"Where Movie Critics Get A Taste Of Their Own Medicine"
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AN INTERVIEW WITH:
George Romero
by Peter Sobczynski

May 7, 2004

In 1968, horror buffs who went to their neighborhood theater to see a new low-budget, no-name film called "Night of the Living Dead" were confronted with something that they always hoped for but so rarely experienced-a genuinely frightening movie that not only scared and sickened them but upended their expectations of what such a film could say, do or show. On the surface, it may have looked like silly trash (the dead inexplicably begin to rise from their graves with an uncontrollable taste for human flesh) but what startled viewers was the transgressive way in which the story was told; it featured a black man as the hero (without ever commenting on it), it was shot in a grainy black-and-white style reminiscent of the news reports regularly filtering home from Vietnam and, instead of merely alluding to the gross stuff, it actually showed the zombies eating people (courtesy of an indulgent local butcher) for all to see behind covered eyes. The most intriguing thing that writer-director George Romero, a commercial director from Pittsburgh making his feature debut, did was use his genre story as a way to explore the social concerns of the time; in his film, the scariest thing was not the monsters but the ease with which all the institutions that people normally held faith in (family, friends, government) could turn on you in a heartbeat.

The film made Romero a cult icon and has allowed him to continue making films to this day that fuse horror archetypes with stinging social commentary. Although the increasingly political nature of his stories (as well as his refusal to shy away from gore and downbeat endings) has hampered his career in some ways, most notably in getting financing, the films that he has been able to produce are fascinating works that hold up as well as any that the genre has ever produced. His work still attracts a sizable cult and his proven a huge influence on contemporary filmmakers-witness such recent, Romero-inspired films as "28 Days Later" and the remake of his own "Living Dead" sequel "Dawn of the Dead".

From May 14-16, the Movieside Film Festival, a short collection of films put together by local filmmaker Rusty Nails (whose homegrown epic "ACNE" will also screen), will be hosting a mini-retrospective of some of Romero’s work as well as featuring the man himself introducing the films and participating in an on-stage Q&A. Besides the inevitable midnight screening of "Night of the Living Dead", the festival will also show; "The Crazies" (1973), a thrilling science-gone-amok epic about a town plagued (pun intended) by a government-created disease that turns them into violent maniacs; "Creepshow" (1982), his hilarious collaboration with Stephen King that paid tribute to the old EC horror comics of the 1950’s and "Day of the Dead" (1985), the final (to date) installment in his "Living Dead" saga-a film which was largely ignored on its original release but which has now begun to develop a sizable cult following of its own.

Calling from his home base of Pittsburgh (and battling a cold), Romero recently talked about the films that will be showing at the festival, his impact on contemporary culture and his feelings on the "Dawn of the Dead" remake.

(George Romero will be appearing as one of the guest of honor at the Movieside Film Festival, held at Chicago’s historic Biograph Theater (2433 N. Lincoln). On May 15th, he will introduce "Night of the Living Dead" following a discussion of the impact of the film that will include the author of this piece. On the 16th, the fest will feature "Day of the Dead’, "The Crazies" and "Creepshow" as well as an on-stage Q&A with Romero. For further information on tickets, screening times and other elements of the festival, please go to www.movieside.com)

George Romero
Director of "Night of the Living" "Dead," "Dawn
of the Dead," "The Crazies," "Martin & Creepshow"

What got you interested in filmmaking in the first place?

I grew up loving film but I came to college to study painting and design to become a commercial artist because I was always interested in the arts but I never thought you could have a career in the movies. I went to Carnegie-Mellon and they had a wonderful theater department and after three years of painting and design, I transferred over and met people and became convinced that I might somehow have a career in theater. At the time, I was more interested in in movies just as a hobby-there was no such thing in those days as a school where you could go and get your hands on equipment. In those days, the news was on film and so there were labs that could develop them. I quit school and went down to hang out at one of those labs to learn how to use the stuff-literally, my first job was bicycling 16mm newsreels to the TV stations in town. I learend how to glue them together and synchronize sound to images.

Later, a bunch of us started a commercial production company to do TV commercials and industrial films in town. We were pretty successful-we were the first guys doing it-and we wound up accumulating equipment. We were able to go out and make a movie and that turned out to be "Night of the Living Dead". I was always impassioned-as a kid I just loved films. I was influenced by several filmmakers that I still just think of as The Guys-Orson Welles, Michael Powell-and I am old enough to have seen all the old Universal horror movies on the big screen-I loved the genre and "Night of the Living Dead" was sort of a combination of all those factors.

