All things begin there.

See, when you're in the air and you have a problem,

you've got to get it figured out.

You can't turn to somebody. And go, "Um…"

There's nobody there.

And that's where I think the character of MacReady,

he's already done that.

"I need to be able to be in control of this."

Is that a man in there or something?

Whatever it is, they burned it up in a hurry.

I remember Donald, when-- when we uncovered The Thing,

he went like this.

We found this.

- Jesus Christ.

And I imagine the same thing, that it-- it-- it was a grotesque, awful smell.

I mean, my face is even taking it on right now, you know?

I once went to a crematorium, and they opened the back of it,

and I smelled decomposing flesh for the first time in my life.

It's unmistakable what it is,

even though you've never seen or smelled it.

- That was the first effect that we worked on, first autopsy.

We had a big stack of different body parts, fiberglass body parts.

And then Rob said, "Hey, Ken, uh, can you figure a way

to stick all this stuff together?"

Rob was working on the split face, but it was very much a collaborative effort.

It was a big conglomeration of things with the like, the split head.

I remember being there to help dress it for Rob

and paint blood veins in the Methocel on this massive thing.

And the cast is sitting there, and they're almost starting

to get to a point where they're waiting.

And I'm just like, having to paint all this.

And I think Carpenter was like, "Oh, I think that's enough now."

To try and get me to stop, because Rob's like, "Keep going, keep going.

One of the most iconic images is the split face creature

that's brought back from the Norwegian camp.

That's probably the one image that was released a lot in public.

We pictured like, aliens looking like, you know,

something out of a 1950 sci-fi movie.

This was like a whole other thing, literally.

You know, with all the-- the weird faces, that kind of half-stretched face

that looks like something out of Basket Case.

Well, the first real glimpse of The Thing we see looks like

an Edvard Munch's The Scream.

You know, it's a-- it's an art project in a way.

It's quite horrific, because you can just see that it is or was human.

That was an example of it sort of absorbing

and recreating those, because it's not necessarily

two people being joined together.

But in my mind, it was that creature

sort of being caught mid-transformation.

- That was an incredible way for John Carpenter

to set the stage to sort of say,

"Okay, this is what the creature's capable of."

And you go, "Oh my, they're in trouble.

Oh, my."

- I think that face has a certain thematic heft to it in terms

of duality, and doubling, and paranoia.

I think it also has this sort of unquantifiable, uncanny quality to it.

You know when you look at it--

Like if you look at American Werewolf in London,

that's just-- it's a wolf, but it's beautiful.

It's a beautiful sculpture,

and it's a beautiful-looking creature in its way.

This looks wrong.

The-- the-- The Thing looks like it doesn't belong here.

It's-- it's uncanny in the truest sense of the word.

It is wrong.

I don't know what the hell's in there,

but it's weird and pissed off, whatever it is.

Bennings, go get Childs.

- And when I heard they were making the film,

I was really, really, really, really interested.

My agent got a call saying John wanted me to come in.

John and I knew each other.

We had mutual friends, and we had socialized some.

He-- he knew my work, I certainly knew his.

HEAVEN'S GATE [1980]

Uh, originally, when he asked me, I mentioned Donald Moffat's part.

And John said, "No, I-- I-- I think I got the guy for that."

He said, "What else are you interested in?"

And I said, "The one I relate to the most is

is actually Clark, the dog handler.

He's got a real presence, and I love the fact that

all he cares about is the dogs,

and he doesn't really care about the people."

Easy. Easy. Yes.

Richard had a great sense of humor.

Really good, but very, very dry.

And that slow delivery of his, you know, which it's always measured.

And if you have that subtext of, "Maybe you're not the person

I think you were", it adds a layer of fear.

Richard Masur does that so beautifully.

He ostensibly is protecting the dogs, right?

But he has that internal thing going on.

The camera loves it.

Did you notice anything strange about the dog?

Anything at all?

Strange? No.

I had a University of Oregon T-shirt on that I wore

almost through the whole film, uh, you barely saw it.

The only thing I thought there, this is the slightest piece

of backstory, was, "Yeah, if-- if he went to college,

he probably went to someplace like the University of Oregon",

which was kind of a outdoorsy, open-thinking kind of a place.

And-- and then I-- I was absolutely sure

that he had dropped out and gone to do what he loved to do,

which was probably gone to Alaska

or someplace else, and-- and learned how to run dogs, so.

Go ahead.

Go ahead. What are you waiting for?

In the mid-'70s, when makeup effects really

was thrust into the forefront…

- By this sign of the Holy Cross!

- The artists that created these effects, Tom Savini,

Rick Baker, Stan Winston, and later Rob,

they became almost household names.

- And Invasion of the Body Snatchers was remade

into something contemporary and really believable

in a lot of ways, better than the original movie.

American Werewolf in London came out the year before,

and Rick Baker had done things nobody had done before.

The Thing was the epitome of that body horror movement.

Pretty sure, it's the movie that got John Carpenter called

a pornographer, because of how graphic it was.

That just tells me he's doing everything right.

Talked to everybody. I talked to everybody.

And all the special effects guys.

- So you didn't want to see a man in a suit.

You didn't want to see a bug.

Anything necessarily alien or Geiger-like.

I think I might have brought it up.

It was dismissed almost immediately by John.

I mean, the designs for Alien were so distinctive.

You know, he wanted to move as far away from that as possible anyway.

We have a meeting with a gentleman named Dale Kuipers

to design The Thing.

Dale Kuipers had worked on Caveman.

John knew about Dale.

And so Dale came in very shy. Very shy man from Michigan.

And you know, there was a bunch of different early concept sketches.

A creature that was designed that was very crab-like.

John's sitting in his office looking at the sketch, figuring out,

"How the fuck can I make this big mechanical puppet".

We had to move from Dale to someone else.

And that someone else became Rob Bottin.

Rob, of course, had appeared in The Fog

and done some stuff with John until they knew each other.

And it seemed, you know, at this point,

it's like, it's-- it's a natural way to go.

Even for this 6 point-- 6-foot-2-inch-tall guy,

22 years old, with-- with big broad shoulders, you know?

The Howling had just been released or about to be released.

We saw it. We knew it was great.

Only question was, "Could he do it under this sort of pressure?"

I mean, 'cause John at one point said, "Look, this guy is the film." You know?

"And if this-- if this doesn't work, you know, nothing's gonna work."

Before we hired him, at John's behest,

I took one last meeting with Rick Baker, who at the time was

right in the middle of American Werewolf in London.

And the idea behind the meeting was not to get Rick to do the film.

But whether Rick could work as a uh, as an advisor to Rob.

You know, should Rob need help, should Rob need advice.

John's concern was, you know, whether he could deliver.

Whether Rob could deliver.

Rick, there was no way he could do it.

He was right in the middle of the werewolf. His schedule was full.

So we uh, we went ahead and-- and it became Rob.

Smartest man on the film.

HARTLAND CREW

- We were given a-- a facility called, "Universal Hartland".

That was in North Hollywood. It was a uh, a larger facility.

It had been a shooting stage.

They had shot uh, Buck Rogers there.

The original Star Trek movie.

Uh, there were still some props there when we-- we moved in.

The plan originally was to do a lot of the work with First Unit.

However, the effects were very involved

and sometimes very labor intensive.

- I've known Rob since he started high school.

So he was probably about 13.

And so he was a family friend.

At that point he also is when he met Rick Baker.

But then Rob got a movie where he was making an ape suit.

That was one of his first projects.

And so he knew that I was in hair school.

So he wanted me to help him with it.

So I just was cutting up wigs and sewing wefts

on a spandex suit for a movie called, "Tanya's Island".

And then he got The Howling.

And so he asked me if I wanted to work on it with him.

That's basically how I started on-- on The Thing was

'cause Rob and I-- I--

He's kind of like another brother for me.

I uh, first met a childhood friend of Rob Bottin

named Vince Prentice.

Vince told me many stories of him and Rob's childhood escapades.

How they used to do stunt work and do little home movies and stuff.

And then uh, Vince told me that Rob was actually apprenticing

with Rick Baker.

And had worked on films like The Incredible Melting Man. King Kong.

And then some work on the cantina scene on the first Star Wars.

And I first actually met Rob in 1977 on the set of Piranha.

And they were doing underwater photography with little mechanical piranhas.

In 1981, I was working with Carlo Rambaldi on the film E.T.

And I was doing test paint jobs on the different E.T. heads.

A short time later I got a call from Vince Prentice.

And said, "Hey Ken.

Rob's starting up a new movie called, "The Thing".

And we have all kinds of different creatures we're gonna be creating.

And he wants to know if you want to come work on it."

"Heck, man." I go, "Yeah.

We're working on a-- I'm working on this silly-looking alien here.

I'm gonna go out and do some great work with these guys."

- I had been working on a film called, "Dragonslayer"

to Industrial Light & Magic.

Flew back on the plane.

And my memory tells me that Rob picked me up at the airport. Rob Bottin.

And at that time, he-- he told me about The Thing.

We had a script.

He had a hell of a lot of ideas about what he wanted to do.

Pretty wild. Pretty out there.

Where the really uh, interesting stuff was going on

was actually Rob in his area with Mike Ploog.

Because that's all they were doing was just concepts

of what-- what kind of creatures could be formed.

And one of the greatest horror comic book artists is Mike Ploog.

He created Ghost Rider. His art is so specific.

Especially in the horror genre. It's just amazing.

Definitely a-- a guy who can imagine something

if you can describe it.

And I think that Rob's imagination, uh,

Mike Ploog's aesthetic kind of mutated together.

'Cause you needed someone who could be not constrained

by, you know, the classical forms.

We needed storyboards

and potentially artistic renditions of The Thing itself.

And he was in our shop with us. We had an-- an office for him.

- You know, they published Mike Ploog's drawings.

You know, the storyboards and his illustrations.

Some of those were published in Cinefantastique magazine.

And it gave you a really good glimpse into how it was done,

the behind-the-scenes.

I think the kennel sequence is really enjoyable to watch.

Because every time they cut back,

The Thing is mutated into something different.

And it's so perfectly done with the sound effects

and when the dog walks in.

So, the first instance of The Thing feeling threatened

and showing itself almost prematurely, uh, because

it wants to defend itself or escape.

We were basically tasked with coming up with duplicate jets

for effects, different effects.

- The dog that's just sitting there in the very beginning that's just straight

and it's starting to shake, that was a taxidermy dog.

- We went to a rendering plant in the City of Vernon.

Every morning, trucks from all over Los Angeles County

would come and bring dogs and cats that had been euthanized or roadkill.

We'd give 'em a-- a case of beer every day

we went down there just so they'd work with us.

And I used to drive a little Pinto station wagon.

And I had to go to a taxidermist.

And they put this dog in the back of my--

of my station wagon facing the-- out the back.

People are like staring at the back of the car.

It's like, "Why isn't that dog moving?"

- The animated dog was all on like-- like hydraulics.

They had to pump air into the animation of the dog.

But it looked so real when I came in, it was like, "Oh!

Oh, it doesn't-- it doesn't, it's not moving."

Then when they started pumping that air in it and it starts…

It was like, "That is fascinating."

And the dog's head begins to split open

and you don't know what you're-- he explained it to us, you know?

We saw drawings and stuff, but it was like, "Well, okay."

Rob always likes to push things to see how far he can take it.

And it looked cool.

- And people talk about design, I always say,

"Well, there's two elements to makeup effects and monsters.

Horror and beauty."

If they don't have both, it's not memorable. Right?

And the-- the moment the-- the head of the dog flowers out.

Yeah.

Is like a choreographic moment of great beauty.

The hoses. We called them, the "hissing hoses",

which were like these tentacles that would come out and fly around.

Motivated by uh, air pressure.

The sound and the…

You can't quite process it, 'cause you've never seen

anything like it before.

And then also in the dog kennel was a chicken dog

that he gave Stan Winston to do.

- I think Rob felt that the workload was becoming overwhelming.

I fought against it. I didn't wanna…

'Cause I knew Stan was gonna get all the credit.

The timing was perfect, by the way,

because uh, the shop uh, was a little slow at the time.

Uh, he had a few-- a few you know, team members there,

Lance Anderson, Michiko Tagawa, uh, Jim Cagle.

Stan was blown away by what Jim Henson did uh, with regard

to you know, applying the puppetry he developed.

Fortunately, that's where he w-- his head was

when Rob approached him.

Isn't it interesting how all these artists, Rick Baker,

Stan Winston, Rob Bottin, those were like

the three massive, the three pillars of cr--

we didn't even call it, "practical effects".

And they all had their individual takes.

- On the dog thing, they took a mold of Lance

in a position, you know, with his arm.

So you had the dog's body here. And then you had the neck.

And then here. So it's just a hand puppet.

And once that was completed, they brought that back

to uh, Hartland and we added a-- a big tongue, mechanical tongue.

And then we had tentacles that were-- we shot in reverse.

The slimed dog that's in the corner.

I was puppeteering it from behind.

I had a-- the muzzle the-- and-- and one of the hands.

And Vince Prentice was doing the other legs.

Vince was trying to pull the tentacles away.

And he ran out of room.

So he just starts spinning around, wrapping the tentacles around himself.

And Rob, "More, more, more. Pull, pull, pull."

And when it absorbs the dogs, the dogs become a repeating motif.

And I believe that it had never come in contact

with an animal like that before.

So maybe that DNA was sort of fresh in its metamorphosis.

The thing reaches up and punches through the ceiling.

And Rob was wearing some gloves.

These rubber gloves uh, with slime on 'em.

And he punched through this-- the uh, top of the ceiling.

We can see part of it escaping into the ceiling.

And nobody goes after that.

I had never known that those petals were tongues of dogs.

And that the teeth that are inside are dog teeth.

So that that was a version of The Thing reprocessing the dogs.

'Cause I always thought it was like a weird flower creature

from another planet.

I've seen on posts that people comment.

It says if you freeze frame shot,

you could see a silhouette in the back of the head.

Uh, someone back there. And that's actually me.

Get your ass over here!

Burn it.

I loved the fact that my character has

the responsibility of having the flamethrower, you know?

"I'm gonna be a badass", you know?

Damn it, Childs. Torch it!

The responsibility of holding that thing

will put a little color in your shorts,

because it's got like a hair trigger.

All you got to do is tap it. And that thing, psss!

And it projects 20 or 30 feet. Even if you just tap it.

At the same time, I was pumped up and happy, I was also…

…scared shitless.

Uh, it's really funny, 'cause now I'm older than Wilford Brimley

was in The Thing, which kind of blows my mind.

'Cause as a kid he was like such an old man.

- Oh my God.

Wilford Brimley was cast as Blair, it's a kind of vital role.

- He's the one who figures it out at first.

Asking the questions,

how long before the entire world is infected.

So we understand his descent into a little bit

of paranoid madness.

- When Brimley came in to meet us,

John offered him the role on the spot.

How long were you alone with that dog?

Blair is one of the first to be uh, infected or absorbed.

And that we wanted to make sure that when he was off-camera,

that the audience not think about that character too much.

Now Will had been a stuntman for years.

He stood in for Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas,

he knew all these guys. He was a real cowboy.

And I think at the time,

China Syndrome had just kicked his career way up.

And here he is and…

He was just the funniest man in the world.

- And Will Brimley was sort of like everyone's dad.

And I'd-- I've never seen anything like this before or since.

But Will would be doing rope tricks.

And they would stop work.

Imagine on a feature film. Even in 1981.

It's hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour.

And John allowed all the work to stop for Will to be telling

a story about who knows what,

while he was doing rope tricks.

Will Brimley and I went back to horses.

I-- I had looked at some horses.

And was thinking about buying some horses from uh, Will,

which I didn't do.

So the first day I showed up for--

I think we were rehearsing or something.

And he, very Wilford style, he says, "You never called me."

What the hell are you looking at me like that for?

- We were talking about the next scene.

And Wilford is sitting there in his chair and he's doing this…

And we're-- you know, we're all going, "What?"

You know? And he says,

"You boys still think this picture is about us.

It's not about us. It's about the rubber guy."

That was his line.

But it was really true in some ways.

One theory about who's who in The Thing by the way, uh,

might have to do with facial hair.

Rob Bottin mandated that any of the actors involved

with the effect sequences be clean shaven.

And this meant Will would have to have his famous mustache shaved.

I fell to John to ask him to do it,

which he fortunately agreed to do.

John Carpenter has so many scenes in which

there are up to a dozen characters in the same frame.

And yet no one is standing around looking awkward.

I remember Tarantino telling me on Hateful Eight that he's like,

"Oh, I'm gonna shoot 70 millimeters."

Every single person, I got to deal with what they're doing

at that moment in time.

I don't know what Carpenter's direction method is.

Whether he rehearses it with the actors

or he sets up the camera and tells them where to go.

But it looks effortless. And it looks very natural.

And that's the hardest thing to do.

- Look. Son of a bitch, oh.

This thing dog, you know, you only see it in the movie

for maybe five setups.

But when you look at the piece,

you see elements of the sculpture that are absolutely fascinating.

Rob was the one who, when he was auditioning for me,

to do the-- the rubber, to do the creature,

he said that the opportunity is it can look like anything.

It can look like all the creatures that it has imitated in the universe.

And that was the secret to me.

"Oh! Now we can do something different.

Now we can really show our stuff."

This is a Hawks creature. A Howard Hawks creature.

A creature defined by its actions.

How many planets had this thing gone to?

So how many other life forms could be incorporated

with human life forms or animal life forms on Earth?

Which opened it up even more.

Who knows why it had to leave the planet that it was on.

But it survived by understanding how it could emulate,

it could continue its organism by entering a different organism.

Going from planet to planet, to planet, to planet, to planet.

When this thing attacked our dogs, it tried to digest 'em. Absorb them.

And in the process shape its own cells to imitate them.

The thing that interested me from the astrobiology standpoint here

is the ability of this being

to morph into whatever it attacks and absorbs

in-- in-- in-- in some ways.

This for instance. That's not dog.

