Feb 13, 2008 - George A Romero will always be known as the filmmaker with an affection for – some may even call it an obsession with – zombies. It definitely wasn’t what Romero had in mind when he began making movies, but he knows the undead will always be connected to his name. “I'd love to be able to go in and pitch another kind of film and be taken seriously, but I'm generally not taken seriously,” admitted Romero. “If I were to walk in there with a little romantic comedy, they'd say, ‘What?’ So that's a bit frustrating because you don't grow up wanting to be a horror filmmaker. You grow up wanting to be a filmmaker, and I wish I had a wider range. I tried early on to do several films that were not genre and nine people saw them, so I don't have the credentials in that regard.”
“There's a bit of frustration there, but on the other side of that coin, and far outweighing it, is the fact that I've been able to use genre fantasy horror and be able to express my opinion, talk a little bit about society, do a little bit of satire, and that's been great, man. A lot of people don't have that platform. So, I don't know. I joke and say maybe I'm the Michael Moore of horror, but it's wonderful to have that ability. It's sort of my niche. I can go in and do what I want to do.”
Romero’s latest venture into the land of flesh-eating slow-walkers, Diary of the Dead, follows a group of college students participating in a student film who hear reports that the dead are coming back to life. Instead of putting down the cameras, the budding filmmakers/actors chronicle the zombie attacks while trying to stay alive.
Romero explained the genesis of Diary of the Dead: “I made a film just a few years ago called Land of the Dead. It was my fourth zombie film that I made. I was pretty satisfied with it and I know that some of my fans were not. When I looked at it, even though Universal really left me alone to make that movie the way I wanted to make it and it wound up being pretty much largely the film I wanted to make, when I turned around and looked at it it seemed so big. It was Thunderdome, or it was approaching Thunderdome, and I didn't know where to go from there. I had this sort of track going, the zombies were sort of learning and evolving but this movie was so big, I just couldn't envision what to do next.”
“Before we shot Land of the Dead I had this idea that I wanted to do something about emerging media. I thought, ‘Well, that's a way to get back and do something really inexpensive and simple and see if I have the chops and the stamina to go back and make another little guerilla movie and relate back again to the origins of the thing.’ That's where it came from. I had this idea that I could use film students out shooting a school project when zombies begin to walk, and they document it. I wanted to do the subjective camera thing. This is before I knew that anybody else was working on it. I didn't know about DePalma. I didn't know about Cloverfield or anything else. I thought we were going to be the first guys out there with one of these,” said Romero.
Because the story is told from the perspective of whichever character is behind the video camera, Romero says Diary of the Dead required more discipline than anything he’d done before. Shots had to be extensively choreographed, and Romero has nothing but praise for his director of photography, Adam Swica, who he says did a great job of making it seem as though film school students running for their lives shot the footage. “I wanted it to be theatrical. The one thing about this is I think it walks that line, maybe unsuccessfully, I'm not sure,” explained Romero about his decision to use a director of photography rather than have the actors actually shoot the film. “It might be a little too arch and a little too theatrical, but I didn't want it to be Blair Witch. Blair Witch was dizzying to me and it didn't quite make sense, so I wanted to explain a little more.”
“I wanted it to have some traditional elements, more gothic elements in it which requires a bit more staging and a bit more just carefully constructed plot. Not only plot elements, but production elements. I guess that's also one of the things that really is disappointing to me, that a lot of films these days sort of leave those values out. I went to see Atonement and I expected to need a tissue. It didn't happen. That same week, Turner Classic Movies showed Brief Encounter. You laugh at the style, you laugh at the techniques and everything else for 90 minutes, and then at the end of the film, there's a tear in your eye. I find that films are hollow that way today. People are afraid of that. Not that this film is an emotional film in that same way, but I like some of the old sort of gothic values. We were trying to walk that line and put some of that in, at the same time make it feel free and easy.”
Page 2: On Zombies and 'I Am Legend'