"Night of the Living Dead" has been studied, reviewed and analyzed so often since it debuted in 1968 that it is all but impossible to think of anything new to say about it. Was there ever a particular moment when you realized that your film had gone from being just another horror film to a genuine cultural phenomenon?

No, simply put. Initially, the film went out in neighborhood theaters and drive-ins around the country and it actually returned some money-the only money that it ever returned. We made it for about $114,000 and it returned about $500,000. We all thought that filmmaking was an easy business and so we went out and started to make another film. Somewhere after the release in the neighborhood theaters, it stopped earning money and it seemed to go away. Later, it was rediscovered by some critics here and in France and it came back from the dead. However, we were all off making another film and we never fully appreciated that it was going down in the lore.

Then it got invited into the Museum of Modern Art, but at that time, we were fighting with the distributor to try to collect the monies that were owed us that we never got. At the same time, there was a copyright issue with the film that was also a hassle. I never sat down and thought that it was a completely wonderful experience all across the board; it was always fraught with problems and I am still facing legal battles over the use of the title. It has not been a smooth ride-however, the film got me a career. I am still here and able to work because of that film.

The central metaphor of "Night of the Living Dead"-that of a new generation rising up and attacking the previous one-was a powerful one for a horror film, especially one made at the height of the Vietnam conflict when similar battles could be seen with regularity on the evening news. When you were orignially conceiving the film, were the metaphorical aspects there from the beginning or did they simply grow out of the material as you went along?

Some of it was conscious because we did talk about it. We were hippies, man! We were all living in that farmhouse and we talked about a lot of it. It is a concern of mine that you try to say something. I’m not the kind of guy who writes about people who jump out of the shadows with knives and hockey masks just for the hell of it; I am always looking for some underlying theme. To some extent, we were trying to build on those underlying themes but a lot of the stuff was accidental. The fact that we cast an African-American as the lead-he just happened to be the best actor from among our friends. I had worked with news guys and I was trying to make it look like the news-there was all that rioting going on at the time and I think that the sight of Ben being shot and the posse coming around looked like footage off of the news.

Principally, we were just out to make a horror film and hopefully we would do it well enough. I did try to build an underbelly into it and when I did the other two movies, it became more obvious-they were more obviously social satires.

There was a documentary that you particpated in entitled "American Nightmare" that focused on American horror films of the 1970’s and whose central thesis was that the films under discussion, including yours, were so powerful because of the chaotic social climate of the period. Do you find that it is easier to make a horror film in times of social strife?

Easier to finance or easier to make?

Both.

I guess I feel a little more motivated when I am angry and I look for some way to express what I am angry about in a fantasy tale. It isn’t easier in terms of money-the marketplace ignores that. People love horror movies and then they get tired of them when ten of them come out in a given year. Hollywood likes to say, "Horror’s coming back-let’s make a bunch of horror films" never bothering to examine what people liked about them-they just try to imitate the one that was successful immediately before.

When you completed "Night of the Living Dead" and went about trying to sell it to various studios, one said that they might consider releasing it if you would go back and give it a more upbeat ending. You didn’t, but your subsequent "Dead" films have all had reasonably optimistic endings-even the remake of "Night" that you wrote and produced. Where those sunsequent endings a conscious effort to avoid the bleakness of the original and had you ever contemplated changing that dark finale at any point?

I never thought of doing that to the original-I was pretty satisfied with the way that was-but the second film, as I’ve said, I didn’t think of in the same dark way. I did several things just because it was a sequel and I thought they would be expected-such as putting a black guy in the lead. The second film is really much more of a comic book and I did write an ending where everyone dies; we even shot the stuff where the guy shot himself in the head and the girl stuck her head up in the helicopter blades, though we never did the special effects with the helicopter. I just decided when I was watching the dailies that all that stuff just didn’t work-the tone didn’t work because the rest of the film was just kind of silly. By the time we did the third film, I decided that I wanted to set up a situation where they would be off somewhere and trying to reestablish some kind of normality despite the futility of trying to live and ignore these things as though they were homeless or sick. That is the way I have gone with the fourth script, which I have already written-it is all about ignoring the problem.

The next two films you did, the little-seen "There’s Always Vanilla" and "Jack’s Wife", were much different in tone from your debut; the former had no supernatural elements at all and the latter briefly touched on witchcraft as a metaphor for feminism. Was the decision to do those films a conscious effort to avoid being typecast solely as a horror filmmaker?

