George Romero
- Story by J. Bennett
Decibel walks slowly, inexorably with the zombie master
It’s been 40 years since S. William Hinzman teetered precariously through that Pennsylvania cemetery to scare the living piss out of Barbra (Judith O’Dea) and Johnny (Russell Streiner) in Night of the Living Dead, but director George A. Romero remembers it like it was yesterday. When Romero’s original zombie came for Barbra—just like Johnny said he would—the cultural landscape would never be the same. In that moment, America’s familial suburban security was permanently breached—the handsome brother splayed unconscious on the bone-yard grass, a future victim of a mysterious bloodlust; the virginal sister running for her life (straight into the arms of—gasp!—a black man) as an undead army of brainless flesh-eaters ambled slowly toward revolution. For all intents and purposes, it was Romero’s coming out party, and the horror genre has been coughing up not-so-fresh legions of reanimated corpses ever since.
Fast forward to 2008: On the patio of the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, the 68-year-old Romero is smoking furiously, sucking down butt after butt as he considers his legacy. With five Dead films in the can—the 1968 original, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, 1985’s Day of the Dead, 2005’s Land of the Dead, and the recently released Diary of the Dead—his influence has spread beyond the relentless arterial spray of splatter flicks to infect books (Max Brooks, Stephen King), music (see sidebar pg. 58) and video games (Resident Evil, Dead Rising) in a never-ending cycle of unholy resurrection. Decibel was shocked to learn that he’s six-foot-five.
There’s actually a Wikipedia entry for “Zombies in popular culture,” and a lot of it comes from your films. When you see all the books and the video games and the music, do you just think it’s kinda cute, or do you get a sense that you’ve really had a profound influence in other cultural arenas that you never set out to have? Do you even take it seriously?
Well, it’s hard to take really seriously. When Simon [Pegg] and Edgar [Wright] made Shaun of the Dead, I loved it. If it’s done with a little soul and a little heart, hey, man—cool. I don’t mind if it’s a knockoff, a satire; I don’t care. Do it. My shit is my shit. I’ve done these five movies, and for some reason, they’re popular. That’s enough for me. Everyone asks Steve King, “How do you feel about Hollywood ruining your books?” And Steve says, “They’re not ruined—here they are.” And I feel that way, too, sort of. I’m doing my own thing. But I see so little… I mean, nobody’s using it as metaphor. There’s nothing behind a lot of this shit. I don’t get it. You have this tool, this ability to say something, so say something.
Have you read Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide or World War Z?
Oh, yeah—I’ve read ’em both. I know Max—he’s a really sweet guy. And of course Steve [King] wrote Cell. Everybody’s saying, “Why are zombies so hot right now?” But c’mon, man—the Dawn of the Dead remake made a lot of money. Shaun of the Dead was quite popular. The 28 Days movies made some money—but they’re not zombie movies, in my mind. To my mind, it’s video games that have done it. Resident Evil and Dead Rising. Kids know about zombies all of a sudden. I call ’em neighborhood zombies. I mean, if I did anything, I created this creature in Nikes and a t-shirt, coming over to visit, but he’s dead.
You’ve said that you don’t consider the 28 Days movies to be real zombie movies, and you don’t like how “the infected” move so fast. Do you consider it a perversion of your style, or do you like slow zombies because you want your heroes and potential victims to have an out?
No, no—it’s not even that, man. I go back to Christopher Lee in The Mummy—or Michael Myers from the original Halloween, you know? That cat never moved quick and there’s something scary about that. It’s inexorable and it just keeps coming at you. You drill it full of holes, and it’s still coming. But now all of a sudden you’ve got 400 zombies running around the corner as if the first thing they did when they came back to life was go join a gym. It doesn’t even make logical sense—if there’s any logical sense to any of this. And I couldn’t help but make fun of it in the new film. Dead men can’t run, you know? They can’t shoot hoops, and they can’t run.
After the original Dead trilogy, it seemed like maybe you weren’t into the idea of making zombie movies for a while. And then you came back with Land of the Dead and then Diary. Have you embraced this as your calling, or are you just resigned to it?
Both. When I made the first film, they weren’t zombies in my mind. I had read the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend [which was adapted for the screen in 1964’s The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price, 1971’s The Omega Man starring Chuck Heston and last year’s I Am Legend, starring Will Smith] and I thought, “This is about revolution.” And of course, I was primed by the ’60s, thinking we had successfully changed the world. And then all of a sudden we’ve got police action and Vietnam and rioting in the streets and all that shit. So maybe we hadn’t changed a thing. Maybe things were worse; maybe it was the same-old, same-old. So I ripped it off. I did I Am Legend, but I started on the first night. I couldn’t use vampires because Richard did. [Laughs] And I thought, what would be the most revolutionary, earth-shattering thing? If God were to change a major rule, what would it be? People that die are not staying dead—that was it. But I called them flesh-eaters, ghouls. They weren’t zombies. I never thought of them as zombies. And we didn’t think it was that radical of a film. We were basically trying to make a horror movie that would be a bit hard-hitting and maybe push the envelope a little on the gore. Back then, there was no ratings board, so it was like, “Why cut away? Just show it.” And really, it was only the last 10 minutes of the film where I was deliberately trying to imitate newsreels. I was shooting all handheld stuff as this fuckin’ posse comes along and pops the guy [Ben, played by Duane Jones]. When I wrote that scene, the guy was white. In my mind, he was white. All of a sudden, Duane Jones, who was the best actor from among our friends, agrees to play the role. And us, you know, us being hip ’60s guys, were like, “Tell you what—we’re not gonna change the script just because you’re black.” Wrong. All the way through the production, Duane was much more in tune with how much more powerful it was just because it was him in the lead role.
