old news but interesting
On the set of his new film, Diary of the Dead, George Romero instructs Joe Dinicol on the finer points of acting with zombies.
Rumours of George A. Romero's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Internet message boards are buzzing with word that the zombie auteur recently collapsed on-set and production on his latest film has been postponed.
The spry 66-year-old man in front of me, rail thin at 6-foot-5, briefly flutters his arms and shuffles his feet in a mock dance to prove otherwise. "Look at me," he said in his trailer. "I passed my insurance physical to do this movie, so that's fine for me, man!"
Romero is not dead, or undead, he is merely living in Toronto. He has taken the trail sought after by so many of the embattled survivors in his tetralogy of zombie films, beginning with Night of the Living Dead (1968). "I'm heading north, to Canada," the protagonist will always say. "Where there's no people."
The long-time Pittsburgh resident has lived in Toronto since 2004, but still gets ribbed about the "no people" line. "People took that the wrong way in Land of the Dead. What I meant was somewhere way up north."
But he's no Democrat fleeing the red state hordes. The old team he used to work with in Pittsburgh has dispersed to New York and Los Angeles, casualties of that city's shrinking film industry. After already making two films in Toronto, he said he has found a new family, a good crew and the right economic incentives. And there's another thing: "Here, I have a girlfriend."
Diary of the Dead, currently shooting at a downtown warehouse-cum-soundstage and in the suburban backwoods of Markham, Ont., is a return to Romero's independent, low-budget roots after Universal Studios financed Land of the Dead. Following a group of student filmmakers heading into the bush, it is also a return to the franchise's origins. "In this story, we're back to the first night," Romero said. "It's really going all the way back and telling a different story with a new group of people."
There's another pragmatic reason that Romero is returning to the Dead franchise. When the distributor changed the tail of Night's original title from Flesh Eaters to Living Dead, the copyright symbol that should appear next to film's name went missing in the final print. The film, which trade paper Variety said "raised doubts about . . . the moral health of moviegoers," has been in the public domain ever since; Romero receives no royalties and has no ownership of any of the subsequent Dead movies.
Making Diary is his way of reasserting copyright, and he has a stake in the production.
It's fitting, in a way, that Night of the Living Dead should belong to all of us. The sheer primitive pleasure of watching stilted and stumbling versions of ourselves noshing on the tasty tissue of human brain is one thing. The more disturbing implications of watching how humans behave, collectively and individually, in a state of crisis is another. The walking undead have proved to be a rather enduring and pliable metaphor for aspects of the modern condition -- from conformity and consumerism to social chaos and disease. Romero always played ironically with the socio-political subtext in his films, most notably Day of the Dead's critique of consumerism, zombies wandering aimlessly through a DayGlo shopping mall. ("They come here because they remember it was important to them," deadpans one of the survivors.)
In the post-9/11 world in which Romero wrote Land, he riffed on issues of homeland security; Dennis Hopper based his portrayal of Kaufman, the despotic administrator who lords over a fortified city, on U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld.
"You can read whatever you want into the zombies," Romero said. "People who write film treatises about these movies have them representing just about anything. In my mind, it's just been about some sort of revolutionary sea change in society. I don't care what they represent. They're evolving, a new species taking over. It's about adaptation and our ability to either adapt or find some way to co-exist or not. That should be the driving force. But all the different characters in all the different situations try to maintain life as it was, without acknowledging life is no longer what it was."
Romero is surprised that his premise has had so much gas. In the past four years, his work has spawned a gaggle of new zombie flicks, from 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and the upcoming Canadian feature Fido, in which zombies figure as pets. While Romero is a big fan of Shaun, he's less enamoured of 28 Days, picking on the fact that its undead do not lurch and stumble, but run. Which, he sighs, just isn't right. When asked once how you direct a zombie, he said, "Loll your head as if it's a little too heavy and the muscles have begun to atrophy." He promises a few in-jokes about it in his new film.
There's a flip side, however, to Romero's influence -- not many other director's films have been remade so often. Even his little seen 1971 film The Crazies is slated for an updating. But he hardly blinks about it.
"I'm just this funny guy over here making movies, not paying much attention to what's going on over there. Stephen King is often asked, 'How do you feel about Hollywood ruining your books?' And he says, 'They didn't ruin my books, they're right here on the shelf behind me.' So I figure my movies are mine."
For one of the icons of American horror cinema, the progenitor of an entire zombie subgenre, it's surprising when Romero says none of his films since Night of the Living Dead are "really scary," and even that one he's not so sure about. He admits that in the past 10 years he has viewed all his old films again, and sees instead the constant evolution of his craft.
"I've relied on tricks," he said. "I've never really had an idea that was believable enough to lend itself to [being scary]. Monkey Shines [1988] has a few jolts, a few creepy moments. I think Alien, for example, is a really scary movie, very well-crafted. There are other obvious ones, like The Exorcist, that really get to you on a different level. But first you need some dough, then you need some time, and have an idea able to make the audience completely suspend its disbelief. Then you can just work on crafting it. But that takes time. And so, what you do when you don't have that kind of time and money is rely on the old jumps and tricks, and bah! It's about all you have time for."
With its low-budget friendly premise of student filmmakers in the woods, Romero dismissed comparisons to The Blair Witch Project.
"Blair Witch was trying to be much more desperately realistic. It was hyperreal. It was just viscerally experiential. This is not. This is still a bit arch, a bit theatrical and it's just the style that is more subjective.
"We're going to have fun with it. When I look at my films, what I see most is me learning to use the pencil, if you know what I mean. They say John Ford made, what, 250 flicks? I made 15. I don't have all them tricks in my pocket yet. It's one of the things that keeps me going when I have an idea that I'm hungry for. You got to find something. I guess it's why fishermen keep fishing."
No, Romero is not in a dire state. He appears revitalized by the new surroundings and that even his most obscure films have found a second life on DVD.
Before returning to the set, Romero reflected fondly when asked, about the television program where he got his first break: Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. He once shot the educational shorts that Fred Rogers showed on his "Picture, Picture" machine.
"We made little movies like How Do They Make Light Bulbs? or something about wheels. That was my first job. It was anything that came into Fred's head, including Fred Rogers Gets a Tonsillectomy."
He laughs. "Now that's one of the more frightening films I've made."
Special to The Globe and Mail
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