Yes. I didn’t want to be typecast that way but that wasn’t the principal concern-I was just trying to tell an idea that was interesting. That first one was one that we rushed into-it was written by a friend of mine-and it was probably the one I was least involved with emotionally while making it. We rushed into it because the script was available and some of the investors from "Night" came back and wanted to do another one. That was just kind of a misguided effort and we weren’t ready for it-because of the success of things like "David and Lisa", we thought we could get away with it. It did get a distributor and that distributor financed "The Crazies" for us eventually, so it turned out to not be an entirely disastrous move.

"Jack’s Wife" was a story that I really liked and it is the only one of my films that I would really like to take another shot at because I think that the story still applies today. We just ran out of money. We had an investment brokerage that came around and had promised to raise money for us and wound up reneging. We had to make the film with a lot less money than we had expected and it just wasn’t a very successful execution. It’s a theme that I like and I wouldn’t mind taking another whack at.

Given that, why did you choose to make, in "The Crazies", a film that, on the surface, seemed to have a lot in common with that very same film that you were trying to get away from?

I don’t have an answer for that. I don’t think it was the same at all. It was much more about weapons and the war. I also didn’t write the original script for "The Crazies"-another guy did and then I adapted it. I like it a lot and I am not apologizing for it but I think that I might have made it a little smaller and more controllable-more like "Night of the Living Dead", in fact, with just a little group of people holed up somewhere. It was just a little too large for the budget that we had. We had $275,000 and it was my first film with Screen Actors Guild actors-I sort of bit off just a little too much. There is a lot about it that I think is pretty crude but I am still okay with it.

I guess now, because of Iraq, there is now all this interest in remaking that film-I even have some of the majors nibbling around it. It goes to show you that you never know what is going to come out of the cabinet.

Most of your films have used the horror genre as a way to explore social and cultural concerns. However, 1982’s "Creepshow", your collaboration with Stephen King, was an exception to your normal approach-it was nothing more than a goofy, gory homage to the old horror comics of the 1950’s. Were you consciously looking to do something a little less serious in tone when you decided to do the film?

Well, it wasn’t really my film-that isn’t an apology because Steve is a good friend. When we sat down, I wasn’t thinking about old comic books-I was thinking about old horror movies. What I wanted to do was make a film where even the format would change in each story-one would be black-and-white in the old 1.33 ratio, one would be 1.85, one would be wide-screen, one would even be in 3-D. I wanted to really mix things up and do a bunch of short stories that paid homage to all of the old horror flicks. When I talked to Steve about it, he said "No, we should do the old comic books!" and use that as the through-line. I went along with that because I grew up on the E.C. comic books and I loved the idea. It was meant to just be like the comic books and so I threw social sensibility to the wind and just went out to do a romp and have some giggles.

Having been working more or less by yourself on your previous films, how was the experience of working in tandem with other horror icons like King and Dario Argento, who helped produce "Dawn of the Dead" and later co-directed "Two Evil Eyes"?

I don’t have a problem with it. "Dawn" was still mine all the way through-Dario didn’t touch the English-languange version. Our deal was that he had the rights to re-edit it for non-English countries, which is where all those other versions of the film came from. It was still pretty much my film. With Steve, I enjoy working with him and I enjoy hanging out with him-the same thing with Dario. Dario was super-supportive and I had no problem working with him. My original cut was exactly what I wrote it to be. In the case of "Creepshow", I was just glad that I was able to go out and execute it and have fun with it.

On "Creepshow", it was also your first time working with reasonably well-known actors; people like Hal Holbrook, E.G. Marshall and Adrienne Barbeau. Did that force you to change your approach towards working with actors from what you had previously done?

I had no problems. They are just folks. Obviously, it helped the distributor to give us more money and so it helped that way. I thought it was the kind of thing where you could use iconic figures and recognizable faces and it wouldn’t hurt it. With the new zombie film, I’m trying to do the new one and get someone to finance it and everybody wants stars. My feeling is that it would be better with unrecognizable people because you don’t know what will happen and you aren’t as certain about who they are or what they represent. These days, they want some marquee power, no matter what the film.

You’ve worked in various capacities on a number of anthology films over the years-you directed "Creepshow and one-half of "Two Evil Eyes" and contributed to the scripts of "Creepshow 2" and "Tales From the Darkside: The Movie". The general Hollywood rule is that such films just don’t work for any number of reasons and yours have had mixed results; "Creepshow" and "Two Evil Eyes" were pretty good while the others were fairly dreadful. Do you have any theory as to why some of them worked while others didn’t?

