The George Romero Interview
A BBC Interview about Dawn of the dead converted by Gareth Murfin.
What about Dawn of the Dead?
I had made Night of the Living Dead back in 1968 and I really didn't wanna return to it even though originally I wrote it as a short story and it had 3 parts. 90% of the story was the first part, which became Night of the Living Dead. Then the second part was a couple of pages which took the world into a transition where this had become a worldwide phenomenon and we were the vanishing humans - mortal humans were the vanishing society. The 3rd part of the story was just one short paragraph long where the zombies had taken over.

We knew people that owned this shopping mall in Pittsburg and I said you know, this really sort of does it for me - this is a way to do an '80s update on Night. Then I suddenly got the conceit that boy, it'd be nice to do one of these every decade and try to reflect the differences, not only texturally on the surface of the film but also differences in the heads of the people. So I wrote a script and I don't think I would have ever got it made because it was brutal and also very garish and silly in places. It was sort of the Bee Gees meet Night of the Living Dead or something. I was trying to go for that sort of '80s "All I wanna do is keep on dancing" attitude - more of a comic book than the first one.

I don't think anyone would have gotten it except Dario Argento approached us - an Italian director - and we showed him the script and he said Oh, you know, I'd love to, I'll be the first money in on this. Basically he caused the movie to happen, and after the financing that came from Italy through him, we were able to come back to the States and raise the balance of what we needed from private individuals.

He was an admirer?
Yes, Dario's always been a good friend and he loves the genre. I'm very grateful to him for that and for later collaborations. The only one that ever came to screen was something called Two Evil Eyes but I've always thought of Dario as a really sort of operatic, very, very interesting person and film maker. It's funny because I think our styles are so different but I guess he enjoyed some of the things that I'd done and I'd enjoyed his at the time - Deep Red (Profondo Rosso), and Crystal Plumage and so on. At that time he was making Suspiria and I just thought that was almost Michael Powell-ish. It was just so tremendous visually and texturally. So we had a lot to talk about and he helped us out a lot in those transitional years.

How come he's such a nice guy and makes these films?
All the people that I know that work in the most brutal horror are not at all that way. Maybe there is something about getting rid of it, getting rid of those tensions or being able to express it some other way. Stephen King says that horror writers don't have nightmares because they give them all to you, and maybe there's something to that because many of the people I know - Stephen, Peter Straub, Dario, John Carpenter - you meet these guys and they're saying grace at the dinner table and they're just the sweetest people in the world! It's either repression or a healthy release!
What's your attraction to horror?
When I was growing up the horror films that I was allowed to see, and then at high school, the ones that we sneaked off to see, always stopped short of the punchline. And it seemed ridiculous to me. You know that the vampire is biting that person (vampirism was big because that bite on the neck almost looks like a kiss so they were able to get away with that one) but all you ever saw after were the 2 little holes, very neat and clean.

Most of the horror stuff that was made just never went that extra step. And it's really part of the job of that genre to rattle your cage and create an environment that is not the environment that you're in. It's meant to shake that world up, particularly if you're using it as an allegory or as some form of criticism of the way things are.

Probably the biggest problem that I've always had with horror is that things are restored to normality in the end! Whereas the whole genre is meant to bring down reality, or destroy it or at least discuss it, attack it. And when you're writing a novel, like Stephen King does, he can take 5 pages and describe in great medical detail what's happening to this person's body as it's slashed apart or whatever - and that's an important part of the genre. Putting that into film seemed to me essential to doing something that was complete.

Will the people you want to convert watch your movies in the first place?
It's sort of like rock and roll music. I mean the people that enjoy it are people that are already converted, but I think that you have to hope for a creeping kind of push on the envelope. Some people like roller coaster rides some don't. Some people like hot peppers and some don't. And most people don't like horror films or are repelled by them, even distributors (except if it happens to be in one of those brief windows where they're making money!) There's a great discrimination against horror films but I think it's a valid form and I think by continually pushing it and pushing it and pushing it you are having some kind of an influence.

People write about it and very often criticism lives longer than the work itself. You just hope that what you're saying is going to be noticed because much of the audience in theatres is not really thinking about what's underlying it. They're just on the ride.

