ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
As Escape From New York gets a 4K restoration, Total Film straps on its eyepatch and hunts down John Carpenter to interrogate him on the industrious making of a sci-fi classic…
“I don’t watch my old movies because I see all the horrible things I did and say to myself, ‘What was I thinking? Why did you do that, you idiot?’”
So says John Carpenter when Total Film asks him how he feels Escape From New York – in which roughneck Snake Plissken is sent into a walled-off Manhattan to retrieve the US president after Air Force One is downed – stands up 37 years on from its 1981 release. Carpenter is being modest and honest, as always, but it’s a pertinent question given the movie is now being given a 4K restoration ready for its re-release into multiplexes, where many of today’s sci-fi blockbusters are $250m behemoths that put the fate of the entire planet – nay, galaxy – at stake. Does he not pine for the days when one dude with ’tude could go on a contained mission within a 24-hour time period?
“Sure, I miss those kinds of films,” he offers. “But life goes on. I don’t hate or love movies today. They are what they are. They’re out there appealing to kids who love comic-book heroes, big movies. Star Wars changed the way that movies are made. And Star Wars was an interplanetary adventure and everyone fell in love with it. That’s great. But I didn’t have the money to do that.”
Made for $6m, Escape From New York was the second of a two-picture deal (the first was The Fog) that Carpenter and his writing/producing partner Debra Hill made with Avco-Embassy after the stellar success of seminal slasher Halloween. It was an idea he’d been sitting on for years: a futuristic action movie set in a derelict New York that serves as a giant penitentiary/ playground to roaming packs of thugs.
The suits wanted Charles Bronson or Tommy Lee Jones to play antihero Snake Plissken, the former special forces war hero, now criminal, who’s conscripted to break into the world’s
most dangerous metropolis to locate POTUS. But Carpenter insisted on ex-Disney star Kurt Russell, who’d impressed as The King in Carpenter’s 1979 TV movie Elvis and would go on to work with him again in The Thing, Big Trouble In Little China and belated, beleaguered sequel Escape From LA.
“There are no problems with Kurt,” says Carpenter. “He brings the performance and he brings the character. He’s a consummate professional.” He pauses to ponder. “A lot of the character was Kurt. He found out that Lee Van Cleef was gonna play the Commissioner, so he said, ‘I know what I’m doing,’ and he did Clint Eastwood. And he came up with the eyepatch, the whole costume. He made that character very memorable.”
Armed with a taut, tough script and a colourful supporting cast of grizzled faces – Van Cleef, Harry Dean Stanton, Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes and Donald Pleasence as the prez – the big challenge for Carpenter was conjuring a gone-toshit NYC on such a limited budget. Location manager Barry Bernardi suggested St. Louis, Illinois – its old buildings possessed, as he put it, a “seedy, run-down quality”, and a fire had gutted entire neighbourhoods in 1976. St. Louis’ authorities even agreed to shut off 10 blocks of electricity at a time so that Carpenter might enhance the atmosphere and authenticity.
Matte paintings and time-lapse photography were judiciously employed, and production designer Joe Alves, a veteran of Jaws and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, contributed stunning sets. For the scene depicting the downed Air Force One, for example, Alves build a portion of the wall (33ft high, 200ft in length) that surrounds New York City in futuristic 1997. Meanwhile, a detailed 10ft by 10ft model of NYC was constructed. It even featured a view of Brooklyn in the distance.
Escape From New York was shot from August to November 1980, primarily at night. Parts of LA were used as well as St. Louis, while Atlanta, Sepulveda Dam in Sherman Oaks and, yes, New York, were also put to use. “We were the first film company allowed to shoot at the Statue of Liberty at night,” says Carpenter. “They let us have the whole island to ourselves. It wasn’t easy to get permission. They’d had a bombing three months earlier and were worried.”
Released on 10 July, 1981, Escape From New York took $25m at the domestic box office. Audiences and critics responded to its collision of styles and genres: high-tech police state clashed with broken-down Manhattan; sci-fi mixed with spiky satire and streamlined action. Its reputation has only grown over the subsequent years… which leads us back to the initial question: does it hold up?
“I don’t know,” shrugs Carpenter. “I’m the last person to ask about my movies. I like it. What do you think?” Like a dream.
EscapE From NEw York opENs iN ciNEmas oN 22 NovEmbEr aNd will bE availablE oN EsT, dvd, bd aNd 4k UHd oN 26 NovEmbEr.