John Carpenter's 1981 classic "Escape From New York" gets a one-week revival starting tonight at the IFC Center on Sixth Avenue... all your friends are back... Snake Plissken, Cabbie, The Duke, Hauk, Brain — all characters inside a derelict Manhattan that's serves as an unsupervised maximum-security prison. (It was actually filmed in St. Louis.)
The Wall Street Journal published a Q-and-A (subscription required) with Carpenter on Monday...
An excerpt:
Did the film reflect any of your real feelings about New York?
I'm a New Yorker at origin but I grew up in the South. New York was a wonderland for me when I was very young in the middle '50s and visited it for the first time because it had so many movie theaters. I just wanted to go to the movies there because I was in love with the movies at the time and still am. It's huge, it's immense, it's just unlike any other place and it has a vibe to it, especially when you don't live there. A strange vibe.
And now?
Well, the thing about "Escape From New York" is that none of it came true. They cleaned up New York. It's Disneyland now. It has nothing to do with a prison, there's almost no more drugs or X-rated movies in Times Square. It's just completely changed. I miss the old days, I really do. I kind of miss the violence and the scum.
