Fango continues its chat with THE WARD’s director John Carpenter and actress/producer Amber Heard, begun here. The film debuts on VOD today from ARC Entertainment, prior to a theatrical release on July 8.

FANGORIA: Coming back after a long break, did you have jitters? Like, “What’s this going to be like being back behind the camera?”

JOHN CARPENTER: Like I just said, everyone’s afraid. Everybody, when they make a movie. They don’t know what’s going to happen—it’s the unknown. Sure, I didn’t know; I didn’t know if [Amber Heard] was going to be any good or not. [Laughs] Oh, I knew.

FANG: How quickly did it take for you to find your “groove”?

CARPENTER: About 10 minutes after we started [laughs]. You get into a routine, you get the day going. Once you get the first rehearsal under your belt, you know the actors are gonna [be all right], everything’s gonna be fine. We’re gonna light it, we’re gonna shoot it, I can sit down, have a cup of coffee and think about it, and it’s all gonna be good.

FANG: Having been away for about 10 years, is there a certain perspective change for you in regards to where horror is at now?

CARPENTER: Well we have some grisly scenes. As a matter of fact, this young lady here objected to a couple of my grisly scenes—

AMBER HEARD: I agree that there’s something nice and valuable and wonderful about the suspense of classic horror that doesn’t just crutch on blood and almost pornographic view of fear.

CARPENTER: I would agree. Look, man, it’s just a storytelling device. This is a different story than those. A movie like either SAW or HOSTEL, or film in that genre, is about a different kind of story. Their punch, their power as a movie is, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe what I’m seeing!” That’s what they’re all about. This movie is entirely different. It’s a character study. There’s really not that much room to go in that direction, and it’s not about carrying a bunch of rules along with you: Oh, I have to do this to make the audience to like me. I couldn’t give a shit what the audience thinks. I just wanna make a good movie.

FANG: For Amber, what were some of those scenes that you objected to, or were squeamish about?

HEARD: I think that the movie that you see now is probably free of anything that I [objected to]…

CARPENTER: You thought maybe the eye scene went too far.

HEARD: Oh, that’s right. I forgot about that.

CARPENTER: It was the display of the knife in front of [Lyndsy Fonseca], a certain relish to it, that maybe I was going a little too far in that scene. That’s what she’s talking about.

HEARD: Yes, what he said. That’s true.

FANG: With this one under your belt, do you remain reenergized for more films? How did you come out of this experience?

CARPENTER: Had a good time. Enjoyed it, sure. Get the right story, get the right budget? Do I really have to kill myself? It depends on the story. If you have an ambitious project, with a lot of ambition, you need a lot of money for it. It’s one thing to a do a film low budget—and I love low-budget films, they’re a lot of fun to do—but you have to have realistic expectations at what you’re gonna get back. And right now there’s a big, kind of vogue in Hollywood. It’s the BLAIR WITCH vogue—let’s make a movie for nothing. And then we’ll market it and make a bunch of money. Well, I’m not interested in doing that. That’s a little too rough.

FANG: For John, what’s your opinion on VOD and how do you think it’ll affect this film?

CARPENTER: I don’t know; I know the exhibitors don’t like it at all. That’s all I know about it.

FANG: Does it impact the way you make the film knowing that some people may wind up watching it on an iPhone screen, and so all the little details you put in are not noticeable?

CARPENTER: You have to make a movie for an audience to watch it, no matter how they watch it. You don’t think about that.

FANG: How do you feel about the fact that the big screen experience seems to be diminishing somewhat with these new platforms for people to watch and are you afraid that’s something that’s gonna go away?

CARPENTER: What can I do about it, dude? There’s nothing I can do about it. Everything’s changing, but it’s constantly changes. It doesn’t matter, it’s the quality of the storytelling that counts. If the storytelling is great, it’ll work on your little phone.

FANG: With that being said, are you going to return to scripting something yourself as opposed to looking around town for a script?

CARPENTER: That’s real work. Sitting down and writing. That’s real hard work. Not sure I’m ready for that yet.

FANG: Amber, there’s a lot of excitement about your new ’60s-era fall series THE PLAYBOY CLUB. What can you say about it?

HEARD: I love so much about the series, there’s so much texture and I feel like it’s a very rich platform. It’s full of all these different elements: from music and dance and performance, in a classical sense, to the crime and sex and love and social revolutions, and everything that was going on at the time. Just the music alone of that era is exciting and fun and different than we have today. I’m excited on so many different levels about the project, and I have very high expectations of it and I hope it’s as wonderful as it can be.

FANG: Do you see your involvement in that show as a way of branching off from the string of horror movies you’ve been doing lately?

CARPENTER: Run away from them.

HEARD: [Laughs] No, I’m not running away from my horror films. I love my horror films and they will always be very close to me. I am doing PLAYBOY CLUB because I love it, because I like the pain of the corsets—no, I’m kidding—because I’m having a good time and it’s the right project for me and a very interesting character and that’s why I work on any project.

FANG: Monsters and ghost stories have been around so long, before even the days of campfires. John, what do you think changes when those stories are put up on film and do you think the horror genre has been, not only popular, but malleable.

CARPENTER: It’s a genre that started with cinema, when cinema was created, and it’s been with us in various stages of popularity ever since because everyone who is alive is afraid of the same things. We’re all born afraid. We’re afraid of death, we’re afraid of the unknown, we’re afraid of being hurt, disfigured, we’re afraid of losing a loved one, of losing our identity. Anything I’m afraid of, everyone’s afraid of it. It speaks to us; comedy doesn’t sometimes travel to other cultures. Sometimes. Horror, fear, is in every single culture. That’s why it’s so powerful.

FANG: What do you think of them going back to the source material for THEY LIVE, as opposed to straight up remaking it?

CARPENTER: Well, they’re paying me. See, there are two kinds of remakes of my films—there’s the good kind and there’s the bad kind. They just did a prequel to THE THING. That’s the bad kind because I don’t have any rights in it, so they don’t pay me [laughs]. If they do ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK or THEY LIVE, or any movies that I wrote and have a more primal position, I get a check. This is something that I wanted to do and find all my life, is to make money doing nothing.

Read more from Carpenter in Fango #303.

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