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Features
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A Chip off the Carpenter Block
At age 24, the daughter of horror film master John Carpenter is thrilled to have finally joined the family business with her box office conquering work in The Exorcism of Emily Rose.
Monday, September 12, 2005
By Brent Simon
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Another successful Julliard grad
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[Editor's Note - 01/22/09: Somehow, the erroneous information in this article's headline, subheadline and text linking Dexter co-star Jennifer Carpenter to horror filmmaker John has only just now been pointed out to us. Thanks to Australia's BigFooty.com for bringing this to our attention and our apologies, three and a half years late, for perpetuating a factual error about JC's lineage. FilmStew regrets the error.]
Jennifer Carpenter, the star of this fall’s first unconditional box office smash, is apologizing for flipping me off. “You know what I realized? That I give the finger a lot when I’m having seizures. My hands tense up and my middle fingers pop out.”
Don’t call the paramedics, though. Fortunately, the young co-star of The Exorcism of Emily Rose isn’t having a real convulsion, but rather just reliving one of her many striking physical contortions from the new psychological horror film from Screen Gems and co-writer-director Scott Derrickson (Hellraiser: Inferno). And why not? It is a part any up-and-coming actress would love to have — short on lines but long on impression, casting a shadow as the titular, overcome young girl — and one for which Carpenter flew halfway around the world just to audition.
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Proud papa John Carpenter
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Based on true events transposed from Germany to the American Midwest, the film chronicles a criminal negligence trial against the priest, Father Richard Moore (Tom Wilkinson), who performed the controversial, and failed, rite of exorcism on college freshman Emily Rose. Laura Linney stars as Erin Bruner, Father Moore’s defense counsel, and Campbell Scott opposes her as Ethan Thomas, the shrewd prosecuting district attorney in the case. While definitely a movie of creeping psychological unease, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is first and foremost a courtroom drama.
And that’s fine with the daughter of famed horror filmmaker John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing), who’s eager to downplay her showbiz roots and strike out on her own. “Everyone keeps asking me if I feel, or am scared that I’ll be typecast in horror films and I just don’t even think about it,” she says obliquely during an interview last week with FilmStew. “Because I know that I have more than one trick up my sleeve. I’m equally as interested in comedy, and I feel like I can do it all and have time to do it all.”
Indeed, there’s evidence to support her claims. Carpenter, after all, made her screen debut opposite the Wayans brothers in last summer’s White Chicks, and has a foray into dark comedy lined up nex. “White Chicks was a blessing, because I learned the vocabulary of film,” she explains. “I learned that if you don’t know where the camera’s set up and where the lights are and how that affects you then you’re not really using everything at its full potential.”
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Director Scott Derrickson
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It was her strong reaction to a 12-page collection of sides for The Exorcism of Emily Rose, though, that primed Carpenter for a featured jump into the genre deep end. “I feel like so often you’re sent scripts where you’re the bubble-gum, all-American girl, saying, ‘I love you too, Trevor,’” intones Carpenter with perfect deadpan timing. “And this was so exciting. [Director] Scott [Derrickson] wrote a letter to everyone auditioning and said, ‘This is what I want in the first scene, this is what I want in the second scene, and the third and fourth. And the person who can do that will get the part.’”
“It was very specific, and I thought, ‘Wow, you’re inviting someone to be a player.’ And very rarely are you asked to be a player.”
When Carpenter also found out that Linney -with whom the young actress had auspiciously appeared on Broadway in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, directed by Richard Eyre - had expressed interest of her own in the project, and additionally forwarded Carpenter’s name to producers as a possibility for the part of Emily Rose, she turned around and flew back to Los Angeles from Italy on her own dime. Carpenter spent a night in a Texas airport when there wasn’t a timely connecting flight, and made the audition the next morning with 30 minutes to spare.
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Co-star Tom Wilkinson
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She’s glad she did, too. For her breakout role as Emily - a part not leavened with CGI gimmickry - Carpenter tapped into an array of physical and vocal quirks. “I went to Julliard, where you spend like 13 hours a day on voice and speech,” she says, “and now I realize why. But I was really specific with every sound, which I think helped protect me. They say in the movie that Emily is possessed by six demons, so maybe (for) one sound I think of sticking needles in my heart, and another one might be a chainsaw on my ribs.”
While the foreground on-screen debate rages over Emily’s symptoms (the film’s negligence trial is constructed around the notion that she’s epileptic and/or paranoid schizophrenic, conditions treatable by psycho-tropic drugs), Carpenter says she realizes some people will have strong opinions about the movie’s veracity and whether or not Emily is actually possessed. “I went to Catholic school growing up in Kentucky,” says Carpenter, “but I feel like I came to the movie from a very neutral place. I didn’t have a lot of my own opinions to place on it or champion.”
“So I think how people respond to it belongs to them,” she continues. “I think there was probably some concern [during production] about how people and certain groups would react to it, but if your faith can be rocked by a movie then there’s something else you’re not looking at, because this is just trying to give you questions, not answers.”
While more film roles and her abiding love of theater will remain points of career focus, upcoming for Carpenter might just be a stint on the small screen. She recently finished work on a pilot for Showtime called Dexter, and has high hopes for its future. “It’s really good, I’m excited,” she says. “It’s a good character.”
“I guess you’d call it a dark comedy, because I think it’s really funny,” she adds. “I play a cop in Miami who’s trying to get on homicide. And my brother, Michael Hall (Six Feet Under) studies blood splatter, and is feeding me clues and information that I need to get in, and there’s sort of a dark secret as to why he knows so much about that.”
For now though, Carpenter is enjoying the newfound bloom that her creepily convincing performance is bringing… but not too much. “I think you feel the highs out here and the lows a lot more too,” says Carpenter, who speaks in an at times digressive but always self-analytical style that evinces her classical training. “I think in L.A. your friends become your family, and I’ve got a really good family here.”
| “When I first got to L.A., I was stretching $20 a week, waiting tables, and I did that for about six months,” she continues. “And I [didn’t] mind it at all, I was really happy for that experience, but it made me really get aggressive about what I want. I’ve been doing this since I was eight, and never considered doing anything else, so I really had to kick it into gear.”
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Mission accomplished. For Carpenter, The Exorcism of Emily Rose represents a convincing upshift.
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