Tales From the Dark­side: An inter­view with George A Romero

George A Romero has passed away at the age of 77 fol­low­ing a brief bat­tle with lung can­cer. Although he will for­ev­er be syn­ony­mous with the zom­bie genre, reach­ing ground­break­ing heights with 1968’s Night of the Liv­ing Dead – from which five more would fol­low – his bril­liant fil­mog­ra­phy was by no means con­fined to the walk­ing dead. Back in 2013, we sat down with Romero in Lon­don after a screen­ing of his mag­nif­i­cent debut fea­ture. What fol­lows is a pre­vi­ous­ly unpub­lished inter­view with one of hor­ror cinema’s true masters.

LWLies: Night of the Liv­ing Dead has just been archived by the Amer­i­can Film Insti­tute and the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art. Are you still sur­prised by its longevi­ty and its last­ing impact?

Romero: God, I real­ly am. I mean, it’s amaz­ing to be hon­oured like that, but it’s been 45 years now… Lord!

There’s been so much writ­ing about the sub­text of the Dead movies. How does that feed into the writ­ing process, is it some­thing you start with or does it feed in later?

Yeah, well, ever since Dawn of the Dead. The first one I nev­er thought would go any­where. Cer­tain­ly when we were mak­ing it, no one could have envi­sioned what would hap­pen to the life of that film. I didn’t real­ly have any rules, I was just think­ing of it as one film. Then when peo­ple start­ed to write about it as though it were impor­tant, I got intim­i­dat­ed. Every­body was after me to make anoth­er one. I said, ​‘I don’t want to just make anoth­er one, I have to have an idea, I have to have some­thing to say!’ So that was it, and it took me 10 years to come up with that idea.

I knew the peo­ple social­ly who were devel­op­ing this big shop­ping mall, and it was the first one in west­ern Penn­syl­va­nia, the first one that any of us had ever seen. I went out to vis­it it before it opened and saw the trucks com­ing in, bring­ing every­thing that you could ever pos­si­bly want in your life into this enor­mous build­ing. So the con­cept was there, it just seemed like this tem­ple to con­sumerism. The light went off and I thought maybe I could do some­thing with this, so I start­ed to write the script. That was the moment I realised I could use zom­bies, couch­ing what­ev­er it was I want­ed to do or say with­in the con­text of a hor­ror film, that it would give me the chance for a lit­tle social criticism.

So you weren’t think­ing along those lines when you wrote the end­ing for Night?

Well, the ques­tion of race was the fur­thest thing from my mind. When I was writ­ing that char­ac­ter, I was think­ing about the dis­in­te­gra­tion of fam­i­ly, the whole idea that peo­ple can’t coop­er­ate, even when faced with a dis­as­trous sit­u­a­tion they just stick to their own agen­das, argu­ing about whether to go upstairs or down­stairs instead of fac­ing the prob­lem. When John Rus­so and I wrote the screen­play, he was a white guy, we didn’t change the script. So when Dwayne [Jones] agreed to play the role, we all had a con­ver­sa­tion and decid­ed that it was a bold move to not change the script. That was it. The same things hap­pened to him when he was white, the red­neck posse came and shot him, because they thought he was a zom­bie, not because they knew he was black. It was an acci­dent real­ly, in the end a hap­py acci­dent. The night we drove the first print to New York we heard on the radio that King had been assas­si­nat­ed, so of course the film imme­di­ate­ly took on a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent slant.

We were big fans of Sur­vival of the Dead.

I’m so glad to hear that! I mean, that film just went com­plete­ly unno­ticed in the States. We watched The Big Coun­try a bunch ahead of shoot­ing. We were real­ly going for that look, even if we didn’t real­ly have the mon­ey. We shot it at 2:35:1 and want­ed those big MGM/UA colours.

You’ve spo­ken pre­vi­ous­ly about your ideas for a zom­bie noir…

Well, I’m try­ing to avoid zom­bies now. All of a sud­den the whole world is zomb­i­fied. I could nev­er sell a zom­bie movie now unless I promised to spend $250m and filled it with the most amaz­ing CG effects. That’s all they’re buy­ing right now.

So the likes of World War Z isn’t help­ing you get your projects made?

You just can’t get a small movie off the ground. No one wants to risk $10 or $15 mil­lion, peo­ple will only risk two or three, which forces you into a cer­tain cat­e­go­ry. If you’re judi­cious enough, and are able to squeeze it into a short enough sched­ule, you can still make a pret­ty good film at around three mil­lion. That film looks around five or six. That’s the ben­e­fit of hav­ing great techies, I’ve got a won­der­ful DP and design staff.

Do you miss the small­er scale of film­mak­ing from your Pitts­burgh days?

