CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 2/15/08

Forty Years With the Dead:
Diary of the Dead's George Romero

By peter clines

One of the great legends of Hollywood steps back up to the plate with a new film about the creatures that made him a household name—zombies.

If someone had told 28-year-old George Romero that the low-budget gore-film he was making with his friends would become a cinematic classic, he would've laughed. Yet today, he's become irrevocably linked to those creatures he created and considered the father of the entire genre of zombie films. Night of the Living Dead spawned a handful of sequels, and half that franchise has already been remade by Hollywood on a bigger budget. Now, four decades after the walking dead gave him a career, he's giving their world a reboot with his new film, Diary of the Dead.

The mockumentary claims to tell the story of a group of film students working on a horror movie one night in the woods when they hear news that the dead are somehow returning to life. As the world around them descends into chaos, Debra (Michelle Morgan) just wants to go home and check on her family, and the cast, crew, and their faculty advisor (Scott Wentworth) decide to band together in their production Winnebago for the trip. But Debra's boyfriend, Jay (Joshua Close) sees this crisis as his big chance to become a real documentary filmmaker and record a story the whole world will want to know. As the numbers of the walking dead grow and the group's numbers diminish, they realize their goal may have to shift from reaching safety to simple survival, and Jay has to decide how much his film really means to him.

As he prepared to start his opening-week press junket, Romero took a few minutes on the phone with CS Weekly to talk about his new film, why he hates to see zombies run, and why he considers most of his career to be a grand accident.

Zombies seem to be having a huge comeback over the past few years. Why are they so appealing in this day and age?
It's sort of a tough question. I think that it's not movies and it's not the books. It's not Max Brooks' books, it's not Steve King with Cell. I haven't really sat down to think in a serious way about that. To me, zombies were the guys down in the Caribbean doing the wet work for Lugosi. Maybe I created the neighborhood zombie, the guy from next door with his Nikes and his t-shirt who was dead. I can't take absolute credit for that, but that has become the creature, and I half-expect to see it showing up on Sesame Street, hanging out with the Count. I think it's just become idiomatic. The rules are clear (except a couple of the video games have violated at least my rules), and we know this is the dead thing from next door. Maybe it's the new vampire, y'know? You can't fool people with vampires anymore, but there's something spooky about the neighbors getting up after death and coming after you.

You've worked in a couple different genres, but you keep coming back to horror, specifically zombies. Why is that?
Well, to some extent, it's what people want from me. It's much harder for me to finance Knightriders than it is for me to finance Teeth in the Night or whatever the hell it happens to be. First of all, let me say, I love the genre. I grew up on EC comic books. The first movies, when I was allowed to go see movies alone at 12 years old, when they cost a quarter, I saw on the big screen the re-issues of the famous monsters of filmland. Frank and Drac and Wolfman and the Invisible Man and all that stuff. And I loved it. So, I don't feel trapped that way. I also found that, wait a minute, I've got a franchise here. I can go make Knightriders, which is just sort of a personal, almost autobiographical thing. I can go adapt a Steve King novel and shoot that. But I've been able to express myself most through the zombie films, and I'm able to actually show who I am and make observations about society with these films. I guess what I feel is that, at least my horror films, the zombie films, are not just films about a guy with a knife. I'm able to really express myself with it. I joke and say if they nuke Philadelphia next week, I can glue zombies onto it and get a movie deal out of it (laughs). It's just my thing.

On the commentary track for Land of the Dead you say you're surprised at some of the stuff people read into your films, about zombies evolving or an ongoing story. If you're not putting this stuff in, why do you think so many people are getting these same ideas?
You reviewed the commentary track? (laughs) I gotta be more careful with those. No, the long story is definitely there. Actually, after I made Land of the Dead, even though I like it and Universal let me make the movie I wanted to make, when I sat back and looked at it I said, "Whoa! It's getting too Thunderdome. Where am I going to go next? Planet of the Apes? Beyond the Planet of the Apes?" I did have that feeling. I mean, what are you going to do? It's 10 years later and I'm going to try to do a film that pretends to be a sequel even though it's not a sequel, so what am I going to do? I'm going to advance the zombies and make them a bit more—not intelligent but a bit more organized. All of that was part of that disappointment, and what I wanted to do was just go back to the beginning.

