George A Romero: Why I don't like The Walking Dead

Writer-director George A. Romero needs no introduction to horror fans, having almost single-handedly invented the modern zombie film as we know it with Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its subsequent sequels. He’s in London for a stage interview at the BFI Southbank, as part of their Gothic season. Beforehand, Tim Robey sat down with him to talk zombie origins, the current mania for having them move fast, and his debt to Orson Welles

I think you’ve been involved with a number of video games, as well as all your films.

I’ve always wanted to be involved, but usually when I walk in they say, ‘Well, we’ll do all the design work, we know you’re not a game person.’ I’ve always wanted to be part of the design of the game. But I’ve been in a game! I guess I’m the monster you have to kill? There’s a version of Call of Duty called, I think, Call of the Dead.

Even so, it must be strange to see zombies flooding the mainstream and becoming part of mass entertainment? Given that, when you reinvented the genre in 1968, it was practically a basement activity …

Oh, it definitely was. I used to be the only guy in the playground. Now, my God. I do think the popularity of the creature has come from video games, not film. Zombieland [2009], which was relatively recent, was the first zombie film to break $100 million at the box office, and therefore got Hollywood interested. The remake of Dawn of the Dead [2004] did about $75m, so I think that may have started the ramp. And then Zombieland and now, of course, World War Z. But dozens of hugely popular video games have had a bigger impact.

You’ve said somewhere that you felt Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake was a bit like a video game in itself?

I thought it was, yeah. I sort of thought it lost its reason for being. I know a lot of people really like it very much – Stephen King, for example. I didn’t like it very much. Basically, because I was using the idea for satire. My film needed to be done right when it was done, because that sort of shopping mall was completely new. It was the first one in Pennsylvania that we had ever seen. The heart of the story is based in that. And I didn’t think the remake had it.

I wondered if it was trying to make a different point, in a way. In your film, the zombies are inside the mall, and carry on as they did in life as brainwashed consumers. Whereas in the remake they’re barred from it, they’re on the outside – it’s almost like more of a class thing, where it’s like a gated society, or something?

In my film the zombies are in there to start with. But most of it is a siege film, where the humans have taken it over. And it’s similar to that extent. But you change the meaning of it, which is just something that I don’t particularly like. And I don’t buy running zombies. There was just so much about it that I couldn’t buy at all.

That did seem to launch the vogue for fast zombies, didn’t it?

I guess it did. I think maybe Guillermo del Toro – a filmmaker I very much admire – launched the idea of fast-moving vampires in Blade II [2002]. They were all over the walls and scuttling around like insects or something. Somebody noticed that, and there’s where I think it all started.

Thinking back to when you made Night of the Living Dead, and thinking about zombie films before that – I suppose we point to something like the Jacques Tourneur film, I Walked with a Zombie (1943), which is very different culturally. But I wonder if you derived anything from that tradition at all?

I was almost consciously trying to stay away from it. And I didn’t call them zombies in Night of the Living Dead, and I didn’t think they were. Because those films – the traditional Haitian voodoo zombie – is not dead. And I thought I was doing something completely new by having the dead rise. The recently dead. They’re too weak to dig themselves out of graves. They’re too weak to eat brains, because they’ll never crack the skull. I have these sort of rules that I use, that everyone seems to have gone away from. Not that it’s my way or the highway, that’s not what I’m saying. It’s just what I prefer. But I consciously was avoiding influences from that. Maybe, indirectly, some of the lighting and the photography, although I was modelling mine more after Welles. Welles’s Shakespeare films – Othello [1952], that’s what I was trying to ape there. But I really was not using any of that mythology. The tone perhaps, a little bit. But that’s the tone of many more serious horror films back then.

You often talk about the casting of your leading man [the African-American actor Duane Jones] as kind of an accident. But it's a very uncanny one! Not only because of the relevance to that exact moment in time, with the assassination of Martin Luther King, but also, given that history of zombie films, the Haitian tradition of black zombies, you have a black hero, it’s kind of an uncanny parallel.

That’s the first time anyone’s mentioned that! But it does seem an obvious connection. When John Russo and I collaborated on the final screenplay, the character was white. And we consciously, deliberately didn’t change the script when Duane agreed to play the role. He was simply the best actor from among our friends. And then, we finished the film, we were actually driving it to New York to see if anyone would want to distribute it, and that night, on the car radio, we heard that King had been assassinated. And all of a sudden, the film took on the feel of a racial statement. That was not intended at all. The same things happened to that character when he was white. The posse shot him, because they thought he was a zombie.

^{George A Romero. Picture: AP}

Now you’ve moved into fast, digital, film-making. You seemed to downscale your films after Land of the Dead (2005). Was Diary of the Dead (2007) mainly about that new technology?

