<
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240403-dark-star-at-50-how-a-micro-budget-student-film-changed-sci-fi-forever>
'In the early 70s, young filmmakers John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon created a
spaceship tale for a graduation project – little knowing it would influence
Alien and many other works.
Made for $60,000 (£47,581) by film school students, horror maestro John
Carpenter's directorial debut
Dark Star is now regarded as a sci-fi cult
classic. Having just turned 50 years old, it's a world away from much of the
sci-fi that came before it and would come after, neither space odyssey nor
space opera, rather a bleak, downbeat and often absurd portrait of a group of
people cooped together in a malfunctioning interstellar tin can. Arguably its
most famous scene consists of an existential debate between an astronaut and a
sentient bomb.
Dark Star was a collaboration between Carpenter, who directed and scored the
film, and Dan O'Bannon, who in addition to co-writing the script, acted as
editor, production designer, and visual effects supervisor, as well as playing
the volatile, paranoid Sergeant Pinback. They met as budding filmmakers at the
University of Southern California. "While [Carpenter and O'Bannon] couldn't be
more dissimilar in personality, they were both very energetic and focused,"
says Daniel Griffiths, director of
Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark
Star (2010), the definitive documentary about the making of the film.'
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