I think that what I was referring to on that commentary track was I thought the first film, Night of the Living Dead, was given way too much credit. I mean, it's been called essential American cinema! Me and a bunch of my friends made this little movie trying to push the envelope a little bit. The biggest element was we cast Duane Jones. I shouldn't even say we cast him. Duane was willing to play that role, and he happened to be the best actor from among our friends. He also happened to be an African-American. When we wrote the script, we were thinking of this guy as a white guy, and we thought, "This is hip. This is how we show that we're hip, by not changing it." Meantime, Duane was hyper-sensitive to it. He was saying, "You're asking me to slug this white woman -- do you know what's going to happen to me when I walk out of the theater?" And we're going, "Hey, man, it's the '60s, forget about it." Can you believe we're still talking about the same shit? It's just unbelievable. Anyway, a lot of that was completely accidental.

You mentioned doing Stephen King adaptations. Do you approach writing differently when you've been hired to write for another director?
Completely. Every word I write, I wonder what are people going to think about it. Whereas, if I'm adapting something, I can say, "Ahhh, they'll blame Steve." It's so much easier. The only obligation you have is to stick with his purpose and you don't have to question your own. As long as you have an open pipeline to that person, you can ask, "What'd ya mean by this?" and then try to stick with that. It's just a hell of a lot easier. Whereas, when you're sitting there with a blank page and you know that everybody's going to blame you for this, it's just harder. Because you question too much. And that's the thing. When we made Night of the Living Dead, we were young guys. We were devil-may-care, put it out there, whatever happens, happens. Even when I made the second film, I didn't want to make a second zombie film, because so much had been written about Night. I said, "How can I make a second movie unless I feel I'm really saying something?" I felt obligated, I felt worried. Is it going to live up to the old one?

Do you write looser scripts for yourself to direct?
No, because it's not just you. It's all the department heads. They need to know exactly what to bring to set each day. I learned over the years that if I want a bottle of Fiji water instead of a bottle of Evian, I need to put that in the script. I've actually written production scripts that are longer than the scripts we present for financing, because I want to put those details in there. The biggest reason that I like films that I've made is because they've come closest to what's on the page.

Cameras are everywhere these days. I don't even think you can buy a phone anymore without a camera in it. With that in mind, why did you take that extra step to make these kids film students in Diary of the Dead?
I just thought it was the best way to start the story. It was the most explainable way to have a bunch of characters out there that happened to have a real camera. It's one of those ideas that comes to you in the shower, and I just went with it.

You use a lot of footage from recent real world tragedies like Katrina. What inspired such a direct political comment?
Y'know, we made the film and our object on set was to get through the principal action with the main characters. We said to ourselves, "We can finish the movie later!" That was Peter Grunwald and myself. I want to include him in this deception (laughs). Michael Doherty, the editor, showed us hours of footage, and we tried to find stuff that was pertinent. Then we wrote dialogue—Debra's narration, newscaster voices, all this stuff, and tried it on for size. We finally came up with a soundtrack that we thought was appropriate. Then we added the images that we thought were appropriate to the soundtrack. Then we said, "Wait a minute. All these voices are us." It was Peter and me and Michael and my girlfriend. We can't just have four voices on here. That's why we called Steve King and Quentin [Tarantino] and other people and said, "Would you be willing to do a news voice?"

I loved the idea of having this quilt, because it's about media. The idea of having a quilt of images that people sort of recognize. Katrina you recognize, some of the others you don't. Some of the stuff from Palestine. You don't quite recognize it, but it's familiar and it gives you this ring of "this is what I've been seeing for the past 20 years." There's even an atom bomb in there. It's a bit subliminal, but it's actually there.

Is it true you're already thinking about a sequel?
Yes, except we don't know if it's going to happen. You never know. Tomorrow I might be at Disneyland. I don't know (chuckles).

Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.

George Romero, Diary of the Dead courtesy The Weinstein Company

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