Yes, it was meant to be. So it almost needed to be shot that way. But I would have done it anyway. I actually did all the finishing work on Bruiser [2000] digitally. Because you just can’t beat it with a stick. Again, Land of the Dead was 35mm, but had a lot of digital effects, and was finished in digital. You can just do so much more with it, with the timing and colour balance, and light and dark, and you can dodge parts of a shot, it’s like having a dark room. And now with the really high-def stuff, you can blow it up, zoom it in, without losing quality. It’s terrific. And also, just simply the effects. When you’re shooting super-low-budget – we had 20 days to shoot Diary, and a little over $2 – time is money. It’s much easier. If a squib doesn’t work, you have to clean it up, reset it, and that takes 45 minutes, whereas if one guy points a gun, the zombie falls down, you can paint in the gun flash, you paint in the splatter. It doesn’t feel as good, it doesn’t look as good, because it doesn’t interact with everything nicely, but it saves the day, basically.

Does that mean you miss anything about the old days, given that you were established with Tom Savini and all those guys, doing the practical effects?

Oh yeah. I loved doing it manually. There’s much more of a sense of achievement for all of us. ‘Man, it worked!’, you know? It was wonderful. It was sort of a team effort, with much more of a sense of accomplishment when you were able to pull it off. However, the last time where we really tried to do really elaborate prosthetic effects was Land of the Dead, with Greg Nicotero, who worked on that. And there were several effects that were carefully planned, and we were doing them the way we did them in the old days, and we did have enough time in Land of the Dead to go back and try it again. There were some that we just couldn’t do, effectively enough. All of a sudden it started to look funky. There’s so much to forgive, particularly in Dawn. Day of the Dead [1985], some of them look really look terrific. But in Dawn, some of them are hard to forgive. Now, you can’t get away with that.

I’m thinking back to a helicopter blade slicing off the top of a zombie’s head …

In Dawn, yes. That was a completely prosthetic effect. The blade wasn’t there. Tom [Savini] rigged it so that with a string he was able to pull off the make-up. He found a guy with a fairly flat head, and was able to pull that away, on fish wire, so that it looked like it was being chopped apart. We matted in the blade. We all applauded that one.

It’s still quite ingenious.

When it worked, it was really great. Tom was great at doing that, at coming up, sometimes last minute, at spectacular and inventive ways of doing things.

Am I right that Land of the Dead was your biggest budget film?

The biggest budget zombie film. The Dark Half [1993] was the biggest overall. I had such a bad experience with that. Orion was supposed to be the filmmaker’s studio, but I had bigger trouble with them than Universal. I was terrified of Universal! But Orion were really terrible to work for. It was really tough. I didn’t do Land for Universal, I did it with an independent producer, Mark Canton, and Universal picked it up. But they were there the whole time and they helped us tremendously with post-production. They were very cordial and respectful.

So that was a better experience? You’ve said you were a bit overwhelmed by Land of the Dead, that it was all too much …

Oh it was too much. I didn’t think it was necessary. I didn’t think we needed the stars. Mark Canton wanted the stars, because he thought it would make the film more valuable. But I would rather have had five more days of shooting than an extra box of cigars for Dennis Hopper. Poor Dennis – I mean, I love Dennis. But his cigars were a substantial line item on the budget!

Could you talk about the evolution in style between Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead? It’s like we're looking at a newsreel, then a commercial.

I wanted Night of the Living Dead to look naturalistic, but we weren’t able to do it, because we were shooting with a blimped 35mm camera, which is automatically static. We didn’t have a dolly, we were just on sticks, with a monstrous camera blimp, so the dialogue scenes I think are really stilted. When I went for the newsreel stuff was when that camera came out of the blimp, and you could basically handhold it, like one of these video cameras today. So when I was shooting the posse stuff at the end, I was able to get out there, because we didn’t need to record sound on those things, and shoot away. And I wanted that stuff to look newsreels, everything from the race riots in the South to police coming out with dogs. I wanted it to look like all-American crisis footage. But the rest of the film, I think, was way too static.

With Dawn of the Dead, we were of course trying to make it look a little more slick. And we were used to shooting commercials. But we had this shopping mall, and we were only shooting at night – the last tavern in the mall closed at 2am, and they let the cardiac patients in to exercise at 5am, so we only had that limited number of hours to shoot, and we couldn’t light it. We replaced all the fluorescents in the mall with colour-temperature fluorescents, so that we could just throw the switch and it was lit, but we couldn’t really do fancy lighting, we couldn’t do backlighting, except in the small set pieces. So it never really turned out to look quite as glamorous as it should have. Colour, of course, made a difference.

^{Night Of The Living Dead, 1968 Picture: Rex Features}

I think of it as a more of a playful film than Night of the Living Dead?

Oh, completely. I mean I view it as more of a comedy. I don’t find anything about it “scary”, in the traditional sense. It’s broadly comic. It’s probably as comic as Shaun!