We know on Earth creatures that are capable of mimetism.

Looking like the stuff around.

It's Blair who says it's a mimic.

- You see what we're talking about here

is an organism that imitates other life forms.

And it imitates 'em perfectly.

When you take that as literally as the movie pre-- presents it,

you know, the mimic doesn't really have its own identity.

The mimic on-- it is-- it is-- simply exists as a mimic.

- He had tentacles.

Uh, it's not like it swallowed an octopus.

The tentacles had to come from someplace.

And it has insectile parts. And it-- and it has squid parts.

And it has fangs. And it's part dog.

And it's part crab. And it's part dragon.

There is something in its metabolism that allows

that being to become the thing that it actually kills.

If DNA or if amino acids are the vehicle to create,

then it might be that an advanced civilization

could be capable of creating

a sort of a library of bases.

And-- and just play with that.

- It's imitation.

We got to it before it had time to finish.

Finish what?

Finish imitating these dogs.

I only saw this for the first time the other day.

I actually saw it on Reddit.

'Cause I was dipping into--

I sometimes just dip into movies or stories that I like

to see how other people think about them.

And for the very first time I noticed that somebody else

noticed that Wilford Brimley pokes at it with the-- the--

the eraser and then touches it to his bottom lip

for just a second.

Not-- not in, just literally touches it right there like,

he's thinking. Like, "That's it, he's done."

He knows that they're doomed. And he loses his mind.

And he will become the first one to sound the alarm

and the last carrier. Both.

Blair is the biggest threat to it.

And therefore, decides to take care of business immediately.

So Blair is probably a creature throughout the entire film.

Jesus, how long you figure this has been in the ice?

- Where'd they take these shots?

Seems like they were spending a lot of their time

in a little place northeast of their camp about 5 or 6 miles.

Charlie, well, he was just the sweetest guy on the planet.

I don't know how else to put it.

I'm sure everybody else would have said the same thing.

- This is it. The place where they're spending most of their time.

Pretty nasty out Mac, 35 knots.

Screw it, I'm gonna go up anyway.

Charlie was growing his own grass, his own weed.

He was very proud of that. A very well read man.

Very well read. Really fun to talk to. Great debater.

You know when he was giving you a statistic, it was legit.

God rest his soul, he uh, was always

bringing in reference material.

Stuff about the backscatter effect,

which is things buried deep in the permafrost slowly,

for whatever reason, rise to the surface and suddenly appear there.

Well, the backscatter effect's been bringing things up

from way down around here for a long time.

I'd say, I'd say the ice that's buried in is 100,000 years old, at least.

You know, sometimes it got to be too much, just too much information.

- Charles Hallahan's Norris, the geologist.

He's one of the men who go along on the helicopter flight

to see where the Norwegians found the block of ice.

You know, he's got a-- a-- an important place on the team.

John Carpenter obviously has a great deal of affection

and respect for the original film of The Thing.

The Thing from Another World.

Uh, and indeed, he references it directly several times in his film.

The flying saucer at the beginning.

He chooses to have a classic-looking flying saucer.

Very retro sci-fi.

ANTARCTICA

Well, I guess now you'd call that an Easter egg of some sort.

But um, yeah, I-- I think those were all intentional.

-Hello, doctor, professor. -Hello.

-Still the same game? -Yes.

-And then it got really fouled up. -You mean you're not getting anything?

Not a thing. Static's knocking it right out of the air.

Look, I haven't been able to reach shit in two weeks.

Look there.

Half a mile due east.

-Captain Hendry. -What's the matter, Corporal?

-Dr. Chapman. -Where's the captain?

I've got to tell him…

It's Bennings.

- You have the helicopter flying across a mountain range.

There's one kind of vein of mountains running through it.

And when they give you the references,

I get a feeling if somebody out there wanted to do it,

they could triangulate exactly where this camp was.

Antarctic people might criticize it and say,

"Well, we don't have mountains like at the South Pole,

so it's not a South Pole station."

Well, it never said it's a South Pole station.

And then there is a thing in the movie that says something

about 800 miles away, which is roughly the distance to McMurdo.

Mike Ploog, he drew this outrageously big sombrero for Kurt.

And I-- I loved it. And I had it made.

And I don't think Kurt liked it very much.

- I buttonholed him in a party a year ago.

And I said, "I'm sorry, I don't mean to bother you,

but I just can't help but talk to you about The Thing."

And he was happy to talk about it.

And I said, "Let's just start. I'll just start here.

Let's start with the hat."

And-- and he said, "Oh, I hated that damn hat.

Initially, he hated the hat. Yes. Yes, he did.

But then he grew fond of it.

And I don't know how John talked him into it.

Uh. Kurt had not been cast.

He was about to be cast as we went up mid-June.

John needed Kurt's outfit, because he was gonna play Kurt

in one of the shots we were gonna do, second unit.

So John picked the outfit, including the fabulous hat that

uh, that Kurt loved so much.

And that's where John established the hat.

MacReady going forward, and toward the flying saucer.

That's John Carpenter playing MacReady.

- I go to wardrobe, and we're going through,

you know, this, that, and I got the thing.

And I keep noticing that over, there's a chair over there

with this big sombrero on it.

I said, "What's the deal with the sombrero?"

She said, "Oh, that's your hat."

I just laughed. I said, "I'm not wearing a sombrero."

And I-- I think at that point John kind of came in.

I don't know if he was out in the hallway listening or something.

I don't know. He came in, and I said, "That sombrero."

And he goes, "It'll be great." And I said, "All right, if you say so.

I'll wear that sombrero in a helicopter.

Okay, fine."

He showed me some stuff that they'd shot.

You had all these guys, all, you know, heavy clothes, wrap--

wrapped up, hoods, goggles.

And then I was looking at this, and I said,

"But it looked really good. It just looked really good."

And I said-- he said, "What do you think?"

And I said, "I think it looks really good."

He said, "But you see, my issue. I don't know who's who.

I need someone to hang my hat on."

And suddenly the sombrero, and when I saw sombrero,

he lit-- he means literally a hat.

Says the old Ford thing, right? "Where's the horizon?" Right?

It's shot like a Western.

When the atmosphere weighs down the characters,

it's the nothingness crushing little figures.

I remember he once looked at me and he said, "Okay, so uh, Darabont,

-Hawks or Ford? -Hm.

It's like saying, you know, Beatles or Stones, right?

-Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. -Back then I-- I said, "I think Ford."

And he-- and he looked at me and he goes, "You're wrong."

Yeah.

- There's a running joke that I have with a friend of mine

who-- where we-- we talk about whatever movie Carpenter's made,

he's some-- at some point in the interviews,

he's gonna go, "Well, it's really a Western."

But certainly The Thing as elements of a Western,

to a degree, Quentin Tarantino remade it

as a Western in uh, The Hateful Eight,

which is snowbound. Here's Kurt Russell.

I hope it's not true that Kurt Russell's character

in Hateful Eight is an ancestor of MacReady.

The fun thing about Kurt Russell in Hateful Eight

is that he's kind of foolish.

He's not on top of everything and he's not got it all figured out.

We are led to think he's that guy, but he's kind of a dipshit.

Christ, that's awful!

And my character in that was not paranoid enough.

Just because you're-- just because you're paranoid

doesn't mean they're not after you.

- My God, those beautiful matte paintings

when they're rappelling down where the ship crashed.

It's unmatched.

There's-- there's nothing that looks and feels like that.

When you see those beautiful, beautiful Albert Whitlock

matte paintings, they're-- they're spectacular.

So, Carpenter really understood the classical '50s style

of filmmaking, but used modern special effects.

The production design, uh, the cinematography,

the matte painting, all by really talented people.

It makes a place.

It creates a setting which is real and is also mythic.

The ship is right there. And it's open.

I find it kind of extraordinary that they didn't even peek inside.

For whatever reason, it had to expand its horizons to survive.

I-- I do-- you know, who knows what that is?

But it came here to simply do that here.

- Was the Thing piloting the spacecraft

at the start of the film? Or was it a passenger on board?

Or was it a sample uh, being carried

by a Weyland-Yutani type corporation

back to whatever planet for use as a bioweapon or something?

I have always thought the creature that was discovered

in the ice was one of the crew of the crash-landed ship.

Uh, and that they are a race of creatures

that can take on the attributes of other beings and then infiltrate.

I don't know. It's so confusing when you really think about it.

Was it just a life form that the actual crew

on the alien ship were transporting somewhere?

Maybe. I don't know.

I thought it was like a, sort of a-- a high intelligence race in the ship.

And they were collectors of organism.

Like Darwin on the HMS Beagle. Finding specimens.

Examining them. And like-- and they find this creature.

Maybe I don-- you know, also shape-shifted in a-- in a--

in another creature. Probably.

And they let-- that creature breaks loose in the ship

and basically kills everybody.

And that's why it crashes.

So we wanted to build all these sort

of glass things with these weird creatures.

Like a little bit like an alien.

- What we were designing for the pilot

was an alien species unrelated to The Thing.

Just like human beings are.

That had been taken over by The Thing.

And they had-- in this ship, they had uh, various containers

holding different creatures from all across the galaxy.

So theoretically, they picked up a creature that was a replicant

or was infected by or something of The Thing.

And you know, you can't contain The Thing.

The Thing was owned by Universal, so…

They licensed it out and they did all sorts of things.

They didn't have to ask me.

- You basically have to do it in Norwegian

with an all-Norwegian male cast. That was my proposition.

Now looking back on it, I would never have done it, to be honest.

But it became a sort of like reconstruction of like,

okay, the double-faced monster is outside.

How did it get outside? There's an exit door.

The guy's committed suicide in his chair.

All these things we had to make fit.

And I think that had a sort of a-- it was also like a burden

a little bit on the story.

Reportedly, a lot of very skilled people made

some wonderful practical effects

only for the studio to obliterate them and--

and put computer effects in instead.

With the result that nothing really looks real.

It looks weightless.

- The idea was really make it like 80%. For real.

And then really do some post-work on it to enhance stuff.

Because I think like in 2011, looking at Rob Bottin's,

although amazing work, if you would incorporate that

in a 2011 film, people would go like, "Hmm, uh, that's a bit odd."

There was a-- a scene in it where they go into a spaceship

and there are the frozen and dead shriveled bodies

of the aliens that were on that ship.

It was a-- a parallel to the Norwegian camp in the first film.

And we did create a character wherein The Thing was

replicating itself as one of these aliens.

But people in the test screenings thought that's the actual form of The Thing.

And so the decision was, "Well, we can't uh, show this."

They basically decided that we had to replace everything with CG.

- I really like what they did with the-- the prequel.

The story of the Norwegian outpost

is already a remake,

in a sense, of what happened to-- to Outpost 31.

You can expand the universe by telling us what happened before,

but at the same time, kind of remake the original.

But it's also a story that exists in the continuity of the original film.

I always thought that The Thing was sentient.

And that it-- it did have a plan.

I think it just probably landed in the wrong airport, so to speak.

Well, if you examine the creature in-- in the-- in The Thing,

The Thing itself, uh, it has one defense offense,

which is to hide and escape detection, so it imitates.

I think The Thing is sentient in that it has a awareness

of itself and an awareness of its desire to continue existing.

But a lot of what it has become is a conglomeration

of everything it's been.

It has a plan. It is profoundly intelligent.

It has absorbed the-- the souls, not only the bodies,

but the souls of many, many creatures around the universe.

It is way smarter than all of us.

I always wondered if you-- you took all your cells

of your victim, you know,

would you take the sense of smell of the dogs?

Would you be-- become a better smeller?

It's just made for a good monster movie.

It was all-- it all came to a-- a good-- a good head

to have this combination of unanswerable stuff

that just makes people-- people's minds want to explore.

Happens all the time, man.

They're falling out of the skies like flies.

Well, I had no interest in the genre of horror.

But when I read the script, I was intrigued by the situation

that the men find themselves in.

I thought that was interesting. Psychologically.

Now, how's this motherfucker wake up after thousands of years in the ice?

And how can it look like a dog?

They wanted me to come in and read for the part of Bennings.

I thought, "I don't want to play another college-educated,

science-minded character.

I want to play someone who is more working class."

I told my agent that I would also like to read for Palmer.

Not necessarily any less smart, but-- but less educated.

Childs. Childs. Chariots of the Gods, man.

- Palmer's out there.

You know, he's had some of the best lines.

He's the funniest guy.

Really, really, really good actor.

And loved doing-- he loved playing the part he was playing.

He was having a lot of fun with that.

I became very attached to the music

that I wanted to hear

through that tape player into the headphones.

It was probably The Rolling Stones.

You know, so I was really happy hearing that music

as I went through different scenes in the movie.

And then the sound mixer said, "We have a problem.

We can hear The Rolling Stones coming through your head-- your headphones."

And so I had to-- I had to give it up.

- He's kind of a good counterweight,

because he comes up with these hippy-dippy conspiracy theories

about aliens, which makes what people like MacReady say about

The Thing almost um, sensible by comparison.

And he smokes a lot of weed.

So that's gonna give him a unique view

of the world around him.

He thinks,

"Yeah, so some creatures from outside

our world came down and taught human beings

how to uh, feed themselves, how to grow crops, uh,

how to raise animals."

I just cannot believe any of this voodoo bullshit.

He has the answer.

Chariots of the Gods.

They practically own South America.

I mean, they taught the Incas everything they know.

The '70s was a boon time for UFO sightings.

And capitalizing on UFO sightings,

there were books, there were movies, there were TV shows, In Search Of…

There was a movie where like, James Earl Jones played a-- a man

who claimed he was abducted.

His eyes are slanted.

Oh.

- Chariots of the Gods was a book about a popular theory

that human beings basically exist, because of aliens kind of

settling this planet and building the-- the pyramids

and the Aztec temples, they are our gods, in a sense.

Interestingly, this is sort of where Prometheus ended up

being about 'cause Ridley Scott, you know, came up of-- of age

in the '70s when we believed all that shit.

Now someone, maybe Richard Masur would say,

"Well, when Palmer is talking about the Chariots of the Gods,

is he already The Thing?

And he's doing this Chariots of the Gods thing to distract them."

You buy any of this, Blair?

- I had to struggle with this movie,

because I had to embrace the darkness.

Because it's end-of-the-world stuff.

And I had gotten into it more or less thinking I was gonna make

a-- hopefully, a good monster movie, science-fiction movie.

And man, it's-- it's grim.

And you have to embrace that.

- Even the way they do the computer simulation,

you know, all mankind wiped out.

That none of them are gonna make it. It's now just about stopping that thing.

- Other movies, especially of that time,

would have had the scientists going like, "This is the--

the alien cell, and this is what it does",

and the whole explanation.

And this movie does it quietly with just text on a screen.

For me, it was this sort of bleakness that was

a real sign of the times.

It was basically no hope. Huh?

- The choice if you read Bill's script, Bill Lancaster's original script,

you would see it was more of a movie-movie. More humor.

John transformed the film and sent it toward--

hurling toward the apocalypse.

You don't really get to see the creature

as the creature would be when it crawled out of that spaceship.

You do get to see it on that computer screen,

but that is a graphic of what happens on the cellular level.

- You know, this was actually the computer.

And I can remember there were, we had a bunch of tests,

because the frame rates and this and that,

and all the crap that goes with it to make that work.

- There is a little in-joke there, which is, you know,

John Carpenter, big Asteroids fan.

And when you look at the blood scene with Blair,

there's a scene where you can see the cells kind of

taking each other over, which very much hints back to Asteroids.

Actually on the set of The Thing, there was a Asteroids game.

And so we would play that. It's-- it's a console deal.

But I personally think there might also be another little

history bit here, going back to 1951.

Remember, John Carpenter is trying to fill this film

with lots of little nods to the original movie.

You get a lot of Thing merchandise, including a pinball machine.

Maybe this little nod of having the pinball machines there

to go back to this 1951 version of The Thing.

-I have to talk to you. -I'm tired of talking, Fuchs.

I just want to get up to my shack and get drunk.

Mac, it's important.

I went to USC, University of Southern California.

And that's where John studied film.

So when I went to meet him, that was serendipitous.

He and I got along like gangbusters.

I did the first audition. Then I came back and read again.

That when I left, I went, "Oh God, I blew it.

I'm not gonna get that mov--

Oh, man, I really wanted to do that movie."

And I remember walking back across Central Park to my apartment

and being so dejected.

And I think by the time I got there, the phone rang.

And they told me I booked the film.

-Outside. -It's 40 below outside.

In the Thiokol. Please, Mac.

He reminded me a bit of Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws.

He's a guy who comes along with a beard and glasses,

a bit of an intellectual.

He's some sort of scientist, a geologist or biologist, I think.

And he actually has a good grasp of what's going on.

There's something wrong with Blair.

He's locked himself in his room and he won't answer the door.

So I took one of his notebooks from the lab.

Yeah.

I always thought Joel Polis is

when-- when-- when I was walking down a hallway and I look in

and see him, it's uh, like, "What? Wait a minute, what's going on here?"

And Joel was perfect in that scene

where he turns around and he was so paranoid.

There-- there's nothing left but paranoia on him.

- He kind of plays a bit of a woman in peril role at one point.

He's alone in the lab and the lights go out

and he's going around like a woman wandering through a haunted house.

I went down to Baruch College in New York

and I took a biology class and I was doing dissections of, you know, I was--

I always loved biology, but I wanted to back myself up.

And if you read the original script,

it says, "Assistant biologist, intelligent, unassuming".

So, yeah, I had a backstory.

Just doing a grant for graduate work, uh, applying

to work in Antarctica and that kind of thing.

Girlfriend at home. Not gonna see her again, you know.

Who's that?

Well, The Thing involves a-- an alien species from outer space.

It's buried in the ice for thousands of years.

That classifies The Thing as definitely science-fiction.

Thing is definitely a horror movie.

The sci-fi element is really only in the genesis of the threat.

It's definitely psychological horror.

I always thought that The Thing was science-fiction.

You know, it's got some horror elements to it.

