In your early career, I’m sure that selling yourself as a writer-director-composer package was extremely helpful with getting jobs. But by the mid-1980s you were working with budgets where you could’ve hired someone else to do the scoring. Did you keep doing it because you liked doing it, or…
John Carpenter: Do I like doing it? No! It is too much work, it is too much stress. It is just too much, but it gives me another creative voice, so I can add this other thing. Nobody does music like me, as bad or good, however you want to look at it. It just sounds unique. That doesn’t mean it is great. It could be shit, but it is mine. So that is part of it, it is part of the authorship. But then, after so many years, I had to stop. I just said, “This is not worth it anymore. I have to stop. I’m dying here.”
— John Carpenter in Scored to Death by J. Blake Fichera