There is a prejudice against them and it is almost impossible to sell one now. Nobody wants to hear about them and I think it is because so many of them haven’t worked. I can’t identify exactly why some haven’t worked. Some of them are just not fun. "Creepshow 2", I think the producers just sort of cheaped out on it. I had nothing to do with that production-that was my ex-partner who did it shortly after I left the company and they just cheaped out on it. It was disappointing because I thought that it could have been better-they cut one of the stories that I thought was the best. The Hollywood wisdom is that you don’t have a chance to get to know any of the characters and it is too much like television.

With "Day of the Dead", despite the optimistic ending, you created the darkest and bleakest of your zombie films to date. I am aware that the original concept for the film had to be abandoned when the budget was reduced but I was curious as to what brought about the change in tone, particularly in response to the comic-book excesses of "Dawn"?

Well, it was a different time. Things looked like they were going to collapse and I thought it deserved to be a little bleaker because that was how I was thinking about the way things were going-I thought we were backsliding into all this euphoria about getting rich. It was misguided and the beginning of Americans compartmentalizing and becoming more of a have and have-not society.

When "Day of the Dead" was released in 1985, it was largely disdained by critics and utterly ignored by audiences. In recent years, though, the film’s reputation has grown considerably in stature-in part thanks to the release of a Collector’s Edition DVD last year. Why do you think the reasons are for both the initial rejection and the current resurgence of interest?

I wish I had an answer-I don’t live with these things so it is hard for me to go back and think coherently about them. I like it-I thought it was the most successfully executed of all of them. I think we all felt like we had grown up a bit and were better filmmakers. I liked the idea, I liked the cast and I liked the whole experience of making it. All of that stuff measures into how you estimate your feelings about a film. It was my favorite of the three and it remains so because it was the best-executed. I think "Dawn of the Dead" was a little flip-it works great and it moves like a freight train but it was much harder to make. We were working with not enough dough and it was a harder experience. There are things about it that I wish I could change or that I had more of a mastery of the craft at the time. I knew a little more of that by the time I made "Day of the Dead". The whole process is kind of a learning experience for me. I find as I go along that my writing has gotten better and so has my craftsmanship as a director.

The last film that you completed was "Bruiser", which I saw in what was billed as a pre-release screening at a retrospective of your work in 2000. Lion’s Gate bought it but despite being an excellent film, it wound up goinh straight-to-video in America. What happened?

They didn’t get it. We made it for Canal + and there were a couple of executives there who got it and really dug it. I did it as it was written but by the time we finished, there had been all of these mergers and we couldn’t get those guys on the phone anymore. The new execs gave it to Lion’s Gate and they didn’t get it at all and it just went to video.

Your are about to start on a zombie musical in collaboration with Ridley Scott’s Scott Free production company and one of the people behind "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"...

Scott Free Productions just signed on last week and Richard Hartley is the other guy I am working with. I adapted someone else’s script. It came to me with production illustrations and Richard had already done the music and I just loved the idea of it. Hopefully, Scott Free has enough clout to make it happen.

What about the much-discussed adaptation of Stephen King’s "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon"?

That script is ready and we have Dakota Fanning and Laura Dern interested in it. We have about 40% of the financing but we probably won’t wrap anything up until Cannes-we are looking for a U.S. distributor.

In the last year or so, there has been a resurgence in zombie-related films such as "House of the Dead", "28 Days Later", "Undead", "Shaun of the Dead", "Resident Evil" and the remake of "Dawn of the Dead". As the man who made the genre famous, what are your thoughts about the sudden interest in such films-particularly the latter two? [Romero was the original director hired for "Resident Evil" before being replaced by Paul Anderson.]

I thought that "Resident Evil" was just nowhere-I just didn’t like it and I wish they had done mine. They didn’t, they wound up not liking what I did and the guys at Constantine just weren’t buying it. I wrote several drafts and they decided to go and hire someone else and that is the way that things often happen. I think they were the wrong guys to make the film and I don’t even think that they had ever played the game. I thought that "Dawn of the Dead" was better than I thought it was going to be but I think it has lost its impact. The execution was better than I thought it would be and I thought there were a few cool script ideas. By and large, it is just hard for me to understand-it doesn’t have the same underlying meaning that it used to. Nowadays, a mall is just another place while back then, we shot the original in one of the first enclosed malls. There was just more to it, as far as I was concerned.

-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI

Copyright © 2004 Peter Sobczynski
All rights reserved.
Used with permission
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