Legendary director John Carpenter has revealed the ridiculous studio notes he received while developing the 1988 sci-fi classic, They Live. In a new interview with Variety, Carpenter was asked whether the studio was on board with the anti-consumerism, anti-capitalist message inherent in the movie, to which the filmmaker revealed that the studio did, in fact, request that the villainous aliens be changed from capitalists into “cannibals from outer space.”
Of course, Carpenter was not willing to change the central theme of They Live. Sticking to his vision for the movie, Carpenter simply ignored the notes and carried on, ultimately crafting one of the best movies about capitalism and consumerism ever made. Something which would have certainly been ruined had the aliens been standard, B-movie space cannibals.
“Yeah, I got some notes. (Laughs) Yeah, which I ignored completely, but they didn’t want the aliens to be capitalists. They wanted to gut the whole movie. ‘Why don’t you make them cannibals from outer space?’ It was just ridiculous. But anyway, we did it and I got the movie I wanted to make.”
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Written and directed by John Carpenter and based on the 1963 short story Eight O’Clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson, They Live stars the late, great “Rowdy” Roddy Piper as an unnamed drifter who stumbles upon a special pair of sunglasses. These glasses reveal to him that society’s ruling class are aliens concealing their appearance and manipulating people to consume, breed, and conform to the status quo via subliminal messaging, which they pump out through mass media.
Co-starring Keith David, Meg Foster, Raymond St. Jacques, George Buck Flower, Peter Jason, Sy Richardson, and Susan Blanchard, They Live was met negatively by critics at the time but has since become a cult classic and is considered one of Carpenter’s best.
RELATED: They Live: How the John Carpenter Movie Deconstructs Ideology
They Live Contains One of the Best Fight Scenes of All Time
Universal Pictures
Slotted in between the anti-capitalist message, alien overlords, and Roddy Piper’s brooding, They Live contains one of the best fight scenes ever committed to screen. In the sequence, Piper trades punches with Keith David’s character, Frank, in a burly brawl that goes on for six beautiful minutes. Carpenter has now commented on the fight, which remains one of the movie’s highlights.
Speaking of consumerism, the works of John Carpenter are now hot Hollywood property. The Halloween franchise was recently brought to a (no doubt temporary) end with the critically divisive Halloween Ends, which, while the lowest-grossing of the modern trilogy, still grossed $105 million against a $33 million production budget.
“That fight was pretty cool. The stunt coordinator Jeff Imada, Roddy Piper and Keith David worked the fight out in the backyard of the office. Then we shot it over about three days, and I’m really proud of it.”
There are now plans to continue several other Carpenter franchises, including an Escape from New York sequel and a project involving the shape-shifting beast, The Thing. While there is currently no word on a sequel to They Live, it is a project that Carpenter has hinted at in the past.
