Carpenter and Romero

In 2017, I was working with Rob Galluzzo on the documentary film Analog Love. As that project was winding down, Rob began spit-balling about what we might do next. He had recently watched the feature-length documentary film DePalma, produced and directed by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, and suggested that we might make a similar film… about John Carpenter.

I love John Carpenter. I love the DePalma film, which has the simple brilliance of Francois Truffaut’s indispensable interview book Hitchcock. I loved the idea of interviewing Carpenter on Carpenter, going right to the source and avoiding any extraneous bullshit. I knew Carpenter could be a tricky interview, but I’d had a good rapport with him in 2008 (when I interviewed him for my documentary Nightmares in Red, White and Blue) and I was eager to take a deeper dive into his work.

So, it took Rob about three seconds to convince me that this was a good idea.

I spent the next week or so doing research, digging up old Carpenter interviews, re-watching the films, and writing interviews questions. Then I wrote a script for a short promo trailer—using footage from my own 2008 interview with the filmmaker—so we could pitch the project to The Man himself. I enlisted my friend Andrew Monument to edit the trailer, and I was thrilled with how well it turned out.

Unfortunately, the documentary did not move forward. At this point, it seems unlikely that it ever will. But I still love the trailer. Every time I watch it, my enthusiasm for John Carpenter—his classical storytelling, his irreverent humor, his indelible scores, his love of cinema—is renewed.

 

Between 2017 and 2021, I was also involved in developing two separate documentary projects about director George A. Romero. I had a brief correspondence with Romero in the early 2000s, and I came to really love him as a storyteller and a person, so the opportunity to pay tribute to him meant a lot to me. I did a ton of researching and planning and geeking out.

Again, neither project came to fruition… but I couldn't stop thinking about George Romero. In 2021, I took the initiative to create a trailer for my own ideal version of a Romero documentary, focusing on the filmmaker’s unique (and prophetic) worldview. Once again, Andrew Monument edited the trailer, using footage from an interview I conducted with Romero in 2008.

Of course, I knew I couldn't make my “ideal version of a Romero doc”—because, George was gone—so I conceived the trailer as a loving tribute to the father of the modern horror film, and an acknowledgment of his prescience leading up to the era of Trump, Covid, and the Black Lives Matter movement. The trailer expresses my undying affection for the filmmaker and his dark vision of America.

Personally, I can’t help wondering what George would make of our world in 2025. The filmmaker is gone but his films live on, and they’re part of us. We’re them and they’re us.