Yeah, I’m in Toron­to now. I moved after Land of the Dead, my peo­ple left! The pro­duc­tion cen­tre just left. There was one big $400 mil­lion year, with Silence of the Lambs and Inno­cent Blood, so if you were work­ing as a tech­ni­cian in the indus­try you could have a career and still live there. Then Hol­ly­wood dis­cov­ered St Louis and moved on, the jobs dried up. I was used to work­ing with this small cadre of friends and fam­i­ly, and I had to find that again in Toron­to when I made Bruis­er, that same work-eth­ic and will­ing­ness to make sac­ri­fices. We used to be non-union and just free­wheel­ing, in the days when I shot Mar­tin, for exam­ple. We could work at our own pace with no reg­u­la­tions. I always put it down to how many shots I can make on a giv­en day, and I just love a pro­duc­er who will allow you to do that. I think we spent way too much on Land of the Dead. I didn’t think we need­ed the cast, I didn’t think we need­ed Den­nis Hopper’s expen­sive cig­ars, the biggest line-item in the budget.

From what we’ve read, it seems like you didn’t enjoy that pro­duc­tion much.

I didn’t, no. I just didn’t enjoy the process, it was just way too big. Once you have the stars and all the oth­er stuff that comes with that – their own make-up peo­ple, the cer­tain cater­er and cer­tain type of food they have to have – every­thing just mush­rooms. It gets crazy, it gets way out of hand. I like the film, but it was just hard to keep a las­so on it. If you lose just a lit­tle bit of con­trol, they keep tak­ing lit­tle pieces out of your hands. Like, ​‘We’ll just shoot this bit sec­ond-unit, you keep work­ing.’ I don’t want a sec­ond-unit, I want to shoot it myself! And it’s only because of the excess­es in oth­er areas that that needs to hap­pen. We could have eas­i­ly bought anoth­er five days shoot­ing if we’d been a lit­tle more judi­cious, if they’d eat­en a lit­tle less lobster.

There was a big gap between Day and Land…

Well, I want­ed to do one for the ​’90s. I’d writ­ten a ver­sion of Land, but I just couldn’t sell it. I hard a hard time sell­ing it for a long time, because Day of the Dead hadn’t done that well. That’s what hap­pens to me, I try to make each one dif­fer­ent, then peo­ple just don’t show up! Sud­den­ly, 10 years lat­er they’re fly­ing off the shelves at the video store. They just don’t want it to be dif­fer­ent, they just want me to remake Dawn of the Dead every time.

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Speak­ing of dif­fer­ent ones, Mon­key Shines is just ter­rif­ic. It’s shot like a Hitch­cock movie.

It was a nov­el first, that one. I was approached by a pro­duc­er in New York – Bob Evans’ broth­er, Charles – to adapt and shoot it.

Was direct­ing the mon­key a nightmare?

I loved it, I could sit and do that all day. It came down to fak­ing around. We had all sorts of props, and my part­ner Peter end­ed up doing a lot of sec­ond unit because there was no way I could hang around get­ting mon­key footage all day. I did a bunch of it, but then I had to leave Peter with a sort of shop­ping list. Peter had a bag full of mara­cas and Mex­i­can hats, all he had to do was step in and try to get a reac­tion out of the monkey.

You made a great Edgar Allan Poe film with Dario Argen­to, what made you choose Mr Valde­mar for your episode?

I didn’t choose that one ini­tial­ly. I want­ed to do Masque of the Red Death, but it turned out Lar­ry Gor­don was already doing it. I went back to my Poe and thought it’d make for some­thing pret­ty creepy, and Dario seemed to like the idea.

Dario Argen­to famous­ly re-cut and re-scored Dawn of the Dead, how did that come about?

That was his deal from the begin­ning. He said I could do what­ev­er I want­ed for the Eng­lish-lan­guage release, that he wouldn’t inter­fere at all, but that he’d like to recut it for Euro­pean audi­ences. I knew he was going to use Gob­lin, but he said I didn’t have to. He wound up cut­ting a lot of the humour and stuck with Gob­lin all the way. I nev­er looked at it care­ful­ly enough, but I’m pret­ty sure he did. But that’s the dif­fer­ence between his and my per­son­al­i­ty. I think that cut plays on the same lev­el the whole way, it doesn’t hit any of the sub­tleties, the lit­tle hor­ror sub­tleties – which I wouldn’t have mind­ed except part of my ver­sion was spoof­ing clas­si­cal hor­ror stuff, and I don’t think he hit any of those notes at all. I used some pret­ty corny library tracks, but some­how it works.