I think it's a combination of horror, uh science-fiction,

and psychological thriller, I think.

I classify it as a science-fiction thriller.

It has this little sprinkle of comedy here and there.

But I just don't think it's a horror film as much

as it is the human-mankind survival.

"How do we get out of this", kind of movie.

I would say it's an intellectual man's horror film.

It's a sci-fi horror film.

And I will argue with anyone who disagrees with me, including John Carpenter.

You made a sci-fi horror film, John.

And I think a lot of rewriting took place between

the end of production on the soundstage at Universal

and the beginning of production in British Columbia, Alaska.

John went and watched a rough assemblage of everything

we'd already shot, so all the interior stuff.

And John looked at it and he said,

"This is a boring movie about a bunch of guys sitting around talking."

And-- and it was a bunch of guys sitting around talking.

- We ought to just burn these things.

Can't burn the find of the century.

- So they were shooting and I was cutting right along.

And then suddenly, I got this interpretation of how

The Thing might work that uh, was different

from what we might want to be communicating.

And uh, so John came down and I discussed it with him.

"I think we might have a potential problem here

where some people are gonna think this because uh, it occurred to me."

After the nine weeks on stage, when John looked at the cut,

you know, and-- and came to my office,

and you know, and said uh, "It doesn't work.

Long boring, pe-- repetitive.

It's a long time between monsters."

I tinkered with the script right up until the end, to be frank,

because uh, I just, it has-- the movie has to work.

- The studio loved the dailies.

They were seeing all the stuff of the men on stage.

We held back all the creature stuff from them.

They liked what they were seeing.

And it's all of a sudden, John Carpenter is saying uh, "Yeah, it doesn't work."

Sorry, Mac. You have to move your stuff…

But I thought we needed to hit the idea and the themes harder.

- Scenes were just starting to get left in cold cloth.

Uh, other scenes were repositioned.

Other scenes were sort of remade into something else,

um, where the meaning-- where their meaning was changed.

The computer graphic, the player watches, you know, is a new scene,

for example, that was remade out of something else.

Uh, it was John really doing violence.

But he was out ruthless with it.

And he knew he'd have to replace it with, you know,

material that he would write and that he would have to shoot.

Not on the relatively cozy confines of the Universal lot,

but in the most hostile environment imaginable

on top of the world, you know, Stewart, British Columbia.

Let's go, Bennings. I gotta get some sleep.

John, he took us each one by one into his trailer in L.A. before--

just before we had day one,

to ask us if there was anything before we start shooting

that we had not explored or if they had any questions

whatsoever about the process or anything.

And I told him I didn't have any complaints except that I wish

I wasn't the one to be killed first.

And he said, "Peter, 10 out of 12 men are going to be killed

in awful ways. Somebody has to be the first."

Oh, shit.

Bennings' transformation is is the first time we've seen

the uh, The Thing kind of manifesting itself in a human body.

It's like running in on your parents having sex.

- We're messing with brand-new chemicals for the tentacles.

Those were a thing called, "Smooth-On", material called, "Smooth-On".

And Smooth-On, which not many people like

to mess with anymore, but at the time, Rob was like,

"Oh, we can make the tentacles out of that and make 'em really stretchy."

Bennings was right there, Mac! I swear to God, it had a hold of him!

When my death came, I mean, it was my third death.

There were three deaths of George Bennings.

There are instances in this movie where you still had to fall back

on the lessons you learned as-- as an independent director,

things you had to do for no money or little money.

And uh, no better example of this than-- than the transformation of Bennings.

The first one was written by Bill Lancaster.

In that, I escape on a snowmobile.

- One of the best scenes in the script, after the kennel,

some of the dogs escaped,

and the men chase after them on snowmobiles

and eventually, come across a dog.

And I suggested doing this at night and having us all lit by headlights.

It was a nightmarish scene.

The dogs were gonna turn and change into you know,

this monster dog

and it was gonna start this huge chain of events

where tentacles were gonna start appearing

from underneath the snow, pulling snowmobiles down.

One of them pulls Bennings down, the character down,

and it's just hell to pay.

Now the set was gonna be a giant L on stage 12

and cantilevered, so we could do effects underneath and out

from the side of the wall, including fire.

I mean, terrific scene. Everybody loved it.

Oh, we couldn't afford the scene.

Clark?

So we had the new death of Bennings, which we shot,

of me being killed by The Thing in a human form.

That was a hard day's shoot.

And I'm transfixed by the dogs.

The door opens at the end of the hall and a figure slowly walks towards me.

And I don't see it, because I'm-- I'm trapped here with awful wonder.

And he comes up behind me, wraps a barbed wire garrote

around my throat, pulls it tight, pushes the screwdriver in,

rips the chain-link fence, hoists me up, and hangs me over.

That's the end of Bennings.

Why would The Thing, having taken over one of the bodies

here in the camp, feel the need

to put a ski mask over his face? It's not truthful.

The only reason that the mask exists is so the audience

won't know who it is.

Get back! Stay back!

It isn't Bennings!

Those hands, that you see, are a used pair of hands

that we had used prev-- you know, four or five months earlier.

They're the hands that Palmer uses in his flight to the ceiling.

This is a situation where every cell in your body

has been changed maybe in a couple hours.

And what exists is still a person who looks like you

and exists in the exact same physical space as you,

but every single cell of your body has been changed

into this alien, which is now what you are.

So at some point, you have died in this transformation.

Whatever was you is gone, and The Thing is now impersonating you.

- Rob set up a pair of insulating tentacles

and some orange K-Y Jelly um, and the pair of hands.

Nobody from the effects team was up there. You know?

And John made this scene work.

And this scene is, you know, man turning into monster.

That's all John.

My best friends are forming a circle around me,

and this terrible thing is happening to me

and the evidence is here in my hands or my arms or whatever they are.

It's like something out of Philip Kaufman's

Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

It's so scary, because you see his breath,

you see the look in his eyes, and it's just a hand.

And we're like, "Oh, we caught you

at the first 30 seconds of your transformation."

Then he lets out that alien scream,

which is a really good sound effect. It's unearthly.

But that sound is one of my favorite, favorite sound effects in in movies.

- I think I torched him. Didn't I burn him?

I mean, I torched him. He was great.

Everybody did their thing, man.

It also, I think, gives rise to one of the film's

most touching moments where I think it's Garry says to MacReady…

MacReady, I know Bennings. I've known him for 10 years.

He's my friend.

And it's a reminder that, you know,

these people turning into things were people and you know,

they had relationships.

Donald Moffat as Garry, he's like a company man.

I mean, I don't know how he ended up in the Antarctic,

in charge of this weird group of men.

It becomes obvious as-- as everyone--

as the shit hits the fan that he's not up to it.

Donald was older than any of us and very patrician person.

And he played presidents of the United States.

I am the president of the United States.

He never succumbed to the lure of this science-fiction masterpiece.

He just never did.

Who else could've used that key?

Nobody. I just give it to Copper whenever he needs it.

Donald, I-- I never got to know all that well.

Donald was a little-- for me anyway,

he was a little hard to get to know. Not that he was distant.

He was just kind of unto himself, I guess.

Donald Moffat was one of my favorite actors.

I had-- Donald and I had worked on a television series together,

The New Land. He's just a great actor.

So I was excited about working with him again.

And he goes from, you know, being the sheriff to the--

at the end of the-- my favorite thing at the end

of the movie he says, "What do we do, MacReady?

What do we do?"

What can we do? What can we do?

We get a sense that he's a little bit of the odd man out

in the uh, in the group.

To see him deal with that and then to see him

lose leadership when uh, MacReady rises is just terrific.

And Donald Moffat plays that perfectly.

And I guess, you'll all feel a little easier…

if somebody else was in charge.

And there's a dynamic that John emphasized

when he rewrote the second act.

Originally, MacReady came out of the pack,

was a lot more reluctant.

John, for story purposes, really, being a character

to drive the action, to move MacReady front and center in command, in charge.

We gotta burn the rest of 'em.

- MacReady. He's trying to save his own ass.

And the only way to save his own ass is

to save everybody else who isn't The Thing.

More than leadership, it's about independence.

You know, Kurt Russell's character of MacReady is not

listening to anybody else. He's gonna do it his way.

All right, step back.

It's a wonderful dramatization of what I call, "authenticity".

And it's what natural leaders have about them.

So as you see the original uh, authority figure

in the group lose credibility when shit starts to happen

nobody can explain, MacReady has the balls

to step up and take charge of the situation.

I think MacReady taking charge is sort of a foregone conclusion

just based on how the film is cast.

We know who the star of this movie is

and we know who's gonna be running the show eventually.

And I think there's a lot of pleasure on Carpenter's end

in the storytelling idea of this sort of like

lone wolf pilot who stays up

in his cabin by himself uh, having to lead the group.

You sure that's all of 'em?

We cleaned out the storehouse, the lab.

There is nothing left.

The pecking order was a real thing.

It was just-- it just-- it just was.

Everybody fell into who their roles were. That's all I can say.

I think the other interesting leadership theme about The Thing

is that it's sort of parallel to something that happened

in another movie that year, Wrath of Khan, which is about a no-win scenario.

And how do you perform in a no-win scenario?

There's a scene near the end of the film where Kurt Russell

tells the guys that are left,

"None of us are getting out of this alive."

- We're not getting out of here alive.

And it takes something to sort of admit that, to tell--

tell your-- your fellow men that and to act on that in a way that

is uh, for the common good.

You understand me?

-He's got a gun. Get back. -Anybody interferes, I'll kill 'em.

-Jesus. -Just leave it here.

Blair, he's the guy who goes crazy

and starts destroying all the camp's equipment,

especially the radio.

Do you think that thing wanted to be an animal?

No dogs make it a thousand miles through the cold.

I have a theory that's when he knows he is The Thing.

The big question among the crew when we were-- we did two weeks

of rehearsal, was-- the question was,

"Would you know if you were a Thing?" And we could--

Nobody could answer that.

- Nobody gets in and out of here! Nobody!

- And I don't think he wanted us to know.

He wanted us more to suspect one another.

Now, I never had to worry about that,

because they offed me about one third of the way through the movie.

Ask Dave Clennon.

It doesn't matter if the character I'm playing knows

he has been overtaken and absorbed by this alien life form.

It doesn't matter, because the behavior is identical

to what the behavior would have been

before the attack and absorption occurred.

You have those spiders who are infected by lichens

or those ants that are affected by some viruses

and they become zombies.

Uh, that might be the closest thing we have in nature.

What happened to the mind? What happened to consciousness?

What happened to all of those things?

What if this Thing could imitate you perfectly?

How would you know that you're not who I think you are?

Our answer to that was not necessarily MacReady's answer.

MacReady's answer was, "I know I'm human."

But MacReady might be wrong. He might not know.

It's an interesting gray area in the movie how much memories

from the previous people, their-- their hosts, that they have access to.

They never really play around with that in The Thing.

They never go, "Tell me where you met your wife."

This is what's fascinating about films that work in--

in fantasy horror is, you know, what's-- what is it like to be a victim?

What is it like to be the killer?

In this case, you know, is the human trapped inside?

Uh, in the back seat of his temporal car?

No longer hands on the wheel going, "Oh my God, what's happening?"

- We did talk about cheating.

You know, actors playing it as a character and then doing something for the audience

that's really misleading. There's no cheating.

- And if you have that subtext of, "Maybe you're not the person

I think you are", it adds a layer of fear that you can't get by

slitting someone's throat or blowing something up.

It's actually quite a brilliant insight into mankind, isn't it?

I think it's easier for The Thing

to just let people believe that they're human beings rather than

try to like imitate what that person would do

under this situation, if that makes sense.

I think The Thing logic is when you're infected,

you don't know you're infected until the monster decides

to reveal itself.

So there are things we talked about all the time.

More than any other show I ever worked on.

Because it was very tight.

It's-- it's a tough one to break down.

How you doing, old boy?

"How you doing, old boy?"

He liked him, you know what I mean?

He-- that's again-- The other thing is, MacReady was like that guy.

He didn't dislike people for no reason.

He didn't like--

But you knew when, you know, he was fair.

I don't know who to trust.

- I know what you mean, Blair.

Trust's a tough thing to come by these days.

Somebody in this camp ain't what he appears to be.

Right now, that may be one or two of us. By spring, it could be all of us.

Is there some kind of test, Doc?

Well, yeah, possibly.

I've been thinking about a blood serum test.

Realizing that they shot on a real glacier for a lot

of that movie, in the cold, in the snow, in the remote,

desolate area, it just terrifies me.

It created an oppressive, heavy environment.

So Universal's mandate to us was, you know, he said,

"Whatever you do", when he said, you know, "wherever you go, make sure,

damn sure there's snow when you start filming."

And that led to Stewart, British Columbia, by the way, um,

because it was the snowfall capital of the world.

There was a copper mine that had a road that went right by

this glacier, went up the top of the hill, big copper mine.

And there was a little spur road off of it that we built.

We were right on the side of a glacier.

John never saw any film. We shot there.

This was, I should say, a more provincial time.

No electronic monitoring.

No way to see what we're seeing outside of, you know,

viewing through the lens.

We were mid-mountain, and then below

was Stewart, British Columbia. That's where we stayed.

- They flew us from L.A. to Anchorage.

And then from Anchorage to base camp was a six-hour bus ride.

Over these mountains.

And it was the entire cast, except for, I think, Brimley.

- And every day, the cast would be bussed up the mountain,

up this treacherous road.

But they would call ahead when the mining trucks were coming down,

and you had to get out of the way, 'cause they were barreling down.

So uh, being uh, the director and above the line,

I flew up in a helicopter.

We had white-outs up there, so we almost bought the farm.

- The rest of us were in this bus.

And we are climbing, and climbing, and climbing,

and there is nothing for hundreds of miles, but ice and boulders.

Now, I'm from Maine, and I moved to Colorado

when I was very young, when I was 25 years old.

I've spent a lot of time in the snow, and ice.

It doesn't bother me. I like it. I've always-- uh--

I feel very at home in it.

I'm sitting up in the front. Um, the guys are in the back.

And then kinda it's a long ride,

so the guys are starting to doze off and whatnot.

But I did not like the way this guy was driving the bus.

I can remember the lights of the-- the bus on the snow

the-- the increasingly heavy snow that was accumulating

on the road, on the mountain road.

And people kind of were wandering off.

They were going to sleep with their head against the window or whatever.

And suddenly, the bus driver yelled, "Slide!"

He locks up the ti-- locks it up.

And it's just gonna-- we're just gonna slide slowly over the edge.

- This is the entire cast and crew of the movie.

We could be gone.

I had to get it going sideways. And then hit the brakes.

I just jumped over this guy.

And threw the wheel this way and hit the gas.

And the left rear wheel goes off the road.

So Kurt says, "All right, everybody, stay as still as possible.

Who's in the back of the bus?"

And he goes, "All right, Tommy, get on your hands and knees

and crawl forward slowly. Everybody stay still."

One by one we crawled off the bus and we pushed the bus back onto the road.

And I remember turning around and looking at the guys

and they were all just looking at me.

And they knew they had the right MacReady.

- And we arrived at base camp at like 5:30 in the morning.

There was John Carpenter standing on the corner,

25, 30 degrees below zero with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth

waiting for us, shaking each one of our hands

as we got off the bus, having no idea of what just transpired.

That he almost lost all his men.

They had to face the fact that the film itself could break up in the cold.

Uh, for us it was the circuits.

And it was the fact that the batteries would die

so quickly for everything. It--

From that to uh, the-- the speed freezing in the mouths of actors.

So their diction was terrible and you couldn't understand

what language they were talking in to, you know, actors getting

in a mood, because you-- you have to go, and go, and go

in-- in the cold and you have to see their faces.

- The whole compound that was gonna have to blow up

at the end of the movie, that's where we hung out.

That's where we stayed.

We had to keep the temperature inside at about 28 degrees,

so that it wouldn't melt the snow on top.

So we were never not in freezing weather.

- When truly you know that if you stay out there

for 45 minutes, you can die, it changes absolutely the nature

of what you're seeing on the screen.

- It was cold for John. You know, John's a thin man.

I'm a-- I'm a big man.

So I had a-- I had some-- I had some blubber saving me

from the cold and John-- John didn't take to the cold that well.

Probably the actors coped with uh, our-- our locations

better than I did.

- He's a trooper, you know. He's gonna fight through it.

He's gonna slog through it no matter what it is.

And it's fun to watch him slog through it,

'cause he's, you know, he-- he doesn't have that

Man Mountain Dean let's go get it kind of--

He's not that guy.

But he was involved with a lot of people that were gung-ho

and going for it, and so there he was and he was leading the pack.

Let me explain about the South Pole seasons.

There's only two at the South Pole.

There's summer. Summer runs from about November 1st

to about February 15th.

That's when it's light 24 hours a day. Relatively warmer.

But once you get to February 15th,

that's usually about the time the last flight will leave.

You know, you've got the first goddamn week of winter.

First goddamn week of winter.

And that, you know, the craziness can come out

at that point in time.

All those people that have held back and let it go

a little bit once that flight leaves.

The Thing, the movie The Thing, it's a rite of passage.

The first weekend after everybody's gone,

the summer people are gone, there'll be a showing.

What I'd like to do is get up in front of the crew

and then tell 'em that right away that

it's a training video.

You see the dynamics of the crew.

You see the dynamics of the leadership, for example.

You know, or lack of leadership.

[overlapping speech]

I think the film feels authentic.

The sound design is, I don't get involved with in general.

But the atmosphere, the sound of the Antarctic was amazing.

One thing that was shown pretty well is that

you do the things you need to do where you can,

where you have space to do it.

You also have very narrow corridors.

You are trying to cram as much as you can in as little space as-- as-- as you need.

- Of course, they've got weaponry in there.

They've got a flamethrower.

They've got things that fortunately we don't have.

The blood supply, I'm not sure.

I know that we have a very competent medical staff

with a doctor, I know we could do transfusions

and stuff if we had to.

