![]() And put these clothes on and went, ‘Not! This isn’t how Snake Plissken would dress!’ And so a lot of who Snake Plissken is, and what he looks like in the film, is because he was invented by Kurt and John, from the eye patch to the tight-fitting shirt to the combat pants and boots, and who he was. We actually had him in army fatigues and he looked kind of like, you know, ‘Join the army now!” And he wasn’t the antihero that we really wanted him to be. And they’re very, very connected… We needed to do a publicity shoot for Snake Plissken before we’d really designed his outfit and everything. I mean, there are two sides of Snake Plissken, and that’s John and Kurt. “In many ways, Kurt Russell is Snake Plissken as much as John Carpenter is Snake Plissken. Producer Debra Hill, who was around the two collaborators for long stretches, would make similar comparisons between not only Carpenter and Russell, but Carpenter and Russell in regards to Snake. Politically and every other way we’re very separate people, but in terms of moviemaking we have the same approach.” We have a very similar brain in terms of movie-making. “We worked together on Elvis for the first time, and we just love working with each other. “Working with Kurt is always a dream,” Carpenter would say. If it were not for the fact that Carpenter fought tooth and nail for his lead, the two may never have forged a decades-long friendship that is still going strong today. The actor, who would go on to star in some of the filmmaker’s most fondly remembered movies in 1982‘s The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China ( 1986), would cite Plissken, who he had a huge hand in refining both aesthetically and in terms of personality, as his most iconic character at a Q&A screening of Escape from New York at 2013’s CapeTown Film Fest, also revealing that he wasn’t first choice to play the role. The part of Snake would go to Kurt Russell, who was something of a silver screen veteran by 1981 with 15 movies to his name, but it was his collaborations with Carpenter that made him a cult favourite in the minds of a generation. He has a singleness of purpose, which is a definition, which I guess goes back to Homer, of a hero. Really not giving a shit about anything… Essentially, depending on the situation, this character is very basic because he has one thing in mind, and that’s survival. A combination of this feller and my own alter ego. I grew up with him in high school, he was my best friend. All of these guys have certain basic things in common, and they’re based on a real guy that I knew. “Snake Plissken in ‘Escape’, Napoleon Wilson in ‘Assault’, Desolation Williams in Ghosts of Mars. “There are several characters that I have done in movies that are based on the same kind of guy,” Carpenter would say. It was during this time that Carpenter began to iron-out the template for his own particular brand of reluctant hero. Snake, written with Clint Eastwood in mind while Carpenter was still a student at USC, would sit in the boot of the budding director’s car for close to a decade along with a script titled Escape From New York. Snake - who would become the inspiration for the first truly cinematic video game in Metal Gear Solid - is an amalgamation of heroic archetypes, a caricature who appeals to our basest fantasies, who approaches his valiance with an outward unwilling that speaks to our cynicism towards authority, questioning the very definition of heroism in a political context. Everything about the character screams iconic, from his pirate eyepatch and cowboy snarl to his sneering distrust of all things authoritarian. Snake Plissken is one of the great American antiheroes. John Carpenter’s scathing dystopian classic was closer to reality than you may have imagined
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