Speak­ing of peo­ple mess­ing with your work, you’ve not been able to avoid the remake frenzy…

I asked Stephen King once how he felt about peo­ple destroy­ing his books, and we was like, ​‘They’re not destroy­ing them, they’re still on the shelf.’ I kin­da feel that way about it. They did a remake of The Cra­zies and made it into a sort-of-zom­bie film. I dun­no, I didn’t enjoy it…

Hope­ful­ly Mar­tin will be left well alone.

I don’t know if there are any plans for that, and Knightrid­ers I just don’t know if any­one would. The only one that I would like to remake is a very ear­ly one. My title was Jack’s Wife, which was released as Sea­son of the Witch…

That’s a great one! It’s very feminist.

I thought so. I also thought, who am I to write a fem­i­nist movie? It was a bit obvi­ous in that way. I think I’d be more able and bit more sen­si­tive now, I’d make her more pow­er­ful in life, she was just too weak until she came to believe that witch­craft was mak­ing her strong enough. I think there’s a sto­ry there that I wouldn’t mind try­ing to do again. Knightrid­ers I don’t think you could do now, how would you have? Vin Diesel?

Knightrid­ers is anoth­er of your films con­cerned with ques­tions of trib­al­ism, of mis­matched peo­ple com­ing togeth­er in the face of adver­si­ty. Where does that recur­ring inter­est come from?

I dun­no, prob­a­bly the movie busi­ness. It’s the way I see things, I guess. Trib­al­ism is at the root of the world’s prob­lems. It’s just my view of it. Reli­gion and trib­al­ism of any kind cause… bombings.

Have you ever been seduced by the lure of Hollywood?

My part­ner and I spent four or five years where we let our­selves be seduced. We made some deals and end­ed up writ­ing a dozen scripts, prob­a­bly. I made more mon­ey than I ever had in my entire career. Writ­ing, re-writ­ing, devel­op­ing a ver­sion of one thing or anoth­er for Nicole Kid­man. Then she says no, so it’s, ​‘Let’s do one for Meryl Streep!’ We just kept re-writ­ing, in typ­i­cal devel­op­ment hell. We actu­al­ly had a deal at Uni­ver­sal to do The Mum­my, it was green-lit. But MGM wouldn’t let us out of a deal with only 12 days left to go. So MGM and Uni­ver­sal got into a piss­ing con­test over it and nei­ther hap­pened. I just got so sick of that shit. That’s what brought me to Toron­to, because I’d writ­ten this lit­tle film called Bruis­er. We got the mon­ey from Canal+ and in Toron­to that $5 mil­lion turned into six.

So mon­ey is best found over­seas now?

I just don’t have the patience, nor prob­a­bly the span of years, to sit around in devel­op­ment. You look for the path of least resis­tance. It’s the only way it becomes real­is­tic. So right now, for exam­ple, I know I can’t sell a zom­bie film to any­body, so I’m doing a com­ic book. I took that path. Hope­ful­ly it can become a film, but at the moment I’m doing 15 books for Marvel.

How are you find­ing that process?

It’s great, and I don’t have to shoot it! The writ­ing process is exact­ly the same, and the visu­al process only slight­ly dif­fer­ent. The artist isn’t lim­it­ed by bud­get restraints, so it’s terrific.

How do you judge artis­tic suc­cess to your­self? Is it about a plea­sur­able pro­duc­tion process, or how it’s received pub­licly, critically?

Not crit­i­cal­ly, no. The pro­duc­tion process is very impor­tant. Mar­tin is my favourite film of mine, and the main rea­son is because of the expe­ri­ence I had shoot­ing it. It was won­der­ful. We were non-union so we had no con­straints. We were there to just do the work and make the film. I just have the fond­est mem­o­ries of that. I also hap­pen to think, part­ly because of that, that it just let me be able to do what­ev­er it was I want­ed to do. I was able to make any and every shot that I want­ed to make in that film, where­as usu­al­ly you end up com­pro­mis­ing, cut­ting things off the pro­duc­tion board. Same with Day of the Dead. Shoot­ing that film was one the best times I’ve ever had. Where­as with The Dark Half, I had a DP who thought he was going to win an Oscar, and just gave me grief every minute. He quit indig­nant­ly about six times, and I thought I was gonna get canned because of my prob­lems with Tim Hut­ton. I was ready to just throw my hands up, it was real­ly hard to keep a rope on that one. But that’s what happens.

How do you feel about the auteur label?

I take pride in it. That’s the rea­son I’d nev­er want to go do a Mas­ters of Hor­ror episode if I couldn’t write it, or go direct and episode of The Walk­ing Dead. I mean, I wouldn’t wan­na do that any­way. I real­ly just wan­na do my own stuff, and writ­ing is the first line of defence. You can’t defend some­thing forcibly if you didn’t write it.

The above illus­tra­tion was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in LWLies 03: the Land of the Dead issue.