Did you get a sense of that as you were shooting?
A slight sense, yes, but we were really in denial. So we finished the movie, and this is the serendipitous part: Cities the size of Pittsburgh had film labs back then because the news was on film, so we were able to get an answer print. So Russ Streiner—one of the producers [and actors]—and I threw it in the trunk of the car and drove it to New York. As we’re driving to New York with the first answer print in the trunk, we hear that Martin Luther King had been shot. Russ and I looked at each other and said, “This could be good for us.”
Even after the original’s success, you didn’t make another Dead movie for 10 years.
You know, man, I resisted making the second Dead movie for a long time because The Night of the Living Dead was suddenly being written about and the Museum of Modern Art invited it into the collection and all this shit. When that happened, I thought I couldn’t just make another zombie movie. I had to make it pertinent. Again, serendipitously, I socially knew these people who were developing this shopping mall—the first indoor temple to consumerism in Western Pennsylvania. So I toured the place before it was even open, and all these trucks were bringing in everything that anybody could ever want…
…and not need.
And not need. [Laughs] So the bell went off. Instead of a farm house, it’s this place. Halfway through the shooting of that film it occurred to me that I shouldn’t be afraid of doing it—I should embrace it. And that’s when I kind of developed this shtick. I was doing all these other things in between, but I’ve got this kind of, I don’t know, franchise? The first four films were 10 or more years apart, and the new one is the only one that came quickly on the heels of another. But at the end of Land of the Dead, I thought it was getting too big. It was like Thunderdome or something. I mean, where could I go? At the same time, I had this idea about the blogosphere, this new media beast, so I decided to get small again. I was ready to just try and raise a couple hundred Gs from some doctors and dentists and go shoot it. There’s a film school in Florida where I’ve taught a couple of classes, and I was ready to go there and legitimately shoot it with students under the radar.
But the idea came from this dangerous thing out there, man. I mean, any lunatic can throw up a blog. If Hitler was around, he’d have a blog. He doesn’t even have to risk getting tomatoes thrown at him in the town square. If he sounds halfway reasonable, he’s got a million followers just like that. That strikes me as dangerous. Plus, all the world’s a camera—everyone wants to be a part of it. In the middle of Super Tuesday last week, a tornado hit Arkansas, and it’s like, “OK, we interrupt our political coverage ’cause there’s a fuckin’ tornado. Do you have any footage? If so, send it in!” And the shooting at Virginia Tech? It was captured by students with camera phones. It’s stunning. I mean, we’re in this now.
You came up with some inventive kills in the new movie. Is that always on the checklist when you’re writing these things?
Oh, completely, man—I’m already thinking of new ones. I’ll be standing in the shower thinking, “What can I do next?” That’s always the thing. Otherwise, there ain’t no movie.
What was the inspiration for the Amish guy who stabs himself through the face with a scythe to get the zombie who’s attacking him from behind?
I was standing in the shower thinking, “That’d be cool!” [Laughs] And then I thought, “Who would have a scythe? OK, a farmer.” And I lived in Pennsylvania so long that I immediately thought an Amish one would be great. And then I thought, “What if he’s a deaf-mute?” [Laughs] I mean, how can you explain it? It just comes to you. I’ve used that kind of silly shit forever—I mean, I put a pie fight in Dawn of the Dead—I thought that the new film was just too somber. It took me a long time to resign myself to it. So I took a vacation, and after not looking at it for like three weeks, I came back and looked at it and I actually laughed. It was just one of those things, you know—“The kid’s in the picture!”
What’s next for the Dead series?
Beats the fuck out of me. [Laughs] It does, man—I don’t know.
C’mon—you take a shower every day, right?
Yeah, but I just think about how to kill ’em in there. [Laughs] But there’s a hell of a lot of talk about a sequel because this movie was made for so little that it’s already made money before it even opened. So of course everybody is saying, “Let’s do it again.” But it could all blow away, you know? If the movie comes out and under-performs, it’s all gone. But thank god they’re opening it small. With Land of the Dead, they opened it right between Batman Begins and War of the Worlds. I mean, give me a fuckin’ break. But I like this new one better than Land. Then again, I loved Bruiser, but nobody got it.
How have you avoided the temptation of going the Sam Raimi route—from low-budget horror to mega-dollar blockbusters?
Nobody’s asked me, man. I might’ve succumbed, but nobody asked, and I never really fished for it. When [producer] Peter [Grunwald] and I first became partners, we did seven years in Hollywood. We had a housekeeping deal at New Line, and we never made a movie. We did it at Universal, Fox, all these places—all in development. We made more money than we ever made in our lives and no movies were made because people don’t really trust me. I don’t have that rep, and you don’t get that rep unless you make something that makes a hundred million bucks. But like I said, I’m not fishing for it. In a way, I have this protection against it because I have this weird niche. I can get a meeting anywhere in town; I can pitch anyone I wanna pitch, but I’m not “at risk” that way. And I don’t wanna be. I’d rather be at the two-dollar betting window and stay there instead of shooting for all the marbles. And I’ve been able to make a living that way. There aren’t that many filmmakers who have been working for 40 years who have been able to keep doing it at this level. I mean, forget the lobster—give me a cheeseburger. That’s what it’s all about.
