The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

I guess that The Thing is one of many Carpenter movies I could have chosen. It's not just Carpenter, but the fact that he is in a lineage that comes through watching Red River and stuff like that. So, in the same way that Scorsese has digested neo-realism and the new wave and then Hollywood and turned it into a new cinema, Carpenter’s almost like Melville liquidised into Hawks and Hitchcock. And the thing for me is it’s just a perfectly constructed sci-fi movie, and it’s down to the Rob Bottin special effects, the likes of which will probably never be seen again because he spent so much time doing them. It just wouldn't be feasible to do. All of the skills that he used have been kind of lost to the wind because of CGI. Also the pace of it and the score. I love that film.