I'm not sure actually if they were--

There certainly wouldn't be anything like they show in The Thing.

But I smiled at the room where they are playing.

Because that tells you also this is the end of the day.

You are in a very, very extreme environment.

But in that place,

all of a sudden, you are done with your day.

You are becoming a person again. You are not the scientist.

You are not a function.

And then you can relax.

There is drinking at the South Pole station

and at times it has been an issue in the past.

But it's not like that.

Mac, it may not clear up for a week.

-Yeah. -And we're the closest to…

- Uh, the things that were completely ludicrous is

to have somebody by minus 40 coming out in a leather jacket

and a cowboy hat.

I mean, that person is dead within 10 minutes. Right?

You can be Kurt Russell, but you're gonna be dead in 10 minutes.

And your leather jacket is going to be so hard

that you are probably going to be able to break it with an ice pick.

- I remember coming out of a bar in the middle of the night.

It was like 12:00, 11:30 at night and it was still like dusk

and I'm going like, "What the fuck?"

You know, it was like weird.

You know, we had like an hour of-- of uh, night time.

- Stewart, British Columbia and Hyder, Alaska.

It was kind of-- kind of a lawless place.

Uh, the-- as I recall, the police only came in

to that area twice a year.

And when they did, everybody just left town.

Seriously, they-- they just disappeared for like 24 to 48 hours.

Actors love to be directed, but when they are not directed,

they start wandering, and drinking, and searching for women.

And this was what happened on Saturday nights.

It was unbelievable.

Well, there were no women down there, so uh,

it was-- it was a little desperate, but we survived.

So there was just a bunch of guys just getting, you know,

shit-faced every Friday and Saturday night.

I forget how long we were there. I think it was three weeks maybe.

It could have been longer, but I think it was three weeks.

Yeah, we all sort of bonded on that, too.

There was a one bar, two bars.

I can't remember the name of one of 'em. The other one was called, "The Hyder Inn".

It was a little, you know, shithole bar.

But they had this thing called, uh, "being Hyderized".

They had this booze called, "Everclear".

It's really alcohol.

It's only-- it's like 90, it's like 180 proof.

It's-- it's 90% alcohol.

And they throw it in a shot glass and-- and they set it on fire,

and you have to blow it out, and-- and chug it down

and then you get this card that said, "You've been Hyderized."

There was a bartender poured Everclear all over the bar

like this, up and down the bar and then lit it.

There's blue flames rising up here and his name was Barfly

and he would-- he goes like this with his hands

and holds his hands up and his hands are burning

and the flames are rising from his fingertips.

Uh, I was one of the first to be Hyderized.

I drank-- I drank a little. No, not much.

Um, some weak pot and you know, the operative drug on choice,

by the way, on the movie was nicotine, you know?

John was two or three packs a day, so was I.

I took T.K. and uh, Keith in to be Hyderized

which was an interesting moment.

And um, too rough a story to tell.

Um, it was a strange place.

I mean, there were strange people up there.

And uh, they weren't used to certain things, so…

When those things started to go sideways, it wasn't good.

They weren't particularly happy with this crew

coming into their places and dancing with the women

that were in town and whatnot.

It was like once a week. It was kind of interesting.

Someone was having a fight with her husband at a table

halfway across the room, getting very loud.

And she finally gets up and makes her way back to our table.

And sits down between Keith and T.K.

And I told the guys, I said, "You know,

I really think it would be wise if you leave the room now."

They did. They got up and left the room.

Because they're wearing guns up there.

I mean, it got really racial um, in a very, very nasty way.

Nasty. I never went back in there and I-- I never hoped to go back in there.

But it was really frightening.

- Garry! Hey, you guys! Come here!

Who got to the blood supply?

What?

-Somebody got to the blood! -What?

-Where's Clark? -Right here.

I said to John once, "Isn't this a movie about paranoia?"

And then he said, "Could be."

-Wait a minute. Was this broken into? -No, the lock is undamaged.

Somebody opened it, closed it, and then locked it.

- Great.

Well, the main idea of The Thing is that lack of trust.

So you lose the ability to trust.

"Who are you? Who goes there? Who? Are you human or not?"

And that was-- that was the essence of it. That was what we dug around in.

And it wasn't just a monster going, "boo".

I think the film is about paranoia.

That-- just that. That's what it's about.

There's this horrific thing that's just trying

to survive like we are.

It's, you know, survival of the fittest.

Would that test have worked, doc?

Oh, I think so. Yes.

- Somebody else sure as hell thought so.

And when the creature comes across the camp, of course,

the men are already in the process of falling apart.

I mean, they're already halfway at each other's throats.

And it's that sense that the creature senses and works on,

you know, of course.

When you add Rob's monster, which also deconstructs,

it's the perfect visual metaphor.

And I think it was Tarantino who said it perfectly,

'cause he based a lot of Reservoir Dogs on The Thing,

because what he said was, "It's the paranoia, that they're so confined

and the paranoia builds, and builds, and starts bouncing

off the walls, starts bouncing everywhere

until it's only got one place to go, out into the audience."

Great.

- And that I just happened to be in a great production

of a great play called, American Buffalo by David Mamet

with one of the greatest actors in the world, Al Pacino.

And it was a huge hit in New York in 1980, '81.

And I guess Kurt and John were in town auditioning actors

and they must have gotten tickets, 'cause I know Kurt

hates to go to New York, so yeah, they forced him to go.

But they came to see me and it--

and they must have liked me or my performance, I guess.

-Why would he come in here and take it? -Shut up, man!

-Windows! -Windows!

And it was in rehearsal that I changed the name of the character,

'cause they changed it from Sanchez to John Simmons.

And I can't think of a more boring name than John Simmons.

And-- and the character kind of saw himself

as better than this place.

You know, "I deserve better than to be stuck out here checking

the freaking weather and I'm gonna--

I'm gonna go to Hollywood and be a movie star."

So if you notice, I'm reading a movie glam magazine.

He was the kind of actor who had-- had listened

and heard the phrase,

"There's no such thing as small roles, only small actors."

I think he took that one to heart. It was great.

He does nothing-- you know, he wants to make something out of this.

You guys gonna listen to Garry? You gonna let him give the orders?

I mean, he could be one of those things.

I found a pair of these green sunglasses, and I-- I wore them in rehearsal one day.

And I said, "John, I want everybody to call me, 'Windows'."

And he went…

"All right, from now on, everybody, Tommy wants us to call him, 'Windows'.

Let's go on to the next scene, please."

We're in a sound stage.

There's only light on where the table is,

this huge table that they set up for us to be around.

And you know, that's when Tom Waites said, "I-- I-- I--

uh, I'd like everybody to call me, 'Windows'.

Um, you know, I want to wear these glasses."

And-- and all of us kind of looked at each other like,

"That's the dumbest fucking thing I ever heard."

But we did it, you know, and it was great. It was great.

Tommy was right. He's-- he's got wonderful instincts.

When Tommy declared that he wanted to be called, "Windows",

and John said, "Okay", and we all had

to cross out his character's name from our scripts

and write in Windows.

And Donald was beside himself that anybody could ask that

question of a director, uh, that they change the name,

you know, to suit themselves.

He was really pissed off, really pissed off.

It's on the floor.

And when I was cutting the scene, I thought this is gonna be a--

a real ball-breaker, because um, it's so tense.

And it builds, and it's gonna run down the hall,

and you know, come to fruition there with Windows.

And yet it almost cut itself.

I don't know about Copper.

But I give you my word, I did not go near that blood.

A beautiful piece of direction and uh, uh, film construction

and understanding of what you were trying

to achieve in that scene as it terminates

when they give up the pistol.

You can't say that's really a big physical action scene,

but, by God, um, emotionally, it's every bit of--

of an action scene.

-I'll take it. -Like hell you will.

It should be somebody a little more even-tempered, Childs.

It was always one of my favorite scenes in the film.

I-- I think it was one of the most powerful scenes in the film.

And-- and it really, at that point in the storyline,

it really fired off uh, where we were going with this.

- I know I'm human.

They went up before I did up to-- to start shooting on the glacier.

And when I got there, they were talking about,

"Well, we're-- you know, tomorrow we're doing this."

I said, "No, we shot that already.

We shot that in the rec room. What are you talking about?"

And it was the scene, "I know I'm human",

where he's burning all the blood bags and stuff.

That scene was all shot in the rec room.

It was incredibly intense.

And then John moved it outside, and we're standing there at night,

in the dark in Antarctica, talking.

You know, who does that?

I just thought, "Oh man, he's just totally screwing this movie up.

I can't believe he's doing this.

And I was-- when I left uh, that-- that second part

of the shoot, I was despondent.

I thought, "Just why did he panic like that?"

So then I went to see the film.

And it was great, and it really worked.

Now, for me, I still can't watch that scene

without going, "Nope, nope, nope, wrong, wrong, fucking wrong."

I can't do it. I just can't watch it.

And John, I'm sure, would completely disagree with me.

- This thing doesn't wanna show itself. It wants to hide inside an imitation.

It'll fight if it has to.

But it's vulnerable out in the open.

It definitely has a sophistication and an emotional intelligence to it

that is not really what people were necessarily craving in the '80s

and harkens back to an earlier time, the '70s films.

There's a storm hitting us in six hours.

We're gonna find out who's who.

Carpenter came of age, of filmmaking age, in the '70s.

He is a child of that era.

Without question, this has resonance in every era,

because there's always an other that people can point to

and say, "That's the-- we have to watch out for them.

They're the problem."

Mac, I'm not a prisoner!

- Now, in a more specific sense to the film, part of it is,

can you trust who you think you can trust?

And if not, what happens to society?

And if you can't trust anybody, there is no society,

which is what happens to us.

Here, let me-- let me do it. You're gonna break the needle in my arm.

No, Doc. He's doing a real fine job.

The thematics of it, it being so mappable to so many different

real-world analogs, is just the mark of a good story to me.

- The Thing was one where I just--

I felt like you could very much feel a sense of Cold War paranoia.

You know, the idea of living in a time where maybe we're just

gonna blow each other up at any moment.

Are we really good custodians of this world?

- Every horror film speaks to every individual

in a different way.

To say it's about AIDS kind of diminishes it.

It can be about AIDS, but it can be about a lot

of other things, a lot of other subjects, too.

- When somebody goes nuts and you know,

starts shooting people, or what-- you know,

they check with the co-workers, and the co-workers go,

"I did-- I never saw any sign of it, and he seemed

like a normal person."

Well, that's kind of what The Thing is about as well.

So I think it touches on aspects of humanity that are always

with us and always will be with us.

I see today there's a meme all um, over the internet now,

which is of Kurt's soliloquy.

Nobody trusts anybody now.

And we're all very tired.

Pretty apt description of the way we're feeling in America these days.

I'm gonna hide this tape when I'm finished.

If none of us make it, at least there'll be some kind of record.

I just found it interesting that he was putting it on tape.

We still have nothing to go on.

- Leave a record, so somebody can pick it up from there?

Yeah, that's one possibility.

You could say he's putting it on tape for a number of different reasons.

I just always thought that was an interesting one.

Hey, Blair!

Blair, have you seen Fuchs?

I'd never seen that palette in a horror movie before.

The blues, the whites, that-- the dark.

Just being able to see people's breath.

If you watch the film, it's always blue.

The ice is blue, outside's blue.

And they tried so many different types of blue

just to see what worked on camera.

And they discovered the best blue were the landing lights out at the airport.

Blair?

But there is something magical about a Dean Cundey movie shot on film,

and especially with John Carpenter.

What I think Dean excels at uh, is making-- making it look glamorous

and still making it look ab-- absolutely real and terrifying.

There's nothing else I can do. Just wait.

- There's always red, and that's coming from the flares.

And it was only the flares, the actual road flares, that used it.

Which would never be done today, 'cause those things are absolutely toxic.

I loved that John wasn't jumping in front of the camera

and doing flashy camera things and kept--

It was a very solid, very stolid kind of approach

to directing something. He didn't over cover things.

Every-- every shot mattered.

- Coming from making a show about darkness and ice, let me tell you

that that very, very tricky line, very thin line,

between not seeing, because you're in the dark,

but seeing enough to understand the scene,

is the hardest thing to achieve for a DP. It's just masterful.

- John is a very quiet man, generally speaking.

Not that he's antisocial or you know, he's a great guy

to have a beer with, but as human beings go,

some of us are more loquacious, like myself.

Of course, when he's directing, he's a warrior, you know,

because you have to be.

- I would say he was businesslike. He was about getting the shots.

And he was somewhat indulgent, I think, with the actors.

Hey, fuck you, Palmer!

-I'm going with you! -Who says I want you going with me?

All right, cut the bullshit!

A poet is visionary. They see, like Yeats, he sees ahead.

Uh, and that's what I think John is.

He's kind of a filmic poet.

- John can shoot fast, but he shoots completely.

He knows what he wants.

He-- he's-- he's seeing the movie in his head.

- He's very aware of visual storytelling, using the camera.

Not using the camera just to record stuff, but creating mood.

Well, I found him to have a great sense of humor.

There's a lot of joking on the set.

- He doesn't uh, like to take credit for things.

Doesn't like to be complimented. He doesn't care for that.

He-- he finds it superficial, I think.

But he does respond to feelings.

It took a lot of courage, I think, to make that movie

and stick to his guns and do it the way he felt it should be made.

It really is a masterclass in how to shoot something

and not get in the way of the story

and not get in the way of uh, what the character's going through.

Okay. Show me.

- I think he's one of the most non-nonsense,

absolutely socially incorrect, blissfully independent,

magnificently so, uh, filmmakers that we can hope for.

Plissken?

Plissken, what are you doing?

Playing with myself. I'm going in.

Elements don't float into a story.

A story is a story.

And-- and I don't care about other movies made.

Uh, I just tell a story.

For some reason, I wound up on this-- on this jury of this film festival.

And I wound up going across uh, to uh, Europe uh, with John.

-Wow. -And I remember we were watching

this movie one day that was in the festival.

It was this black and white thing from Spain.

And it was a little slow and it was a little tedious.

I glance over and he-- he does this.

He looks at his watch and he turns to me and he says,

"We're 40 minutes into this.

If somebody doesn't die soon, I'm gonna be really pissed off."

- One of the reasons why studios get involved is when things

are starting to go south, financially.

John is-- is very conscious of what it takes

and how much it's gonna cost.

And-- and I am as well.

- The only trouble I had during the making of The Thing,

during production was, I think I had an interview.

And I inadvertently, I realized what Hollywood's like.

I inadvertently told the truth uh, about how much money

the studio was spending.

And I got in trouble with-- with the head of the studio.

It's the wrong thing to tell the truth.

I should have never done that. So I learned my lesson.

Otherwise, no. They didn't bother me.

The groundwork of the movie was pretty solid. They liked the script.

So no, I don't remember there ever being really any involvement

from the studio on The Thing.

Except for their disappointment at the end when it didn't do well.

Blair, have you seen Fuchs?

I don't want to stay out here anymore. I want to come back inside.

A recent viewing showed me that really this movie is all about reaction shots.

It's all about looking into the eyes of these people

and the idea that we're not sure if they're really them.

And I won't harm anybody.

And you've gotta let me come back inside.

"I'm okay now. I'm--", all right. Like, "I just want to come in."

You know, that is, it's so seductive and it's so weird, right?

- And I love the noose in the cabin, which is a Bill Lancaster touch, actually.

You know, it's Blair playing possum,

you know, wanting to kill himself. It's all an act.

You know, and it's great.

But that through line, which was so clear in the novel, I think

is less clear in the film, which is why many people, I think, feel

that Blair was infected once he was inside the cabin.

- I would argue that Brimley being the most kind

of intelligent elder of the group,

kind of a tribal elder, the way it was presented,

I think he represented the brain of The Thing, if there was a brain.

Anybody see Fuchs?

I think Fuchs maybe knew or suspected or found something

and then killed himself.

Is it Fuchs?

- I don't think Fuchs was-- was The Thing.

I think we gotta listen to Blair.

He goes, "It ain't-- it ain't Fuchs. It ain't Fuchs."

It ain't Fuchs.

And there's a possibility, of course, that Fuchs torched himself,

because he knew he was either becoming

or about to become a Thing.

But there's another possibility is that Fuchs is not a man of action

and he's an intellectual, kind of tried to set fire to it

and accidentally set fire to himself.

I think that's not so implausible.

- In the one, edited out sequence where I think it's Fuchs

is killed with the shovel and he's impaled to the door.

And then they took that out and then they shot it,

so that he burns himself up outside.

"Why'd you go outside?" Or, "How did you die?"

I get that a lot.

But I like to leave it to other people's imaginations.

It's great that the-- the mysteries continue on

and you just see it from the point of view of the you know,

of the cast and-- and you get to wonder what happened.

Close that door.

Where's MacReady?

They give you enough clues to keep debating like we still are today.

Look. It was stashed in his oil-- oil furnace.

Wind must have dislodged it, but I don't think he saw me find it.

"Who could have gotten to MacReady's clothes

and burned them? Did he-- did he Thing out?

Did he change out of them? Did someone get them and try to frame him?

Is The Thing that calculating?"

So then you have to ask yourself the question.

"So if this takes somebody over,

is it clever enough to frame somebody?"

I don't know. I wasn't there.

Which one of you disrespectful men been tossing his dirty drawers

in the kitchen trash can? Huh?

From now on, I want my kitchen clean. All right?

- I don't think it's trying to get us to think that it's MacReady.

They need to make the characters think it's MacReady.

And the simplest way to do that is the torn clothes.

-MacReady? -He's one of 'em.

-When do you think it got to him? -I don't know.

Could have been anytime. Anywhere.

One of my favorite shots ever is when T.K. Carter

is on his knees when he's just come in from the storm

and you know, the camera just moves past him subtly

to the doorknob turning and it's like, "Oh God."

Shh!

-Let's open it. -Hell no.

That gave me such a thrill when I-- when I saw it.

And-- and-- and I just watched the movie of course recently

and I was waiting for that shot and it had the same effect

on me that it did then.

