Nick Castle — Director of ‘The Last Starfighter’ — Talks Being a Horror Icon and a Writer/Director
Nick Castle talks about his career from beginning to end, taking a chance with new technology on ‘The Last Starfighter,’ and shares advice for screenwriters.
Nick Castle has been working in Hollywood across five decades. Most would know him most recognizably as the man behind the mask of Michael Myers in the original 1978 Halloween from the legendary John Carpenter. Despite this landmark performance in the world of horror, and endless questions at conventions and appearances about Michael Myers, he thinks of himself first and foremost as a writer and director. He was a writer on John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, he directed The Last Starfighter, wrote and directed The Boy Who Could Fly. He was even the creative mind who got Hook off the ground.
At the recent Indiana Comic Con, I had a chance to share a stage with Nick Castle and talk to him about his career from beginning to end, and he had quite a lot to say.
In fact, he had no intention of acting at all when he showed up on the set of Halloween in the first place. “They were shooting it near my house in Hollywood, and I just decided to go over there and see if I could just snoop around and learn, you know, by being around the set. You know, to dispel any fears I might have for when I was going to eventually direct. When I told John [Carpenter] that, he said, ‘Hang around then and be this guy and that way you're here and I have someone that I know will do what I tell them to do.’”
As he told it, those early experiences on film sets really taught him what he needed to know in order to work on his own movies. He emphasized through the spotlight panel at the convention that working on the movies of others was a great education for learning what to do on your own films, whether as a writer or a director. He said his time on Halloween and Escape from New York was the only thing that prepared him for the complicated work of The Last Starfighter. “John Carpenter kindly asked me to help him on the second draft of the screenplay [for Escape from New York]. He had done the first screenplay directly out of college. He wrote that and put it in the drawer and then years later, after he's done Halloween, someone's asking him what's the next thing and he pulled it out and told them what the idea was. They gave him the OK, and he talked to me and said, ‘Nick, I need a tremendous amount of help with this. This is a good idea.’ I came in and helped shape it and give it a little bit more humor. John was gracious enough to let me be on the set the whole time.”
Like Escape from New York, he said The Last Starfighter, he had to really whip the screenplay into shape. The idea was there, but the script just wasn’t. “We had 8 or 9 months to massage the script to make it good before we got the go ahead on doing it, because the production company wanted to do the effects digitally. And this had never been done before in terms of trying to make something look photoreal. Tron had been out and they did that within that context of a video game, but this wanted to be real. So it was revolutionary in that sense. That was kind of exciting. We went into the production of that without knowing if it could work, which is one of the stupidest and scariest things you'd ever want to try. You're banking all your money on a system that may not work, and you're still going to do it. That's what happened.”
The Last Starfighter went on to become a box office success, and Castle said that he’s still working on a legacy sequel with the original writer set forty years after the original.
We also talked about his work developing Hook, which went on to become a Steven Spielberg film. “I developed that screenplay and the producer went to the studio with it and we came up with a great first draft. We sent it to the people that eventually were in the movie, Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams. And we're basically waiting for a green light. Then the new studio head—this is where things get very political—their new studio head just saw me, not as the director. He just thought this was too big a movie to lay at the incompetent hands of Mr. Nick Castle. So that's when it all changed. Steven came on board after a while. He'd always wanted to do a Peter Pan movie. Everyone always knew that. And I think when he heard about this, he got very excited about it. What's ironic, though, is it's Steven's least favorite movie, which I'm pissed at because I always saw that it was going to be. A lot of people loved that movie anyhow and you see a lot of charm in it. But when I saw it, I was disappointed because it wasn't what I had seen. But I went on and did Dennis the Menace instead right after that, and I had a great old time in Chicago with Walter Matthau, so I can't complain too much.”
When asked about his advice for screenwriters, Castle distilled it down to the idea that who you know matters. “Well, it's not the nuts and bolts of being a screenwriter, including the inspiration that is the problem. It’s that you're going into a medium that's very expensive—unless you're doing shorts, which is a real possibility and an area that I would look into to start your career, but the reason that I got to be a writer, what laid the groundwork for that, is that I went to film school and I met John Carpenter. He got out of the gate quick. He brought me on for Escape From New York and suddenly I had a career. Because the screenplay itself is not a book where you can go to a publisher. It's basically the pattern for what you're going to eventually do. I would hook up with filmmakers. If you know filmmakers that are going through their early lives as filmmakers, or are coming out of school, get to know them.
RELATED: Making A Short Film
In terms of how to become a good screenwriter, there's actually some great books on that in terms of plotting and character arcs and all the kind of things you do. And then the most important thing as a screenwriter is to watch movies and to love movies and to know the history of movies. That passion comes out after you just see, enjoy, and find what really moves you. When we went to film school, that was one of the best things that John and I and all the rest of the guys and women found out about is that they would do retrospectives of great directors, comedy directors Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder and people from the 30s and 40s who created the templates for all of us and they still resonate.”
Bryan Young is a filmmaker, writer, and teacher. His latest short film, The Lost Boys, is currently on the festival circuit and has won numerous awards. You can learn more about him at his website.
Bryan Young is an award-winning filmmaker, journalist, and author. He's written and produced documentary and narrative feature films and has published multiple novels and a non-fiction book. He's written for Huffington Post, Syfy, /Film, and others. He's also done work in the Star Wars and Robotech universes. You can reach him on Twitter @Swankmotron or by visiting his website: swankmotron.com.