Take us through the visual style
I was trying to do a more of a comic book, visual treatment of it. The blood is very red, bright red, flowering out behind somebody's head or out of a terrible squib where you can actually see the wires before it goes off. We weren't exactly state of the art in those days, but what we were going for was just this garish kind of EC comic book kind of a look where peoples' brains were flying. None of that stuff was particularly threatening. I think that the scenes where people are being pulled apart are grotesque more than terrifying. I mean they're just ugly. It's almost grande guignole.
There is some very effective stuff where Tom Savini was really able to do some wonderful bites. I'll never forget near the beginning in the sequence where they go into a project building and this woman gets bitten in the neck. They were such striking effects that I think it set the tone for the whole movie. In some ways they were the most realistic effects in the whole film, they happened right up front there. And those are the ones that really make you hurt. I thought that worked pretty well, but even then, compared to some things that you see now, it's not particularly disturbing.

I think to horror fans it's the part of the ride that you go for. It's why you're there and you're always disappointed when it doesn't happen well or when it's just too much pyrotechnics and not actually part of the message of the film. I'm not gonna go try to use the CD technology just to see how far we can go with these effects nowadays. I'm not interested in doing effects for the sake of the effects. I think that it's always been part of the genre and I've always missed it in films that need it.

You keep an almost lack of suspense
I don't think of Dawn of the Dead as a suspenseful film or a particularly scary film. I think it's just a roller coaster ride in a way. It's the repetition of the violence - zombies get shot every few minutes in the action parts of the film and you sort of get immune or innured to it. Again that was part of what we were seeing in the 80s - just getting so immune and de-sensitized by the things that we were seeing on television. I was also partly trying to put up this wall of violence and show the military and the hunters just enjoying it. It also it worked to sort of ramp you up toward the really grisly scenes in the end when they're actually tearing people apart, which is the net result of all of this.

Were you and Cronenberg reacting to similar restraints?
David Cronenberg I think worked with similar sensibility. Perhaps he was a little more concerned about the beast within than the zombie films were. I think the zombie films that I made are more about society and people not communicating and so forth, less Jekyll and Hyde; whereas I think David's films are a little more Jekyll and Hyde-ish.

But perhaps there's a collective subconscious - the fact that we were doing those things at the same time. Other film makers were doing the same thing too, but they just never got the notoriety. Unfortunately most horror films are made by people that either have no passion or conviction for the genre and are just doing it because either they had a concept or they were hired by somebody to do it.
What about lack of communication as a theme in your films?
That's a theme that I've always used - this complete lack of communication that we have and a willingness to adopt a position. This sort of tribalism - I think it's white, I think it's black, and there's no attempt to try to figure out any sort of middle ground or build a bridge. That's true in everything from religious wars to the OJ Simpson case. I'm a defence lawyer therefore I'll argue this; I'm a prosecutor, therefore, I'll argue this; and there is no search for the truth. There's this new thing happening in legal circles now which is about advocates of the truth, in other words finding the truth. That's becoming a whole new speciality in trial law, which is a step toward trying to improve this kind of communication.

That's really the problem - whether it's a racial issue or an economic issue, whatever, you take sides and really don't bother to discuss. Politicians are the same way, they just take a position. To me that is the most appalling thing about what we do to each other and so it's a theme that I've worked with particularly in all three of the zombie films; and I've thrown it in here and there in some of the other things that I've done because I think it's really the important problem that we have to solve.

Your characters don't unite in adversity.
Well if you're eight guys on patrol in the jungle and people start shooting at you then you're all gonna shoot back at the same common enemy. But in a situation where things are ambiguous I think there's gonna be at the very least arguing and perhaps at the worst people murdering each other for their point of view. It's not always a black and white situation like "here they come over the hill, we've gotta shoot at them". It's not cowboys and Indians. Most issues aren't that way. Until the shooting starts there is no common enemy, and I think that in trying to decide who the enemy is or even if there is an enemy, that's where we just need to talk and figure out what our strategy is gonna be. Forget figuring out a way to approach it peacefully - just figure out a way to approach it.
What about the music?
Nowadays each suburb has a huge shopping mall, but right then it was just the beginning of that mall culture where you went there and you hung out all day. And my impression walking through there, particularly at Christmas time, was of going through this sort of ritualistic, unnatural kind of shopping or consuming experience. It seemed to me like we really do become zombies in here.

