Forget Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio or even Scorsese and Robert De Niro, for fans of 1980s genre cinema, there’s never been a better partnership between a director and an actor than the bond between John Carpenter and Kurt Russell.
The duo made four theatrical films and one TV movie together between 1979 and 1996, and while their final collaboration on Escape from L.A. may have been a major disappointment, prior to that, everything that Carpenter and Russell touched had turned to gold. Their first team-up in Elvis was nominated for a Golden Globe and three Emmys, and fifteen years later Russell would reprise his role to voice the King in Forrest Gump.
Meanwhile, Escape from New York, The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China are bona fide cult classics that have only grown in popularity since first being released, and all of them have unsurprisingly been heavily touted for remakes. Of course, The Thing got an update a decade ago and another one is already in the works, but so far, the other two have remained firmly stuck in development hell, which is exactly where they should stay.
Carpenter has recently been teasing a return to directing having not stepped behind the camera on a feature film since 2010’s The Ward, and when asked in a new interview who he’d want to collaborate with, his old running buddy’s name unsurprisingly came up.
“There’s a whole lot that I haven’t worked with. Jennifer Lawrence, she’s a brilliant actress. Amy Adams, brilliant actress. I would love to work with them, but chances of that are kind of slim. You just don’t know what’s going to happen. I’d also really like to work with Kurt Russell again. That would be fun. We had such a good time working together.”
Fans would no doubt love to see John Carpenter and Kurt Russell reunite for one last big hurrah, but the horror icon seems happy enough with how things are going at the moment, and it would take a very exciting pitch to convince him to end his self-imposed exile from the studio lot.
