The Thing Expanded (2026) Movie Script

1
- 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 Laud
was to Franois 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?
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.
- 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.
- 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-scne 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
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.
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
And... and hides for a while
under a desk, breathing.
And its breaths go
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...
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.