You know, there's just so much about the movie that that is right.

Nothing human could have made it back here in this weather

-without a guideline. -Let's open it now!

Why are you so damned anxious to let him in here?

'Cause it's so close. Maybe our best chance

-to blow it away. -No.

Childs was like the strong silent type, you know what I mean?

He didn't-- didn't have a whole--

He spoke when he spoke, but didn't have a whole lot

to say, listened a lot.

- You got to love Childs.

He's the audience avatar in a lot of ways.

I just cannot believe any of this voodoo bullshit.

- He kind of can't believe it.

And he's asking the obvious questions that the audience

is probably yelling at the screen.

You believe any of this voodoo bullshit, Blair?

And he's like, he's like, "How's this motherfucker wake up in the ice?"

Now how's this motherfucker wake up after thousands

of years in the ice?

He's not putting any floral, uh, you know, language on it.

He's just like, "What the hell is happening?"

It's a crock of shit.

An alpha male. He's the only other person apart from MacReady

who you could see taking charge.

Childs! What if we're wrong about him?

Well, then, we're wrong.

He and MacReady are kind of like opposite numbers.

I think he's the prototype for a certain kind uh, of character

in these ensembles uh, that is, with good reason,

repeated often throughout the genre.

Oh, man. I'm a huge fan of-- of Keith David uh,

and another John Carpenter stalwart.

Look, you crazy mother!

-Put these on! -Hey! Stay away from me!

I'm telling you, you dumb son of a bitch!

I love him and-- and I love uh, his defiance.

Damn it! He's got the keys.

He's had a great career. He's-- so he's a powerful actor.

Really, really, I just had a-- good-- really good guy.

For me, it was a particularly unique experience,

because it was my first movie.

There were two readings, two auditions,

and the first one I read just by myself, I think.

And then, we were in a room with all, you know,

several other New York actors who-- who I was very familiar with.

It was like a fight scene.

Somebody hit somebody or there was a physical altercation

in this moment that we're reading.

When we get to this fight moment,

I don't remember who the actor was, but he, in order to--

in order to demonstrate this fight moment,

he took whatever that was on the producer's desk,

including the phone. He just went, whoosh! And…

Everything on the man's desk went flying.

So Keith and I had gone to acting school together.

We had a few extracurricular activities that we engaged in

on the stairwells of Juilliard.

And we looked at each other the first day and we're like,

"What the fuck are you doing here?"

It was fascinating. I'd never been on a soundstage before.

Um, I only sort of remember seeing it in Sunset Boulevard, you know?

And uh, so that-- that was, it was actually fascinating

to see, you know, 30-foot ceilings

or I think there were 30 feet, you know, there was just, I mean, wow.

- He's a fantastic actor.

And he can do anything, like Kurt.

He can play comedy. He can play d-- drama.

I mean, amazing guy. And he was wonderful.

He was chasing women like nobody's business

up in Stewart, Columbia. Oh, man.

Yeah, but that's okay. I-- I-- Everybody was chasing women.

But uh, it's grim on a-- on a all-male set,

let me tell you guys. It's grim for all of us.

Come on, Childs. Burn me.

Put those torches on the floor and back off.

I loved all the characters in it, but Keith David

has always been like a special standout to me.

-What an actor. -What an actor.

Well, that's Uncle Sam for you, baby.

Money to burn.

- I saw an interview with him once, and he said that after The Thing, uh,

he didn't get another movie role for four years.

And I think the next movie role he got was

another John Carpenter movie, was They Live.

Wait, boys, wait. You're making a big mistake.

You made the mistake.

Hollywood sucks, man.

I mean, for an actor of that kind of power and-- and--

and-- and a screen presence with that kind of charisma.

-And training. -To-- and training.

To not be working all the time is is a crime.

-You asshole. -You'd have done the same thing.

You're always wondering, you know, is he got a level of strength,

because he's consistently a good guy,

or does he have a level of strength, because he--

he is the alien and could basically consume everybody?

We don't know.

Now nobody gets out of my sight.

-Clear. -Clear.

Every so often, he stops and clutches his chest

and you think, "Oh, no. Oh, dear.

I think that Norris has been fully absorbed and imitated.

And in imitating Norris, The Thing has imitated a body

that was not long for this world.

Where's the rest?

Norris, whether human or imitation, was probably going

to have a heart attack that week.

For me, the most shocking, thrilling, unexpected,

memory-searing sequence has got to be the scene where Norris

is taken in and they're gonna do the defibrillator.

Windows, wheel that defibrillator over here.

It's a masterpiece in itself, that whole sequence.

That, to me, is the signature scene

-of the entire movie. - Yeah.

There's enough effects in that scene to last anybody else a full feature.

Yeah, that's right.

"We'll do this on the first act. We'll do that on the second act.

No, no, no. Let's do it all in four minutes."

-Yeah. -"All right."

-Yeah. -And bam.

And I think that is one of the things that

-in the '80s didn't sit well. -Hm.

Like, people thought it was a bit much.

- So, you sweethearts were about to have yourselves

a little lynching party, huh?

Each part of that was a separate, dedicated, discreet effect.

A lot of 'em were shot separately and then cut together to make it work.

So we could get better control of the uh, puppets.

- Rob didn't let anybody take photos in the shop.

Never allowed any of his crew people to take photos.

And this was before the internet.

This was before everybody would take a picture

and then five minutes later it's online.

So there was a-- a very, very concerted effort

to keep a veil of secrecy around what was being built.

- Where Norris is on the table getting defibrillated

is a great bit of misdirection, because you're invested

in something else in that moment.

I'm a real light sleeper, Childs.

And it's also really kind of ridiculous.

I do think his stomach opening up into a giant mouth with teeth

is very Mike Ploog.

Charlie Hallahan was in some pain in that sort

of structure that Rob had, you know, where his real face

was there prior to where the chest blows open.

There was a mechanism inside that would tear open

and have like shark teeth inside.

- Who's to say the creature is evil?

I think it's possibly just trying to survive and--

and it reacts when it feels threatened.

You could, of course, make another film from the creature's point of view.

I think there was a very good short story made

from the creature's point of view.

- All modern science-fiction movies,

we don't necessarily worry about the motivation of-- of monsters.

But The Thing wants to survive. Just look at it that way.

That's its first primary, primary purpose in its life is

to survive no matter what.

And it-- it does a pretty good job.

-Clear. -Clear.

And his frickin' chest opens up and then he bites off the--

the chest bites off the doctor's hands.

What the hell is happening? What? No one saw that coming.

- Now, I created some gelatin arms and I pre-rigged 'em

with dental acrylic bones, and tubing, and layers of--

using anatomy book, layers of muscle structure inside.

When we shot it, I was on a scaffolding

suspended above the torso.

And I twisted and ripped the arms and the flesh.

The first take is in the film.

John Carpenter was on the B camera.

He said cut after the first take. He goes, "Yikes."

I said, "John", and I told him about

the experience I had on My Bloody Valentine.

The Censors cut all this stuff out.

"I did some remarkable work on there and it all got cut out."

He goes, "I'll get it in."

I'd say my favorite practical effect

is when Richard Dysart gets his arms chopped off

by the chest monster.

And then finding out that the actual arms were

of a-- a double amputee that they used.

- We took a mold of-- of our actor in the grimacing expression

and created a mask that was custom fitted to this amputee double.

We had a-- a gentleman who was a crane operator.

I guess he uh, he had worked at Universal, I think, at one point.

He had mechanical arms that he could work with.

It freaked us all out that this guy was having stubs

put onto his arm with-- with these bulbs filled with blood

that were gonna be squirting blood. He--

This is how he lost his arms in an industrial accident.

And he was so happy to be there.

He just thought it was the greatest thing in the world.

But we were like, "Oh my God, this is so inappropriate.

Why are we doing this to him?"

There's this volcanic eruption that comes out of Norris' chest.

And the entrails come flying out. And this undu-- undulating lips.

Up on the ceiling, is a demonic twisted aberration

of the Norris character.

Jeez, it looks-- it looks like a-- a--

an insane-- a medieval painting or something.

- Had to paint it. Paint all this stuff hanging down.

And then all of that, that caterpillar neck

and the head, all of that had to be uh, fine red hair punched

into all of that.

And that's like one of my favorite pieces.

I rigged it up on the ceiling and Art Pimentel, he was our--

he was the smallest guy on the-- on the crew,

he was up in the ductwork puppeteering that.

I had the really good pleasure of seeing all the props

from The Thing, all the creature stuff

in Henry Alvarez's workshop, in the early '90s.

And in the back of his studio, he had the Blair monster,

he had the Norris monster.

They had really decomposed pretty significantly because

a lot of the K-Y Jelly that they would put on the creatures

just dissolved the foam latex.

But the first and foremost thing that I found really surprising

is how small they were.

Because when Norris' chest opens up,

and that big creature comes out, and its legs are holding onto

the air-conditioning vent, you imagine that thing

being 12, 14 feet tall. It was about 6 feet tall.

They were playing with perspective.

Unfortunately, not long after that, all those pieces were destroyed.

Um, but I was really lucky enough to see what was left

of those pieces in person.

I don't know very many people that had ever seen them.

- It was all Rob's ideas. That was all Rob's stuff.

He had a very fertile imagination.

- Then he had a bunch of heads, because they had to come off the table.

So I had to paint all those heads.

- In the storyboards, there was all these little

stretching tendons and pops.

Boxes of Bubble Yum bubble gum were being stockpiled on the shelves.

- You see all those weird bulbous pieces of flesh that are green.

They're not red.

There's no blood in that scene, which I think

is a direct contrast to the Palmer scene later.

We painted up the entrails that were inside the neck.

It was like a, it was all this like webbing

with a little barnacle tex-- texture to it.

And we painted up that with fantasy colors also.

We were trying to avoid the X rating.

- And we were pumping different materials,

flammable materials that gave a nice stringy look to 'em.

John Carpenter goes, "Hey guys, wait a minute.

At this point, the duct monster has been burned up

and it's fallen onto the floor.

So we should have a flame in front of the lens,

at the bottom of the lens." "Okay."

- We need the fire bar here.

And he brought it, they put it out in front of the camera.

And-- and they, he used uh, uh, like a barbecue lighter to light it up.

A blue flame went…

Because the fumes had built up in the room.

Rob s-- stands, takes a step back goes, "It's on fire."

And I took my arm and swept it across the uh, chest

and just left a trail of ash across the chest.

- They ran and pulled a puppeteer out from under the table.

Fire extinguishers are out…

Doing the whole-- the whole business, put it out.

John Carpenter goes, "Oh, how long-- how long

that's gonna take to reset?"

The head hits the ground and it's still cognizant.

And it moves itself across the floor and it's just trying to escape.

That might be one of my favorites.

Because it's such an amazing likeness of the actor.

And the facial expressions and the grimacing is completely alive.

It still looks like the character,

but then every time you see it and you cut back, it's like,

it looks like him, but it's not him.

It's somehow evolved.

The Thing here, I think, is thinking, "How can I get away?"

Uh, and it comes up with the idea of sprouting spider legs.

Maybe it's absorbed some spider-like alien on another planet.

Or-- or maybe it's already encountered a spider on Earth,

um, either in the ice, if there are spiders in the ice,

or-- or perhaps at the uh, outpost.

And then goes… [imitates spider]

And-- and hides for a while under a desk, breathing.

And its breaths go… [imitates breathing]

And then goes off.

The remote control head, the spider head,

they had a little camshaft that operated the legs.

It's a motorized radio control device that-- that has got

a little, you know, cart on wheels underneath 'em

to have 'em scoot. And everything is synchronized.

The legs and the uh, movement are all-- is all synchronized

to look like it's propelling itself.

- The spider head is certainly my favorite.

I have a casting from the original mold of that

that I've had, you know, it's been sitting in my house.

I actually just recently in the last six months decided

to rebuild the legs and-- and rework it, 'cause I didn't love the hair on it.

And I even said to John, "Look, I have, you know,

I can scan this thing for you and make you a spider head

if you want one."

He just was like, "I'll get back to you on that."

You've got to be fucking kidding.

"Got to be fucking kidding me."

He's like-- it was-- it was, you know,

when you could see this puppet thing working, you-- you went,

"Oh, that's-- that's great."

"You've got to be fucking kidding me, right?"

I mean, it's-- that's the reaction the audience is having.

That's why that line is so great.

Because it's like, it-- you know, Palmer says the one thing

that's going through the audience's head when that happens, right?

I should have known this is a great line.

It's perfectly timed in the script.

You've had this tour de force of practical,

real effects happening before your eyes.

You've had this very frightening experience,

this transformation of Charlie Hallahan.

And it's scary, but it's also extreme.

It's-- it's like a Grand Guignol.

It's operatic, almost.

I think the audience is saying, "Come on."

But it's very important to me that when John shot that scene,

he got the-- all the shots that he wanted, and he was ready to move on.

And Richard Masur said something to him.

I said, "Wait a minute." He said, "What?"

I said, "You didn't get Clennon saying the line."

He said, "Oh, no, no, no.

That line's gonna play over the head going out the door."

I said, "John, you have to get Clennon saying the line.

You have to do it." And he's going, "No, Richard, look."

And he gets out the storyboard,

and he's showing me how the line is written.

I said, "I don't give a fuck what that says. Shoot it.

If you don't shoot it, you will regret it for the rest of your life."

And John was a little annoyed, I think, at first,

perhaps that Richard would have the uh, the nerve

to tell John Carpenter how to shoot a scene.

He said, "All right, fine, fuck, Dean, go ahead, shoot it.

Line it up." And we were already led.

It was-- it was a matter of clearing everybody.

You've got to be fucking kidding.

Okay? The biggest laugh in the movie, the--

one of the most memorable moments in the movie,

and John wasn't gonna shoot it.

John's instincts about what makes a movie a movie

and what makes people react to the movie

and the way he's hoping they'll react are far superior to mine.

But I know some stuff, and that was one of the things I knew.

- When I go to conventions and I meet the fans

and they bring a poster or a photograph to me

or uh, an album cover to-- to autograph it, they say,

"Would you write that line after it?"

It crystallizes something for the fans.

That line captures something about the powerful effect

of the special effects makeup, uh, the special visual effects

that Rob Bottin did.

And then we burn the hell out of it.

Apparently, it still worked uh-- I-- after that.

I think it-- it was able to kind of limp along.

What an insane sequence that could, could,

and kind of is, comical. It walks a fine line.

I think the best way to experience this scene

after you've seen the film for the first time,

is to watch it with Carpenter and Russell's commentary.

Because Russell is just howling.

He's just cackling through this whole sequence.

And I think it's a good example of how it's okay to laugh

at some really horrifying horror.

To me, what I like about some of the monster stuff is,

is his sense of humor that's in-- that he's infused in there.

It's horrifically funny, you know?

- It was shot in such a way that you never held on it

or featured it too long,

because I don't think John ever really wanted you

to put together in your head what it was, what it was like.

Um, so it really sort of allowed there to be this

almost fanatical obsession with understanding

who this guy Rob Bottin was and how they filmed it.

- I don't know, he was massive. He looked like a Yeti or something, a Bigfoot.

His hair, he had this shag haircut and this giant lustrous beard.

- Rob Bottin is an enigma.

He's one of those people that will go down in the annals

of filmmaking.

Elusive, brilliant, funny, a little insecure,

groundbreaking, and uh, very, very personal.

He's kind of revered as one of the greatest ever.

Because of that movie.

He was in his own special world with it, you know?

Nobody-- we didn't-- we were just--

We'd watch him sometimes, get it ready, and keep adding,

keep adding the goo.

When I met him the first time, I gave him a Big Daddy Roth--

-Oh, did you? -Model kit.

And he said, "How did you know?" I said--

-Oh, come on. -"What do you mean how did I know?"

How could you not know?

- And I've got his number through the Corman folks, you know,

and I called him, and he had an assistant

who picked up the phone.

"Yes." "I said, hi, hi, is-- is Rob Bottin in?"

And she said, "Yes, may I ask who's calling?"

And I said, "It's Alec Gillis." And she said, "Oh, yes, hold on."

And Rob gets on the phone, very kind of trepidatious, says,

"Hello, this is Rob."

And I said, "Hey, Rob, it's Alec Gillis."

And he goes, "Oh, shit. She told me it was Alec Guinness."

I went to ask for a job and he was doing Total Recall.

I-- I had my company, I was preparing to do Cronos.

I was trying to learn everything I could about makeup effects.

Dick Smith recommended me and I went to uh, Churubusco Studios

in Mexico City and I said, "I can clean walls,

I can sweep the floors." I didn't get the job.

-Oh. -Later, he worked with me on Mimic.

- Oh, yeah, that's right. You did.

-For-- for a few weeks. -Of course you worked with him.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah. -Of course you did.

We spent hours just shooting the shit.

And I would be watching, you know and we would actually be filming stuff.

Carpenter and Rob would be talking or Rob would be trying

to explain what he wanted to see.

And John Carpenter would just, "Go ahead, Rob."

Rob was a great storyteller and is a great storyteller.

When he describes something, you-- you get kind of swept up in it.

And I think John could see the vision, the wildness of this.

- I'm sure that once the movie came out

and there was such a tremendous backlash against how visceral

and gory a lot of people reacted that John

probably wished that he had reined it in a little bit.

But John made the movie he wanted to make.

And you know, with the help of Rob, you know,

that movie now stands the test of time as a classic.

So it's like a childlike excitement for something,

which keeps you pushing to want to-- to want to get to that,

to want to finish that.

We were a bunch of kids. You know, I was 26.

I think I was the oldest guy there.

Rob was 22.

I mean, we were a bunch of youngsters doing this stuff.

And we were just having fun, blasting the music.

When Jimi Hendrix would come on, I'd get acetone and put a line

of acetone around the radio and turn the lights off

and light the acetone on fire.

"When Jimi's playing, you bow down."

If we heard over the intercom, uh, "Erik Jensen,

you have a guest at the front", that was a signal for myself

and about three other people who were not union

to run like roaches.