You’re a fan of that, aren’t you?

I love it. It was done with such affection. I love those boys, they’re great guys. We’ve become pretty good buddies. Edgar [Wright] shot a big film in Toronto, actually, which is where I live now – somebody saves the world? [Scott Pilgrim vs the World]

You moved to Toronto from your home town of Pittsburgh, when was that?

Right around Land of the Dead, in 2004. I love it there. The crews are sensational. I used to have a family of co-workers, colleagues, that I loved to work with, in Pittsburgh. But then Pittsburgh sort of dried up. It was huge for a while – there was one $400m year, a lot of production coming into Pittsburgh. And people were able to have careers, and live in Pittsburgh. But then it dried up, as usually happens. They went on and discovered St Louis.

They made The Silence of the Lambs there, which you appear in!

Yes, Jonathan [Demme] invited me, and I couldn’t say no.

For a lot of people who know your work well, Martin [the 1977 tale of a teenager who thinks he’s a vampire] is often a favourite. Have you ever felt it deserves more discovery or recognition?

It’s my favourite. It never had any sort of distribution at all. And the same thing happened with Knightriders [1981]. But you know what, with home video now, I go to these conventions, and I sign more Martin DVDs than anything else. And Knightriders. It’s amazing. So people have rediscovered, or discovered for the first time. It’s wonderful. I just wish they would have showed up when it first played.

You know, I’ve made six zombie films, I’ve tried consciously to make each one different from the next. But that’s not what people want these days. They want the same thing! I don’t know if that’s part of this television mentality, where people tune in every week to see the same thing. I don’t know. The box office on my films has suffered, each time, because of that. They wanted Dawn of the Dead, when Day of the Dead came out, it didn’t look like Dawn, it wasn’t as funny, it wasn’t as spoofy, so it wasn’t as well-regarded. I know there are several film writers, who when Day first came out, slammed it. And one of them wrote the jacket notes for the DVD release, almost apologetically! I guess maybe it’s an acquired taste. But I wish people wouldn’t go in with that prejudice. I’m trying to satisfy in other ways.

^{Dawn Of The Dead Picture: Rex Features}

Was that maybe one of the reasons why you didn’t want to get involved with The Walking Dead? Because it wouldn’t allow you to say anything new?

The scripts were written. Same with Masters of Horror. I was working and they said, ‘We’ve got a million scripts, you can read them, and see what you want to do.’ And I said, ‘No, if I were going to do it, I would want to write it.’ Basically except Creepshow, which Stephen King wrote for me to direct, I’ve written everything except the second film I’ve ever made, which was written by a friend of mine, and Jack [Russo] shared the writing on Night, and that’s it. I did the script for Dark Half and so on. So I’ve always generated my own stuff. It’s the first line of defence!

You’ve described The Walking Dead as “a soap opera with a zombie occasionally”. For people who don’t like that show, it seems to sum up their feelings.

That’s what I don’t particularly like. Even though I think Frank [Darabont] did a great job. I don’t know what the hell happened there, something political no doubt, when they canned him after the first season.

With World War Z, just to bring us up to date on the current zombie craze, did you feel that had anything much to say?

I sure didn’t see anything. Other than the obvious, right? I mean, it’s a disaster film. That’s all it is. And they seem to carefully avoid saying that it’s a zombie film. It’s nowhere, you may extract that from the title World War Z, but if you didn’t know about that, you might think it was the last World War in the alphabet. On all the adverts and promos, you just saw these wide shots of them scaling the wall in Israel. They didn’t look like zombies at all. It wasn’t until you got down into that little laboratory near the end, where there were a few close shots where they were stumbling around, and looked a little more like my guys … I know [the book’s writer] Max Brooks pretty well and he wasn’t pleased with the film at all. Nor was I. But then I went to see Man of Steel, and World War Z started to look pretty good.

Anything you’re looking forward to?

I’m writing a comic book, as I may have mentioned. Partly to defend against this current trend. I can’t go in and pitch a zombie film now. Unless I can promise them that we’re going to spend $200m or more, and it’s going to have the greatest CG stuff. I’m just not interested in playing high stakes, though. I’ve always tried to play at the two-dollar betting window.

My ex-wife is still trying to promote [an adaptation of Stephen King’s book] The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I wrote a screenplay for that. Gerald’s Game, too. Frank Darabont, Stephen and I were all talking about that. Why doesn’t anybody want to make Gerald’s Game? I can understand Tom Gordon because it’s about a little girl, and if you try to do the book faithfully, there’s no room for adults. And so, there’s no star that you can sell. And so you can’t spend that much money, unless Ang Lee wanted to do it. Tom Gordon is just as “unmakeable” by Hollywood standards as Life of Pi.

The BFI's Gothic season continues through to January