And the way the music was just that lulling kind of music, or bad versions of everything from Beatles tunes to Lawrence Welk standards, just all went into this unbelievable feeling of surrealism. I'm in another world or I'm in another planet or something. The moving sidewalks - everything about it was just so kind of hypnotic. It seemed like there was almost nothing real there unless somebody slapped their kid, or had an argument, or didn't like the pizza. There were little moments of humanity, but most of the time it's just sort of riding along. It's like the little characters in the Disney Small World ride. You're just going through it and characters are there being exactly what they're supposed to be. And it just said - wow this is exactly where I want this film to be. And of course the zombies in the end of the film, where they're actually wandering around in that mall they really sort of look like those shoppers looked, sort of clumsily knocking down bottles and not cleaning them up. I just found it funny! And sad in a way - kind of poignant.

Tell us about the Hari Krishna zombie
I thought using the nun and particularly the Hari Krishna zombie was just perfect. These are supposed to be the peace lovers or whatever, and they're just sort of going along the way they do in life on some sort of motor drive. No thought behind it or whatever.

And then the people living upstairs in those quarters and being able to outfit it so elegantly from stuff that was in the mall is sort of what we do. We live somewhere over here while all this violence is going on over there. The world's exploding, the stuff that's happening today, and even then, is appalling, and we just go home. If I ever do another one - the 2000 version - I think that's what it'll be like. Maybe humanity will have come back and we'll be sitting indoors with security guards while the zombies are out in the street, sort of like the homeless. But will we care? As long as we get the valet to bring the car and we can get out of there and not really have to deal with it, we won't care.

What about censors?
You know, there weren't any, any real stories that I really sort of got actively involved in with censors or battles or legal battles or anything like that. I was satisfied that here in the States the distributing company could release the film the way we cut it and you know, didn't rate it, which meant that the MPA didn't even have anything to say about it. So the company was willing to put it out, taking the gamble that its outrageous nature would in fact do well for them even though when you don't rate a film you're basically restricted in the same way that an x-rated film is restricted - you can't advertise in certain newspapers, you can't advertise on prime time television and so forth.

But the film went out here and I was very comfortable about that. I also realised that in most other countries, Great Britain I think, cut more out of it because they saw Dario's version. Dario had the right for European distribution to cut the film and I think he cut the stuff that he thought was not European sensibility. A lot of the humour, and in Britain when they looked at that version they wanted to take 7 or 8 minutes out of it and then when we showed them the American version that's the one time we got involved. We sent them our version they saw the humour in it and I think hopefully actually appreciated it more and they wound up I think taking only 30 or 40 seconds out. So it's, an interesting story. But, you know, we never got involved in battle or anything, we just sent the film over and said here look at it this way, maybe what we're trying to say will be a little clearer.

What are your attitudes to censors?
In general I'm appalled by censorship in any art form, but I do feel that the world is a tinder box and that certain kinds of images on film, television - these incredibly strong mediums, can influence people to behave in a certain way. My hope is that fantasy doesn't do that. Maybe Quentin Tarantino does that more than a zombie would. But I can't even say that. How can you? It's unarguable. I don't think these things should be shown to children. I don't mind a rating system if it's a fair rating system because I think it's reasonable to inform people about what they're going to see.

Unfortunately most boards of censorship or most rating panels become very political, and it's like everything else, it's very hard to find a kind of a common ground. I had high hopes that video would provide finally a big enough shelf so that you could have 50 categories and people would be able to go wherever they wanted to go. I mean I actually am worried about images that I put out now. I used to not care. Maybe it's because I have children of my own now, but it does make you worry when you see behaviour on the streets. I don't think that's a reason to restrict the work at all. I think there needs to be a reasonable way of distributing the work but I think there does have to be some responsibility. I don't think you can legislate it, I think it has to be home rule, but unfortunately there's just as big a battle between the filmmakers and the distributors as there is between the the right wingers and the left wingers. So... it's a difficult situation.

George Romero Dawn of the dead interview - Converted from a BBC Interview for Gaz's Dawn of the dead website By Gareth Murfin. Image Quality reduced for smaller image sizes & transparency.