In the back of Hartland, Battlestar Galactica,

planets and spaceships were stored.

So we'd go all the way down the-- the back of this warehouse

and just sit in the dark on the floor while the--

one of the union stewards came in to visit and check out the shop.

John Carpenter would come visit periodically,

particularly after principal photography was over,

and he'd come over about once a week.

And we had a-- a pile of movie magazines, Fangoria,

Cinefantastique, Starlog.

We had this desk with all this stuff.

I had found this magazine that Adrienne Barbeau had--

had appeared in topless, a men's magazine.

I knew John was coming over

and I purposely kind of buried it down a little bit.

I had the page open to Adrienne, who he was married to at the time.

And we were all just kind of waiting, 'cause John would come over

and look at those magazines all the time.

And he looked at the new Fangoria and then--

and then the third one down, he picks up this magazine

with Adrienne topless, "Ay!"

We were cracking.

- Rob, he would just be fun in the shop, too.

Somebody gave him a present.

It's a tube that goes on your finger and you press flammable paper into it

and then you-- a flame shoots out of your hand.

When-- when he got that for a present, everyone was like watching their back,

'cause he would be shooting that thing at everybody.

- The production value is phenomenal in that film.

And Rob Bottin was given a great budget.

He had a huge crew on that.

I mean, for-- for those days, that was a gigantic crew.

30 to 40 people working on that for well over a year.

He, in a sense, was a genius in many ways.

But I think it was painful for him to get everybody

to understand what he was thinking all the time.

And uh, I think he-- he worked really hard,

but grew frustrated sometimes, because he had so many ideas

and he couldn't do everything.

And I know that-- that-- that he did have some help.

There were some-- some production folks who came in

to bring structure to it, 'cause I think from what I heard

it might have been a kind of a chaotic process

as you would expect.

There was so much in there, it was hard

to pull it all out and say, "How are we gonna do it?"

"Well, I'm working on that."

My role was kind of be the right hand guy who--

who plays hardball sometimes.

The most difficult part of the process for us was,

"When are these effects gonna be ready?"

You know, 'cause we were always behind the eight ball.

And by the way, at the end of the day it's fucking fantastic.

You know, as-- as Larry Franco said, "We couldn't

get Rob to go from point A to point B."

I mean, it was, you know, what we were getting eventually

was you know, great, but it was way, way slow in coming

and there was just no way to keep track of uh-- of getting it done.

Like The Thing itself, it was metastasizing.

It was morphing into other things.

And his, you know, his-- his fertile imagination would be

adding aspects to this development, the creature evolving.

I almost, like, had a little breakdown.

I did actually at one point towards the end.

Um, they-- I was having a hard time um,

with being exhausted and I sta-- and it was starting to affect me.

And so Rob let me-- he had gotten a hotel room.

He let me go ahead and go over there.

And go to sleep, which almost was worse.

Because when I woke up, because I think Erik called me,

and I woke up, I was completely incoherent.

Rob always talks about the fact that-- that he literally suffered

from exhaustion and was hospitalized when--

when the-- the movie was wrapped be-- just because

of the amount of stress and strain that was put on him

that he put on himself, I'm quite sure.

- The dog head the peels open.

This was the la-- very last gag that we shot on the film.

Production had been wrapped for months.

We had completed all the other gags

and this was the last little piece that we needed to shoot.

We had a sneak preview in Las Vegas the following week.

Fortunately, we got it in-- in one take.

The following week, we wrapped up Hartland

and we flew up to Las Vegas and saw the sneak preview.

And the film came out four weeks later.

That's how tight it was.

- Today's world with the emphasis on a digital pipeline

and pre-visualization and all that, it kind of,

on the one hand, makes sure things go smoothly,

but on the other hand, it doesn't invite serendipity,

and happenstance, and spontaneity in the creation and execution.

It kind of hammers out all of the imperfections or risk,

and as a result, it doesn't feel as alive, and wet,

and tactile on film.

We Gen Xers are always, when we go in to make our movies,

we're always begging to have practical effects,

because those are the movies that we grew up with.

Uh, and then you do it and-- and you realize the complication

of-- of having so many moving parts to-- to work at the same time.

And when I say moving parts, I don't think there is any movie

with a creature with so many moving parts with so-- you know, in a single shot.

So it's insane what they achieved there. Just insane.

We tend to be hyperbolic and we overuse words like genius.

But what Bottin did was genius.

And you look at the man's career,

you look at the makeup in Legend, the makeup on Tim Curry.

-the makeup on-- -[indistinct speech]

On Robert Picardo who played the-- the swamp witch.

I mean, in the biggest friggin'

Panavision close-ups you can imagine, that makeup is flawless.

Who be this tender morsel?

Bottin was just like on another level.

You could put the Mount Rushmore of great makeup artists.

Yeah, oh, he's there.

Yeah, I think he might have his own mountain, actually.

-Yeah. -You know?

I mean, there's obviously the Dick Smiths

-who was the godfather of-- -Rick Baker--

- So many including Rick. -John Chambers.

- All of those guys are brilliant, brilliant.

-Jack Pierce. And Bottin, yeah. -But-Jack Pierce.

But Bottin just like, what a homerun.

-He's profoundly American. -Yeah, oh yeah.

You know, he has that-- that streak of pop culture.

And he's savage, like he's--

He's like, he's the Sex Pistols or the Ramones,

-everybody else is a lot more tame. -Yeah, yeah.

He's alive! He's alive! That dead trucker's alive!

Same amount of time on the scene as The Beatles

and the same kind of massive mark that he made on the industry.

- Someone with Rob's kind of creativity,

he's just not allowed to work like that anymore.

I think he just got disillusioned with a lot of that.

I'm not familiar with that address, would you please repeat the destination?

So he decided to back away. He does his own thing.

And uh, but not, you know, he just-- it's just not--

It just doesn't work in the system anymore the way he used to like to work.

And I'll tell ya, for a good uh, decade, uh,

you know, being in the business, uh, we who are practitioners

of creature effects dreaded Rob Bottin's return,

because he'd get all the work.

You see, when a man bleeds, it's just tissue.

-What do you got in mind, MacReady? -A little test.

But the reason to make The Thing was the blood test scene.

And Windows, you and Palmer, tie everybody down real tight.

- It's a scene taken almost verbatim from the novella.

It's the one scene that John said he wanted

to make the movie because of. He loved it.

And he told Bill Lancaster at the time, he said,

"No matter whatever else you do, no matter what you do,

keep this scene in."

His words were, "I know how to do this."

And he sure did.

-What for? -For your health.

Come on, let's rush him. He's not gonna blow us all up.

- I figured out what I needed.

Uh, just a lot of shots. A lot of cutaways.

And then this big monster explodes.

He ain't tying me up.

Then I'll have to kill you, Childs.

Then kill me.

Encapsulating all the horrors, all the central conflicts

and themes of The Thing.

The paranoia, the mistrust of your fellow man,

the power politics, all of it.

That scene is so effective.

I mean it.

I guess you do.

So there's no way to outsmart this Thing

until MacReady comes up with a blood test.

The blood from one of you things won't obey when it's attacked.

It'll try and survive.

I am not a medical doctor, uh, obviously,

uh, but uh, doing a blood test is not a bad idea,

at least the concept of it, because that's one

of the first things you do when somebody is infected by something.

Right? You're trying to figure out is there something

in their bloodstream that's-- that's wrong.

If MacReady hasn't earned the position for the audience,

that scene is not-- it can't be written that way.

It would be mayhem. It's like, "You-- what you came up with this thing?"

Like, "Who-- why-- who are you to do that?"

And that was always worrisome to me.

Like you know, you gotta be that guy. You gotta be that guy.

Over there.

I remember it having a kind of reverence, if you will.

One felt like we were shooting something important.

- 'Cause we're gonna find out who's The Thing.

And using those great character actors' faces, intense close-ups.

Like, "Is it this person? Is it this person?"

It's an amazing example of editing.

With no music, by the way.

Every little piece is an individual animal…

with a built-in desire to protect its own life.

Now this is a situation where MacReady is lording it over

all of us and claiming he has all the power

and only he knows for sure.

No, no, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Let's-- let's do what Mac says.

And I still don't think that Clark was the kind of person

who weighed the consequences of his actions.

I'm reacting against somebody telling me what the fuck

I'm supposed to do.

They don't have a right to do that.

So for me, that was-- that was the orientation

and that's-- that's why he makes that move.

John might disagree with that. I don't know.

-Geez. This is bullshit, Mac. -Finish it, Palmer.

They're dead, Mac!

That doesn't mean anything to MacReady at that point.

We're-- we're well past murder being a problem here, guys.

And that's basically the philosophy.

If I need to shoot you on the face during a blood test, I will.

- That whole test he puts them through.

It's brutal, you know, it's-- but it's necessary

and it-- and it works.

- We're gonna draw a little bit of everybody's blood.

And by the way, as we're-- I'm going,

"Why didn't they just prick the finger to get a little blood?

Why they have to take the scalpel

and cut their freakin' thumbs open so much like that?"

I'm like, "Come on."

The Thing and many other horror films use

a particular device to increase the tension

and the anxiety in the audience.

We as an audience seeing a needle penetrate the flesh

of a character in the movie makes us shrink

a little bit, makes us recoil.

When we see Windows take a scalpel and cut the flesh

of his thumb, so that he can squeeze the blood out.

When I see something like that, I-- I cringe.

The character who is revealed eventually

to be The Thing, embodying The Thing,

Um, I very carefully did not give him an eye light, a little glint.

Um, his eyes appear dead and um, everyone else um, had that

little glint of life, you know, sort of embellished the suspense.

The lack of eye light was-- was just really in the blood test scene.

That is such bullshit.

However, if he says so, I-- I agree with him 100%.

Whatever he says.

Well, the blood test is-- is like a master class in misdirection.

That's also a lot of just, you know, what was shot on the integral characters.

That's your palette of colors to play with on the canvas, you know?

And the sound effects of the hissing copper wire.

And the copper wire scratching the bottom of the plastic.

The question I had was like, you know, "Does MacReady know?"

"Well, now I'm gonna and I'm gonna show you what I already know."

Now I'll show you what I already know.

I mean, as a watcher, I would still say it could've--

it could have gone…

"I was wrong. "I thought I was", oh, shit.

But I don't think that's the way MacReady was feeling.

I think he-- "I'm gonna show you what I already know."

When they cut back to Kurt, the close-up shot,

they used multiple angles.

But then they used the same angle

of the fake hand a few times,

because it was a fake hand with a tube coming out the bottom.

It seems crazy, but how many years it took me

to notice that Kurt Russell's left hand is fake.

It's like the scene in Misery with the sledgehammer, you know?

You're convincing the audience that what they're seeing is normal and real.

-It's for the best. - Annie, please!

That moment when the blood leaps out of the-- out of the dish

is another one of the great jump scares.

- You were the only one that could have got to that blood.

We'll do you last.

It didn't just bubble.

It didn't squeal and run around in a circle like, "Ouch". It--

That blood could have fucking killed you. Pardon my language.

We used a-- a hollow fiberglass hand with a petri dish edges

and in the center was a balloon that Willie Whitten had sculpted

a little comic you know, "Ah", like a little miniature

snarled creature with little tiny hands.

- Get away from me! MacReady, burn it, hey!

So the next part was where the blood drops hit--

hit the floor and start moving, traveling around.

Now that was created by uh, the mechanical effects guy,

he's created a gimbal using a axle from a--

a front drive Oldsmobile.

And it was like a 4x4 table that had the same type

of flooring that the set did.

Such a simple special effect, but it adds to the unkillability

and the approachability of the problem.

Which is one of the-- one of the problems with the thing is.

And I don't mean the movie, I mean the-- the creature

is that you can't approach the enormity of the problem you have

if a single cell is the entire thing.

Palmer now.

He looks like he just got called to the principal's office.

No one in the audience would suspect that Palmer is The Thing.

He seems harmless likeable, a little silly

but he's not a candidate for possession by the alien creature.

And when you see it, I think it's-- it's a shock.

It's unwelcome, unpredictable.

If you were a serious actor, you would have, you know,

you'd a huge inner life boiling within you.

I didn't, you know. It was the magic of movies.

When I started to manifest as The Thing,

I think there were grips on either end of that sofa, shaking.

Here comes another outrageous transformation.

You know, we-- we caught Bennings before it went a little too far.

This one we're seeing what happens when it goes beyond the Bennings phase.

We flushed a bunch of chemicals into the foam

and it swelled up.

'Cause it like, the head's like-- like this, hanging down.

And so it was one of those things where you're like,

"Oh, that-- that looked cool."

Rob had created this Palmer head with a fiberglass under form.

And it had little um, tubes that were when they're inside,

they pump solvent into you.

Benzene which is highly carcinogenic

we found out years later.

But the benzene would swell up the foam rubber face

and then you had the bladders with the eye-- eyes popping out.

They shot that in reverse with a stunt guy flopping down.

And he drops back down.

- Windows, Blast him!

At one point, John was gonna use a gag where you remember

Fred Astaire dancing on the walls and the ceiling?

You have the set built and then you fix the camera

and then he's always dancing here, you know?

John wanted to do that.

Where he was gonna have Palmer I think crawl up the wall

on his back and across the ceiling.

And I think the next day it was announced that Spielberg

was doing the same gag in Poltergeist.

John scrapped that set.

Rob would come in with an idea.

I-- I particularly remember one time him coming in

and saying, "I've got this-- I've got this idea."

And it develops the ability to kill you and kill it does

in spectacular fashion.

His head parts creating a giant mouth and poor Windows is toast.

It was like, "How-- how are we gonna do that?"

They made a puppet, articulated puppet that would kick

and slam around and they rigged up the set

to break-- the lights to break and set to come apart.

And that thing is-- that thing was hysterical.

I had had a two-week break in shooting before the death scene.

So I got to go back to New York and see my friends.

I flew back in and the first thing up for the day was you know, my death scene

and I knew it was gonna take all day.

It was a tough day's work.

I mean, I was bounced around quite a bit.

John was like, "You know, are you all right?

We can get a stuntman to do this."

And I said, "No, no, I want to do it. I can do it."

You know all good horror has to have comedy.

If it doesn't have a moment of comic relief,

it's just not gonna work.

It's almost like a Sam Raimi movie.

It goes so crazy. And it's so almost silly.

There's something very undignified about the way he's killed.

It's not a cool death.

Dang it, God!

Now that's the one thing that scared me on this movie is--

is the fire, setting a human being on fire and fil-- filming him.

Tony Cecere was the stuntman and unfortunately, the first time

we tried to burn on him, it wasn't big enough.

So I had to tell him, "Hey Tony, we got to do that again.

It needs to be bigger."

And so he-- he-- he did it. Engulfed himself.

Oh. Boy, I'm glad that's over with.

Well, I had a great stunt team, but in this case, I don't think

anybody is anxious to set themselves on fire, bigger.

So he was you know, he didn't want to hear that.

- Cut me the hell. Come on get me out of here.

Come on get me out of here. Cut me loose dammit.

He allowed Donald Moffat to have that wonderful moment

of complete, you know, going from being Mr. Calm

to complete freaking out.

- And then all of a sudden and I don't know,

John whispered something in his ear.

We're like, "Okay, what was that about?"

And the next thing you know, he played it different.

He played it like you see it in the movie.

- I know you gentlemen have been through a lot.

But when you find the time, I'd rather not spend the rest

of this winter tied to this fucking couch!

Donald Moffat on the couch. I-- you just like--

like you never get tired of watching that.

You know, it's just the best.

The way he changed you know pitch and emotional reality

in a split second like that just had us in stitches.

I mean, it was really like, "Okay."

It was a great moment.

- The sequence where they're testing blood to me

is really right up there with the deer hunter.

With De Niro and Christopher Walken putting a gun to each other's heads.

I love you, Nicky.

I'd rate those two scenes as the two most paranoia-inducing scenes in cinema.

It's maybe, maybe the best directing Carpenter's ever done.

I have memories of John sitting alone in the editing room

on a Saturday morning, no one else around at the Moviola,

not quite willing to let go of the scene yet

until he runs it through his fingers.

And he's running it slowly frame editing taking his time,

taking the trim boxes off the shelf, making the edits himself,

the splices themselves to the frame until he gets it the way he wants it.

Blair's been busy out here all by himself.

Childs, we're going out to give Blair the test.

If he tries to make it back here, and we're not with him, burn him.

Blair's been busy. I think that Blair had access to the outpost.

I think that Blair was in the shed, but he built underground tunnels.

He could have been doing some things, sabotaging blood,

Palmer, in a sneaky way.

Hey Blair! You down there? We got something for you!

It's not just that The Thing has Blair's memory.

Blair now knows how to build spaceships out of helicopter parts.

Thinking about that scene when he tells MacReady,

"Get me out of here, man. Let me out of the shed.

I want to get out of here." It's so well done.

And Wilford Brimley doesn't overplay it.

I want to come back inside. Don't you understand it?

"Is he already been The Thing?

Even in that moment? Was he The Thing?" Well, he was.

And he's building this scapecraft under his shed.

-What is it? -Something he's been making.

It's a ship of some kind.

So once a Thing takes you over, you now know how to build a spaceship?

Just because you majored in biology did we find out that

he minored in magnetic transportation or something like that? I, you know--

But the knowledge of all of those planets that you've been to

once you become taken over, you now have whatever

that organism experienced before, you now have that in your DNA.

Where was he trying to go?

Any place but here.

Is it here to take over the Earth?

It doesn't seem so to me. It seems like that was a mistake.

They crashed here and now that they've revived,

thanks to the Norwegians taking that block of ice out,

they want to get off this planet.

I mean, that's what it seems to me based on that um,

little escape ship that-- that Blair is building.

But it's never answered.

It got back inside and blew the generator.

In six hours it'll be 100 below in here.

Well, it can get colder than minus 100 Fahrenheit.

Talking Fahrenheit. Which is about 73 I think C.

