[Q&A from an interview with George Romero, originally written for Barnes & Noble.com]
DG: Martin isn’t a typical horror movie. Where did the idea come from?
George Romero: I just wanted to do a vampire thing; it’s a long story. I started with the idea of how difficult a time a vampire would have today, you know, having to update his credit cards and his passport and all of that [laughs]. But I decided that was too frivolous. I didn’t want to do something funny, so I continued to develop the idea. Eventually it became a film more about the monsters inside of us.
DG: It gave you the opportunity to drop an ancient myth into the modern world of junkyards, beat-up station wagons and drab suburban houses. Was that one of the attractions?
GR: Yeah, that was definitely part of it — the idea of a crumbling myth in a crumbling town.
DG: Was it in any way a response to other vampire movies you’d seen?
GR: No, not really. When I made the zombie films, I didn’t go with the usual kind of zombie. I guess I’m always looking for a different twist, trying to update something or reinvent it.
DG: With Martin was that twist the ambiguity of the situation?
GR: Yeah, I really wanted to preserve the ambiguity. I mean, a stake in the heart will kill you whether you’re a vampire or just a mixed up kid. So I wanted to leave it up in the air. I don’t personally believe he’s a vampire. I just went about it trying to make sure I didn’t violate possibilities on either side.
DG: You made Martin with mostly local talent in Pennsylvania, where you live. Did the notoriety and success of Night of the Living Dead help attract a larger community of artists to the area?
GR: I’m sure that it did. In fact, I know it did. But I can’t take credit for all of it; QED [the local PBS station] was doing a lot of production and Fred Rogers from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. That was actually the first film job that I ever had.
DG: What did you do for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood?
GR: Well he used to have a segment called “Picture Picture” where he’d open up a picture frame and show a little movie about how light bulbs were made, etc. You know, little films about how things work and such. And I did those.
DG: Oh, you directed them?
GR: Yeah.
DG: How did you get in there? Had you already been working toward becoming a film director?
GR: Yeah, we were doing commercials, or, rather, we set up a shop to do commercials. But the first job we got wasn’t a commercial at all; it was for Mr. Rogers.
DG: So that’s where you learned the technical skills you needed to make movies?
GR: Well, when I was first learning, cities the size of Pittsburgh all had 35mm and 16mm labs because the news was on film; there was no such thing as tape. So there were three labs here, and that’s really where I learned. The guys at the labs let me hang around and help out, and I learned the basic use of the equipment. Then during my commercial days, we shot wide-screen 35mm. I mean, commercial budgets are still some of the biggest budgets I’ve ever had [laughs].
DG: So what was the critical reaction to Martin at the time of its release?
GR: It got really good reviews — from Time and Newsweek, for example. Really good reviews, it just didn’t make any money. It didn’t have terrific distribution, to say the least, and it wound up playing midnight shows. It got most of its audience that way.
DG: Do you think people were maybe expecting another zombie picture from you and were perplexed by efforts such as Martin and Jack’s Wife, with their suburban settings?
GR: I didn’t get too much of that. I’m lucky because I’ve been able to do — particularly in the early days — films the way I really want to do them. I’ve always felt that the real horror is next door to us, that the scariest monsters are our neighbors. That was true with the shopping mall scene in Dawn of the Dead, and it’s been a theme throughout my work. Then later I got to collaborate with Stephen King (Creepshow,The Dark Half), and that’s his style too — to bring the horror into our own homes, to fill the stories with brand names that we all use, beers that we like to drink, streets that look like our own. I think it’s much more effective that way rather than just doing some gothic exercise and trying to revamp it with bigger special effects. I don’t know why they bother remaking those kind of things. They wind up being nothing more than eye candy.
DG: What was your attraction to horror in the beginning?
GR: When I grew up it was right at that lucky time when they were rereleasing all of the classic monster movies of the ’30s. Films like Frankenstein and Dracula were playing on double bills when I was a kid, so I got to see them on the big screen. After that came all the nuclear fear movies — giant ants, giant tarantulas, all that stuff. And so few of them were any good, really. There were some I really liked, like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Hawks’s The Thing (1951). I also used to read E.C. comic books pretty heavily, but that was just frivolous stuff, that just gives you the basic vocabulary. Eventually, I started to appreciate horror more, and all kinds of fantasy, as a way to have fun and still be able to get at least some of your views out there. It basically is just much easier to do in a fantasy context. And I was also influenced by things like Tales of Hoffman, the Michael Powell film. That’s the movie, I think, that made me want to make movies. I just thought it was beautiful, and here were people going to listen to opera, but, in my mind, they were watching a horror film. So, I guess that combination of influences had an effect on me.
DG: It’s been nearly ten years since you last had a film released (1991′s The Dark Half). Can you talk a little bit about what’s led to this extended hiatus?
GR: Well, I was right at my peak. I had made more money on The Dark Half than I ever had before, and I was getting all kinds of phone calls. So my partner and I signed a contract at New Line Cinema. They paid us a lot of money, gave us offices… but they never produced a movie for us during our two years there. All we came away with was one property, a ghost story called Before I Wake, and my partner got MGM interested in it before we left New Line. So then MGM took another two years to develop it. Finally, we had everything in place. The production was set in motion: Sets were designed, we had the staff. But by that time the studio had forced more special effects into the script, and it had kicked the budget up to the point where they thought that it was cast-dependent. It was a very short list of acceptable actors that they gave us, and, when a few declined, the studio began to think that maybe something was wrong with the project. Then just as that project stalled, Universal green-lighted us on The Mummy. But MGM decided they wouldn’t let us out of our contract, and we lost The Mummy too. So, just like that, five years had passed with nothing to show for it.
DG: Was that the Mummy that was just recently made with Brendan Fraser?
GR: Yeah, but our budget wasn’t 100 million bucks; it was like 12 million. So then along comes Twentieth Century Fox, suddenly showing interest in Before I Wake. Another two years pass and we go through 12 more drafts and special effects tests and everything, but, as the project kept moving from studio to studio, it kept incurring costs. We were basically 7 million in the hole before we even got into preproduction. So it was really cast-dependent at this point. Just to show you how cast-dependent it was, they wouldn’t make the film with Gwyneth Paltrow in the lead. I mean, she wasn’t the star she is now, but still….
DG: So, after all those lost years, how did you get back on track?
GR: After everything fell apart, I sort of gave up on Hollywood. I decided I was going to go back to making smaller, more personal movies. I wrote a script called Bruiser, and it took us about a year to find someone who understood it, because it’s not at all an obvious thing.
DG: How would you describe it?
GR: It’s about a guy who’s a good soldier and does everything he thinks he’s supposed to do in order to get ahead in life. He’s on his way up the ladder, but he has to eat a lot of shit. And one day, he wakes up and finds that his face has disappeared. Believing that he’s lost his identity, he becomes a kind of avenging angel or maybe devil is a better word for it.
DG: Before I let you go, I’d like to ask you about this whole mythical Twilight of the Dead project I’ve heard about. People say you’re working on a final chapter to your zombie series. Does it exist?
GR: No. I cracked a joke about that once, and I think that’s how people picked it up. For a long time I had this idea that I’d do one Dead film in each of the last four decades. And I jokingly said that maybe the last one should be called Twilight of the Dead, or, better yet, Brunch of the Dead, because I figured that the ’90s were all about ignoring problems anyway. But it’s never going to happen. The rights are so convoluted now; there must be eight different companies involved. To make another Dead film, I’d probably have to find a new way to make zombies. I’d have to reinvent them all over again.
August 8, 2000