Well, that's suicide!

Not for that Thing.

It wants to freeze now.

What I found was on a minus 100 day that wasn't the worst.

The worst would be like minus 80 to minus 90 with winds.

With the winds blowing hard. And uh, boy I felt that.

Whether we make it or not we can't let that Thing freeze again.

Maybe we'll just warm things up a little around here.

Like this is the end of the movie. We're gonna blow some stuff up.

But he still throws this creepy moment in there with Blair

just digging his fingers into Garry's face.

And killing off another character in a way that makes you squirm.

Those are actually Rob Bottin's fingers in there

with a prosthetic that was sculpted with little

stretch marks for the fingers that Rob put in there.

You're watching a man trying to resist it

and losing the battle to such a nightmarish fantasy concept.

It's very…

it's purposeful.

Nauls, the cook, is possibly the most stereotyped idea of--

of a black character at the time.

He's skating around the corridors.

He's playing loud music on his boombox.

♪ Writings on the wall ♪

- Usually the cook in the kitchen, they are really important.

They have this godlike quality in a team, you know?

You want to have the favor of the cook.

- I kind of like the idea of that perhaps he's um, on the verge

of getting into trouble in um, south central L.A.

and he's been sent out to the Antarctic to keep him out

of the gang culture there.

T.K. Carter actually I think transcends that stereotype.

He's-- he's very sympathetic.

I think I saw Childs outside the main entrance of the camp.

So he always seems to pop up at the right time

with the question that we want answered, so that somebody can actually answer it.

"Why are the Norwegians doing this?

Why have they gone crazy? Why have they come here?"

Maybe we're at war with Norway.

So the real cold in Alaska had not settled in yet.

I was never uncomfortable. T.K. Carter hated it.

"I'm from Beverly Hills. No, I don't know. I don't do this." You know what I mean?

He just didn't…

Really good guy.

And really out of his element up there.

There's some Saturday nighters there that are pretty

kind of like old Hollywood could've got killed that night stuff.

You know what I mean?

T.K. was funny, and very good, and creative,

and just, T.K. was just a good guy. I had a great time with him.

-Where we going? -Up to my shack.

What the hell for?

He could make me laugh. That's for sure.

Reading the novella was very interesting, 'cause it filled in

a lot of gaps or a lot of what people like

to call, "plot holes".

For example, you found out what happened

to Nauls, the cook.

Nauls', you know, death.

Couldn't-- couldn't afford to do it.

He shot one test with a box monster. Didn't like it.

The box monster. It was a uh, a head and intestines

that were on top of this crate.

Nauls was walking by,

we had a latex dental dam and a flexible like vacuum tube

for a vacuum, for pulls inside of it.

We just kind of like lassoed him with it and yanked him into the box.

Visually, it didn't look good, but I-- the mechanical part

didn't really work that well. It was kind of awkward.

It kind of-- you could tell that it was

a hose inside of a-- a-- a plastic, a rubber bag.

- So Nauls just walks off, you know.

Alone in the distance and you don't see anything.

All those ambiguities sort of piled up on the doorstep

of the final scene, I think.

And it, you know, it caused a problem for audiences.

I love this sort of desolate, and austere,

and remote style of the film.

It doesn't let you in very easily.

You're sort of a witness to it. And-- and it makes you do some work.

And it leaves unanswered questions.

I said, how's it…

There's a lot of elements in The Thing that add

to that feeling that you get when you watch the movie.

There's a very, very specific air about The Thing.

And you know, it starts with Morricone's score.

To begin with, I made a confession.

I never wanted John Carpenter to uh, compose the music for this movie.

Um, by himself, that is.

Um, I mean, I love John's music, particularly his score

for Assault on Precinct 13.

John's original idea for music was to take

the original Dimitri Tiomkin score from the original.

And redo it electronically in the John Carpenter way…

which sounds like a more interesting idea to me now.

The studio did not want me to do the music.

It was never-- they just didn't want it to happen.

'Cause I think they thought I was just like an amateur or something.

Stuart Cohen suggested Morricone because he was available

and-- and he was brilliant.

I ended up making the deal in John's absence.

You know, I was the one speaking to Morricone and--

and he accepted the terms which was $40,000 as a fee

and that we would come to Rome and that he would do the film.

- I didn't speak Italian. He didn't speak English.

I went over to Rome to meet him and he played several piano pieces

for the main title of the movie.

And I thought they-- I just didn't think they worked,

so I said can you do something with fewer notes.

John played for him his scene for Escape from New York

on the piano.

And he was listening.

- There was no communication.

More communication. Between John and Ennio.

From that time, from the moment in Rome to the time Ennio set foot…

on stage 10 at Universal in late March.

Scoring session begins with a 60-piece orchestra.

John was bothered by some of what he was hearing

on stage that day.

And he was needing music to drive the film.

That's what he was worried about, Morricone.

Scary music. Music that would drive the action.

And he's not sure he got that. We finished the session.

Um, John shakes hands with Morricone, you know, says goodbye.

And heads out the studio door without saying goodbye to me.

I know where he's going.

He's gonna work on pieces that he thinks he needs

outside of what he's heard…

which is what happened.

The two scores uh, Morricone, John and John's editions

completely separate from one another.

Um, composed separately. Worked separately.

Without the knowledge of the other.

What a way to start the movie out.

Boom, boom, che, che, che.

And then the bass comes in. Mmm.

And then the helicopter appears.

And you're going, "What the fuck is going on here?"

- It's a great score. It's very spare.

And it's very electronic in places.

I think it's abetted by Morricone orchestrations.

But at its very base it's very much a John Carpenter score.

Such a great example of music becoming

an indelible part of a film.

After Morricone saw the film in Rome four months later

when the first cue he hears is John's underneath the titles of the film.

Underneath his credit.

He said, "Universal's got him in Rome already.

So why-- why didn't John just do it himself?

Why did-- need me at all?"

Well, we needed you, because we needed you.

And there's enough there, you know, um, that makes the case.

- But if you listen to the soundtrack it-- it is orchestral.

A huge number of pieces.

Only the beginning and ending were of the synth.

You know I never imagined that we ever got a glimpse

of what the creature actually looked like.

It never reveals itself in its final form.

It's a sentient creature that is just simply using the proteins

and the DNA of whatever its host is

in order to replicate and move itself forward.

It's not The Predator take the mask off. Right, like…

It's possible that the idea of form is something very human

and it's like something beyond our comprehension.

In that, it doesn't have any physical form that we can relate to.

So what you have to remember is the 1982 film

is not Who Goes There?

So Who Goes There?,

the alien was given a very specific form.

It was locked in the ice. It was given tentacles.

It had three glowing red eyes.

It was kind of a bit like a weird gorilla type creature

that was running around.

You had no idea what the fuck it was gonna look like.

And then when you see, you know, the end with Blair and the jaws,

it's-- it's-- you never really understood what the true form

of the alien is, because it has no form.

It's just taken over life.

- In Dale Kuipers' original sketch, that was meant

to be the final form of The Thing.

I suppose if there is a final form

and we never talked about there being a final form.

If there is one, it's the Blair monster at the end of the film.

But not really.

If you're watching this film for the first time,

you're kind of absolutely traumatized by everything that's happened.

So when the Blair monster turns into a sort of like

all-you-can-eat-type monster, where it's got

all the things incorporated. It's got the dogs.

It's got the men. It's got everything.

Plus, other stuff as well. It's almost a relief.

You think, "Oh, it's not as icky as Norris or-- or Palmer."

To be fair, you're not thinking at this point.

You're just thinking, "Kill the fucker."

I never felt that there was anything missing from that scene.

You know, I liked the stop motion aspect

of how big the tentacle was, and the floor exploding,

and all the physical effects. I thought were fantastic.

Rob asked Randy Cook to animate the Blair monster coming up.

Randy Cook did a stop motion model

and that The Thing, once it would rip open,

that that little dog creature sort of leapt out

and sort of crawled towards uh, MacReady.

It's interesting, and it's cool, and I know that they shot it.

I don't know why they didn't use it.

It didn't work, because it's animated.

It just did not work.

- I don't think that's his favorite form of presentation.

But we felt like some of the shots needed to be supplemented this way.

Maybe a pull back, a big master shot that that would reveal

more of The Thing.

You hear 'em talk about, "Oh, we tried to do this,

we couldn't get the Blair monster, we--" "What? There was more? What?

You're like, "What are you talking about?"

They had all these other monsters they wanted to do,

but they ran out of money and they ran out of time. My God.

- But the problem is that when we had to create the actual

life-size puppet, we had to change the proportions

from the original design and it was much larger stomach

than what Randy had spent months and months creating

this stop motion animation.

All right, well, and at the end a 20-foot version

of a creature appears and then you kind of go like,

"Where does it get that much mass?"

It has all the other creatures on it, right?

Like it's got the dog, it's got various heads,

so theoretically, it's an amalgam of all of their protein

and all of their body mass.

That to me is a little bit of a tricky concept.

That was sort of a thing, a trope, uh, uh, um,

well, a sub-trope, I suppose, in that era where you would have

like when the creature, the final monstrosity is revealed,

it's kind of an amalgam of all the other scary things

you've seen, right?

There's like a dog coming out of the middle

and I think Rob was inside all in plastic,

because it was all gonna be a big slimy mess.

We had the-- the jaw that-- on the side, we had the like

facial expressions, we had the articulated arms,

the body rips open and a dog comes out.

We had 62 puppeteers working on that.

We were bringing in anybody we could find.

I brought my brother in, every-- friends of friends.

There were people on-- on pumps for fluids

and there was lever pullers and literally people with hands

through appendages and it was very tight.

People got to know each other very well.

- You know, one of the things that's fascinating

when it was the idea that two Things separated

would maybe not be the same, right?

'Cause at a certain point, they have absorbed

different enough things that they develop their own characteristics.

This one can turn into things that this one can't,

because they've absorbed different items,

because they're really only the sum of what they've consumed.

I remember the VHS years where I kind of couldn't tell

that half of it was supposed to be Blair's face.

John had to go hat in hand to Universal

to get the extra $100,000 to finish the Blair Monster.

By that time production had been wrapped for months.

We were just doing all this-- they were just waiting on us.

The studio was getting worried.

I think one of the things that happened as a result

of The Thing was practical effects became the star of a show

for so many movies.

Rick Baker gets credit for the, you know, changing the face

of practical effects with American Werewolf

and winning that first Oscar.

And The Thing not being eligible because they said,

"No, it has to be an actor in makeup for it to win Best Makeup."

It changed how filmmakers deployed practical effects

for at least the next decade.

I've actually got a whole list of movies that are clearly

either influenced by The Thing

or just complete rip-offs of The Thing.

And one of the things is Predator.

If you think how the movie starts, you have the spaceship

coming in from deep space, it doesn't crash,

but it kind of drops a pod that crash lands.

- We have the same question on the Predator movies.

Like, "Is the-- did the Predator fly this ship?"

"Yeah, okay he flew the ship.

Or-- or some other Predators flew the ship."

"Did they build the ship?

Did guys with loincloths build the ships?"

You have a team of unknown guys going into the jungle,

an alien environment, looking for another similar team.

And the Predator's always invisible you never really see it,

it's trying to remain hidden.

So many tropes from the Predator is ticked off by The Thing.

If Kurt Russell was the star of They Live

instead of Roddy Piper, I think that movie probably

would have done better than it did.

I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass.

Although again, eventually it finds its audience.

He's pulling up a wa-- layers literally in They Live

and revealing the real world as it is underneath the surface.

You know, I think They Live is actually a great comp

for this-- the quintessential John Carpenter movie

in that his thematics are about finding the dark world

underneath our own.

There are films like The Faculty which really rift on it.

-Take a hit. -No way, man.

Oh, come on, man. If you're not an alien, you've got nothing to worry about.

Gave another version of the blood test scene.

- There's nods to it in The Faculty.

I mean, everybody references that scene, because it's just--

it's just too iconic.

You know when I made Cabin Fever, I-- I told Carpenter that

Cabin Fever is probably more of a remake of The Thing

than The Thing is a remake of The Thing.

They put Jordan Ladd in the shed, that's putting Blair in the shed.

I mean there's entire shots that I took literally just stealing it.

I compare The Mist to The Thing quite often.

Those movies are very, very similar.

I think they both have a very, very bleak oppressive tone.

Both of those movies end in a way that you walk out

of the theater going, "Oh my", like there's no like,

"Hey, let's go get some ice cream after the movie."

-Oh! Oh! -Oh my God.

Well, The Mist is your thing in a way. Right?

-Yeah. Very much so, very much so. -Very much so.

They're ordinary people who become extraordinary

by the obstacles and the challenges that-- that they face.

Uh, and that's what makes his-- his movies so effective and so powerful.

And I'd say the same thing about Stephen King's work.

When I read the first draft of The Mist, I threw the script

across the room when I got to the ending.

And I was like, "Ugh, how can you end a movie…"

You-- It's not the kind of movie that you really relish

experiencing over and over again.

Until you start appreciating, you know, the masterful filmmaking

of Frank and of course, John.

So I consider those two movies kind of brother and sister.

Quentin Tarantino makes The Hateful Eight.

He uses the cues that Morricone wrote for the thing.

And he makes the movie set in the snow with people trapped in a cabin.

It's the closest replication of The Thing.

It's the Quentin Tarantino kind of Mexican standoff version of it.

But it-- it's very much influenced by The Thing.

One of them fellas is not what he says he is.

Tarantino made everybody watch The Thing before we did Hateful Eight.

Both he and Robert Rodriguez, when we were doing Death Proof,

you know, they-- they talked on, and on, and on about John.

And the movies that John and I had done together.

But something about Hateful Eight musically,

'cause Quentin's very musical, right?

That sound, that musical sound was-- is in-- was in his head.

-Music time's over! -What? Uh, Whoa!

Of other projects that are, I-- I think, tipping their hat

to The Thing my version is this True Detective recently

with J-- the uh, Jodie Foster.

It's a big chunk of frozen human beings and it-

that looks like a Rob Bottin special to me, you know?

In Night Country, there is a shot of uh, episode one of--

of Jodie Foster talking about the case and The Thing

is right behind her on a shelf.

It's a TV show, and-- and it's a murder mystery, and--

so it's a different animal, but that said, the seed of it all,

the seed of my show is The Thing.

The moment that I made the decision that I wanted

to create this version of True Detective in the Arctic,

I couldn't stop the idea of uh, an Arctic research station

with only men and something horrible happens to them

and their twisted bodies are found in the ice.

So there is no Night Country without The Thing very simply put.

I don't think I can look at the ending objectively anymore.

It's just-- that's-- that's the ending of The Thing.

I-- I-- at this point, it's-- you know, it's like

you're playing your favorite record, you know?

You're not gonna be like, "Oh, fuck that last song."

Like you're gonna play the whole record

and I think that again, the Mike Ploog of it all

comes through in that final Blair Monster a little bit.

It's a little cartoonish.

If the film had ended right there with defeating the Blair monster,

I would not have been as happy, I think.

The prior scares were more grotesque,

'cause they were a bit more personal.

So now you're fighting a real full-scale monster.

Harder to do than ever in physical effects.

Um, but you know very, very effectively done and--

and a very satisfying end to that creature getting blown to smithereens.

When I throw the dynamite at The Thing, John and I

were trying to, to think of something.

You know, 'cause you can't just turn around and throw it.

And I said, "It's really monster shit crazy now, right?"

He said, "Yeah." And I said, "Why don't I just say, 'Yeah, fuck you, too.'

and throw this thing at him." And he went, "Yeah.", you know?

Yeah, fuck you, too!

I was extremely uh, proud of The Thing.

But uh, the studio objected to the ending,

because it was uh, it was uncertain.

And they are right. The audiences hate uncertainty.

But I didn't care, because uh, the real ending of the movie

would be everybody's dead or everybody's The Thing.

So I didn't want to do that.

So I can leave a big question mark.

John had thoughts about it. There weren't reservations.

They weren't really-- he just had thoughts about it.

He was-- he was playing it out in his head and we'd started talking about it.

You the only one who made it?

- Not the only one.

He always knows the question that's being asked

of whatever he's shooting.

That this might be good for this moment.

And he has a partner in crime there.

I always opt for, "Well, let's go with what we feel is right.

Maybe they won't even get it for 20 years."

- The ending as we shot it was-- was pretty straightforward.

To allow the viewer the opportunity to question, to hypothesize.

Where were you Charles?

It felt like a Leone ending where you'd have two gunmen

just sitting there.

The first one that happened to blink would get it.

It's like the chest stalemate.

It's the ending of a chapter.

It might not be the ending of the entire story.

- Oh, I find it tremendously bleak.

I mean, these guys are gonna freeze to death.

I mean, that's just-- but they've given everything

to try and defeat a threat to humanity.

That makes them tremendously noble, you know?

And these are blue collar, lunch pail, working class guys

who are in this really crappy job,

but they stand up to fight for all of hu-- humanity.

-It's not one thing that ending. -No.

You can't-- you cannot close it with one word. It's so powerful.

Fire's got the temperature up all over the camp.

Won't last long, though.

That's the choice of an assured filmmaker

who knows what kind of story he wants to tell. I--

As I-- as I understand it that some of these alternate endings

were kind of uh, entertained to satisfy a studio note.

And the studio spent the last few weeks before release trying

to get me to change the ending.

Didn't change a thing, because it-- it's apocalypse time.

And when it comes to the ending of the film,

which is nihilistic, I mean you shouldn't forget

the problems we were having were being felt a quarter mile

to our east at Warner Brothers by Ridley Scott,

who was having ending problems and tone problems

of his own with Blade Runner.

And for exactly the same reasons.

I know how Ridley, you know-- you know, fixed his problem,

although I hated it.

- I didn't know how long we'd have together.

Who does?

John actually saw a shot as a safety.

A shot of Kurt getting a blood test

and finding out he wasn't The Thing.

It was his protection against the studio.

- At the end of the day, Kurt Russell's last shot on this movie.

And it was just a long, low, dolly shot down one

of Universal Hartland's corridors.

In which the camera slowly pivots and stops

and reveals MacReady at the end of the room,

meant to be a hospital, dressed pretty much the way he was

in the last scene, with Serape over his shoulder and still ice-born.

Nothing else said.

No Childs, nobody else, no extras in the scene.

Just this one shot.

Underneath it, orally you would hear, a helicopter approaching. Excited voices.

Oh, we never cut it in.

Um, I didn't like it. John hated it.

And um, the most important thing about this shot uh,

and this new ending is that we did not tell

the studio that we had shot it.

I-- I-- I thought the idea of-- of suddenly having uh, Kurt,

you know, be the hero and survive was just,

"No, come on. That's not this story.

You haven't been watching close enough, you know?"

And we won that argument and we lost that battle.

Because they didn't support the film.

If you meet a horror fan, to this day, they go,

"Who do you think was The Thing?"

"Oh, you like horror movies? Yeah, what's your favorite?"

"Okay, The Thing. Okay, well, who do you think was The Thing?

Was he uh, you know, was it Childs? Was it MacReady?"

-Oh, fuck you, man. -That's what John would say.

Yeah, no. You're not gonna do that.

Not before lunch. Take me to dinner and we'll talk.

No, I'm not doing that.

Me, I think they're the two human survivors.

And they've sacrificed everything to try and defeat this.

- So many theories have come out.

Is it that MacReady hands across the bottle of alcohol to drink,

never drinking it himself, and we know he's been throwing

Molotov cocktails everywhere, so it's very likely that might be fuel.

Is it MacReady? Is it Childs?

Or is The Thing lurking somewhere

in the remnants of the, uh, you know, compound?

Don't you think that the ending is the perfect example

of it being a-- a Rorschach test of who you are?

-Oh, yeah. -I mean, that's--

that's a great thing when uh, when people say about uh,

Pan's Labyrinth, it was all in her imagination.

-It was not-- it was all real. -Hm.

That tells you as much about you as it tells you about me.

Let's face it, they're both gonna die.

- How will we make it?

Maybe we should.

What do we learn here?

We see all this mayhem, and all of this horror,

and a station blown to smithereens,

and these two guys sitting among the fires that are dying out,

passing a bottle back and forth.

I wanted to believe that they had made noble sacrifices

and every time you would discover eh, eh, eh,

think about going down an alley where Childs was The Thing,

you'd go, "Oh, I really liked Childs. I don't want that to happen."

It's a crock of shit.

You know, of course, over the years I've heard all

these theories about why everybody thinks it's me.

I don't think it was me, and I-- I don't remember.

I think we filmed it both ways, as if it was one of us

and then if we didn't know.

You know, and-- and frankly, I don't know the take

that's in the movie, which of those takes it is.

You know, if anyone knows, John only knows.

- Kurt Russell told me that they didn't know how to get out.

They had one ending and then another ending,

and he goes on nearly a daily basis,

they'd come in with like, "Okay, this is how it's gonna end."

But I think Kurt said that the ending of the movie as is

was Kurt Russell's suggestion of how it ends.

When you sit down and say, as a final line,

"Why don't we just sit here and see what happens?"

You know what you're saying.

You know, I-- I think I wrote that line.

It was like-- it was like, we were just tossing different

ideas around for weeks, you know, and then we came down

to that line-- the whole thing kind of evolved.

It works. It-- it really works.

It's not like Childs ran out into the storm looking for Blair

and then got Thinged and then like snuck back in

and then like put-- put on fresh clothes and--

and you know, came out again just-- just so we could

-fool Kurt Russell with. -Oh yeah. If you--

-It doesn't make sense to me. -If you-- if you Columbo it.

Yeah.

I like to think MacReady's human. I love MacReady so much.

I didn't want to think that The Thing got him.

I think that Childs might be a Thing and he's just waiting to see.

But then why doesn't Childs show himself?

For the longest time I was sure that it could, you know,

as a child, that it couldn't be MacReady, because he's the guy.

He's our guy, right? He's Kurt Russell.

And then you grow up and you realize, yeah,

you missed him for a bunch of the movie. He was not there.

And he has been so proactive to destroying The Thing

which could be the ultimate strategy.

There's an interesting possibility there that

I don't really-- that I-- that I don't reveal.

That I don't talk about.

That I think the audience has not considered.

Thought I saw Blair. I went out after him.

And got lost in the storm.

- So people write to me all the time.

They know everything about every frame of the film.

And they go, "Because this happened and that happened and this happened,

that must mean it's either this or this, right?"

And I go, "I have no idea."

It's-- it's difficult to-- to-- to pick which lane you want to go in.

In the Dark Horse comics, Childs was The Thing.

It wasn't very satisfying to me.

What was satisfying to me was the idea

that these two guys died to save the world.

- Unless our present existence is going to be threatened,

The Thing wouldn't show itself.

When everybody says, "Oh, well, the you know, no smoke comes out

of Childs' mouth."

It's like, that-- that to me is the dumbest reason of all.

Because if you've ever sat in front of a campfire

in the cold, if the wind is blowing away from me,

then you see…

Then you'll s-- then you'll see the condensation of-- of it.

But if you're sitting in front of the fire,

heat is coming in my direction, you're not gonna see anything.

That's just science.

I just cannot believe any of this voodoo bullshit.

My standard answer is, "It's so if you think so.

But it wasn't me."

- We were approached by this sci-fi channel

to write this miniseries sequel.

And uh, 19 years later, I hope--

I'm still hoping to maybe get to do that someday.

But you know, the-- the-- the cogs of Hollywood,

you sometimes, they get caught.

But what we were all really fascinated by

and excited about the potential of with television,

was the possibility of depicting Blair's prediction.

U.S. Number 31 calling McMurdo. Come in…

We started our story with the idea that maybe

there was this Russian outpost, not so far away,

that picked up what Windows was broadcasting.

They come to Outpost 31 and they find the little shelter

where MacReady and Childs were.

And they basically just find them there, like pointing guns at each other.

And MacReady's got the bottle in his hand and they're just frozen to death.

And so they died paranoid, and frozen,

and pointing guns at each other.

But they were both human and they were both heroes.

It's kind of like bringing alien to Earth, you know?

It's like we wanted to bring that strain,

that organism, mutating organism, to the United States.

And not to a big city, but to an isolated little town.

It was about uh, a small town in the desert

that has been infected and has been quarantined.

So you're very much trapped in this town with these people.

And it was more about not so much solving the mysteries

of the original film, 'cause we wanted to move on from that.

It was more figuring out things like, if you're infected,

do you realize you're infected? What's it like to be infected?

- It was a really good script.

David wrote a really, really terrific script.

And it was very much in the-- in the world,

in the wheelhouse of John Carpenter.

We had that vibe.

One of the ideas that Frank had that it was a lot of fun to write

was at the end of the film,

we wanted to have a swarm of the spider heads.

It's like what Cameron, who's another genius,

and I use that word advisedly, you know, it's what he did with-- with Aliens.

He took something that was brilliant and he didn't just rehash it.

-Expanded it. -As so-- as so many knock-offs did.

He expanded it.

There they go! Over there! Get 'em!

And we wound up revisiting it much later at a time

when movie stars were doing weekly TV shows.

And so we-- I rewrote the pilot episode

so that when the Russians get there, Childs and MacReady are gone.

We're there-- we just-- we don't know what happened to them.

And then the idea was, and again this is just me

pitching my headcanon because we never got this far,

um, would be that at the end of the first season we've met

this new character, her-- her name was Anne Blackburn.

She was sort of like the CDC specialist who goes out

and what if at the end of the first season

you had this scene where she goes out and she's driving to the woods,

you don't know where she's going and she comes up to this cabin

out in the woods in the middle of nowhere completely off the grid

and she goes up the door and knocks,

and the door opens and she says, "Are you R.J. MacReady?"

And Kurt Russell comes out with a shotgun and goes,

"Who wants to know?"

There's a lot of movies that leave you hanging and you go, "Goddamn it."

But this one leaves you hanging and you don't go, "Goddamn it",

you go, "Geez, I wonder why, I wonder what hap--", you know,

it really continues to keep you thinking about it.

If you're worried about me--

If we've got any surprises for each other,

I don't think we're in much shape to do anything about it.

How do you ponder about the questions of the cosmos?

-Sit down and drink, man. -Yeah.

The fire will go, you will die and everything will move on.

-Yeah. Yeah, yeah. -It's so beautiful.

-It's very French. It's very European. -Oh yeah, it's very European.

It's no wonder the Europeans love Carpenter.

-Love this guy, yeah. -Yeah. Yeah.

They have Sauter and they have Carpenter.

Movies today are so spoon-fed.

They have to have a satisfying ending

and blah, blah, blah. It has to tie up and--

They don't want them-- studios don't want movies testing low.

That's why movies are so boring, 'cause they cut all the edges off.

As a result, audiences are starting to reject movies.

And they're going back to the old ones, 'cause the old ones had mystery.

And there's no movie that did it better than The Thing.

It's a true mystery movie.

I asked John when he was on the show, "I don't want to know the answer,

but I just want to know if there is an answer."

And he said, "Yes, there's an answer."

And I said, "And can I know the answer from watching the movie closely?"

And he said, "Yes."

It gets more and more, I guess, more and more interesting

as time goes on about like, "Well, well, I have-- nobody's…

had any sort of definitive answer."

- They want to know who survived, who's the human in the end.

And I'm not telling them.

And that's what's kept this movie alive

is that question mark.

And it's still talked about today.

And if I ever give up the secret of who's the human in the end,

I'll destroy it.

Why don't we just wait here for a little while.

See what happens.

- An alien creature had frozen.

But not to death.

I began getting postcards at my newspaper office

from readers telling me that John Carpenter's new movie,

I guess they'd seen it in a preview,

was one of the most disgusting films ever made.

What's interesting about the reaction is that

the questions asked now out of wonder by fans.

"Who's who at the end?

How did this happen?"

Uh, were asked in anger by the audiences

in previews, you know, 42 years ago.

The first preview, I remember one person punching,

you know, a card, a preview card with his pencil angrily

and then writing, you know, "You forgot the other half of the movie."

- I remember the reviews were savage.

'Cause I remember the reviews uh, saying all the characters

were the same and the gore was the only distinction.

I-- I just thought, "How can somebody misunderstand

a-- a movie so much?"

The critics were nearly all oldish white male at that time,

uh, who'd been weaned on uh, real cinema, you know,

like auteurism, Robert Bresson.

They thought special effects, I think, were vulgar

and anything with a lot of spectacular special effects

uh, had to be despised to a certain degree.

It wasn't taken seriously, for-- for sure.

Goldie and I got together somewhere around that time.

Somebody made a suggestion to see The Thing.

And uh, Goldie's mom, who was just a great person,

but a real no-bullshit mom, too.

She was great, just tell the truth.

She got about 20 minutes into The Thing and she went,

"I can't, I can't." And she just got up

and was like, "I don't like-- like it, Goldie."

I said, "Yeah, this is not-- not the right crowd."

But that was true for a lot of people.

They couldn't see the story of paranoia,

because they couldn't get past that monster.

They just could not get past the monster.

You know, we had like a-- you know, like friends

and friends of friends screening, the first public screening of the film

for anyone other than ourselves in late March

when-- including Debra Hill, Nick Castle, and a whole bunch of folks came to it.

The reaction then, I think, was and it's you know, is that

John had taken things a step too far.

Uh, those were actually Debra Hill's words.

It wasn't Poltergeist on ice,

which is probably what the studio was looking for.

- I'll tell you exactly why it didn't find an audience.

The Thing did not find an audience because it came out,

what, three weeks after E.T.?

He is afraid. He is totally alone.

E.T., we'd-- we were-- I had never cried in a movie before-- before E.T.

We were all phoned home. We all had Reese's Pieces.

Everyone had dolls, like-- like E.T. mania was everywhere.

Oh, it was the biggest thing ever.

People, like, literally there were stories

that "I took my-- I took my-- my mute son to E.T.

and at the end of it, he turned to me and said,

I love you, Mommy. And now he-- now he goes to Dartmouth."

You know, whatever. People were being healed by E.T.

Really, there were stories like urban myths about people who like,

walked out without their canes after seeing E.T.

and-- and The Thing is the exact opposite of that.

Well, I me-- it's okay.

I mean, I'm not a huge fan of E.T.

I didn't believe a minute of that creature.

The Humpty Dumpty there.

But, uh, boy, the audience got it.

They-- they loved it.

It was Disney. A Disney alien kind of.

And then that's what Steven does so well.

He senses the audience. What did he say?

He thought the audience needed an upcry.

Of course, I didn't think that. That's not my thinking.

They need to be shaken and scared. Always!

The genre filmmaking machine was-- was operating at full capacity.

It was so good.

Every weekend there was another movie coming out.

Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, The Road Warrior, Creepshow,

Blade Runner. It was like every weekend.

It was probably a strong pill to swallow in the world of media

and culture to go right into The Thing,

which is one of the greatest paranoid horror films ever made.

Trapped in the frozen wasteland of Antarctica…

it could not escape.

I thought it-- there was gonna be a big uh, response to it

and um, I was disappointed when I first saw it.

Not with the work on screen, but just with the way it was handled.

-And man-- -It isn't Bennings.

- …is the warmest place to hide.

So The Thing is like an R-rated movie, there's no monster in the poster.

We love the poster. But at the time it's like, "I can't really see the monster."

It was a-- a winter movie released in June.

So I think if that movie had come out you know,

a little bit farther away from E.T., it would've--

it would've done better at the box office.

I also think the fact that it didn't do well is

one of the reasons people love to champion it.

- So when it didn't connect with an audience, you know,

it hit John hard.

I told him because he seemed so down, I said, "Look",

and I believed it, "This is going to be a classic

in 10 or 20 years."

And he was just very dismissive about it.

CARPENTER'S 'THING' STOCKS UP ON SHOCK

Had The Thing been a hit,

I would have been offered a lot of stuff.

And I wouldn't have lost the job, Firestarter.

- That eventually got made, but we were actually gonna do it.

And we were, I don't know, like eight weeks away

from photography or something like that.

We got called up to the tower.

A guy by the name of Tom Mount

was one of the production executives there.

He says, I can remember, "We realize the obligation that

we have to you both, but we've decided not to proceed with the picture."

"What?" You know, it was like, "So".

And then that was it.

John and I got up, we walked out,

dead silence into the elevator, down the elevator, back to the office.

Didn't say a fucking word for, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes.

He risked and in many ways lost a lot because of this bet.

'Cause he will probably tell you that was a point of inflection,

where he started to losing the capacity to do exactly what he wanted.

The-- one of the things that's really cool to me

about John Carpenter is he didn't sacrifice

appreciating it 40 years later,

50, 60 years later, 70 years, 100 years later…

for maybe it being more well accepted than it ever would have been then.

I think it was uh, it attained the highest honor I've seen

a horror movie attain, which is the audience first rejects it.

'Cause it's breaking every boundary.

One of the few times in my lifetime

where I probably 10, 15 times it's happened,

where you know you're in front of a classic.

And you-- you-- you believe you're watching

the Gone with the Wind of uh, brutality.

I was absolutely blown away and I left kind of devastated

and depressed, because Rob and I are about the same age

and I thought, "Oh my God, is this what one has to do

to make a mark in the industry?"

I saw it very stoned…

uh, because I'm from Amsterdam

on a VHS I rented with some friends at my house.

"Oh, we're gonna see a horror movie."

Uh, and everybody was just laughing and I remember seeing it

and-- and being completely, completely fixed into it.

I immediately recognized this is something truly weird.

Seeing a movie the first time is a casual date, right?

-You see it three times, you're dating. -Yeah.

You see it more than six times, you're married.

Yeah.

The Thing fans are the most enduring.

They are-- they're-- they're-- they're-- they're so loyal

and I-- I thank each and every one of them, because they--

they keep it going. They keep it going.

The fact that John Carpenter has not been forthcoming about

answering the mysteries of this film makes it one

that you can come back to and experience in a new way

and think about in new ways.

How many movies from that time can you say that about

that get more interesting for the audience?

The first thing we do as mammals is trying to figure out a puzzle.

What are you gonna do with a puzzle? Leave it alone?

Every piece of art is a puzzle.

You see a painting and somebody is looking out-- out of a frame,

you want to know what they're looking at.

- It's unfinished business and the film hasn't finished

and it hasn't absolutely finished in popular culture,

because we've been talking about it ever since.

I think on the simplest level what it means to me is it's--

it's one of those movies that inspired me to want to make movies.

The Thing is like my When Harry Met Sally.

It's my feel-good movie.

I am entirely absorbed like I've been absorbed by The Thing itself.

- The reason why it stands up over time is the ensemble uh,

led by a great movie star

backed by incredible artistic precision.

You feel like you're one of these men who's trapped together.

So it puts you, you know, without 3D goggles, it--

it places you in that camp. It--

You-- you live that experience with them.

- People have a kind of spiritual experience

as they watch this film that makes them want to watch it again.

I think it's a great storyline.

In the realm of imagination this could happen.

Where you just can't stop diving in, going into it and go,

"Wait, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute."

And what's great about the movie itself in that regard, I think,

that's fun to talk about is that it was made that way.

It was intentional.

Every now and then a film comes along like that

and it-- it does what that film did.

And uh, if you're a part of it, you're just goddamn lucky.

CAST & CREW THE THING

- John is a pioneer in a covered wagon pondering by the fire at home,

"What lies beyond yonder uh, in the horizon."

I mean, this is-- that's what's quintessentially American about him.

He faces fear and horror and outsized antagonism with a,

"Well, let's tackle it one thing at a time."

- The Thing did something for me. The people hating it.

It made me re-examine myself and uh…

I realized I can't lose myself by trying to please people.

I'm gonna hang on to me. And I'm so proud of that movie.

Like, I don't care what they thought.

That's uh-- it's hard to talk about it now, but that's the truth.

That's the absolute truth.