George A. Romero on Survival of the Dead, Gore Fatigue and Dreams of a Zombie Noir

There's a potentially incendiary line in this film: "Small towns give birth to small people." Is that something we should take at face value?

[Laughs] I don't think so. For me it was more of a character line -- it was his attitude about it. I wasn't trying to preach with that or necessarily say that. It was more him; I don't think I was trying to say that as a general rule. I don't think so. Maybe?

Andy Warhol famously said of Pittsburgh -- his hometown, and yours -- that it was a small town from which he had to escape. What's your relationship with the city in 2010?

I'm not there any more. I haven't been there.

Yet a significant portion of the film -- and all of the previous one -- is set in Pennsylvania.

Yeah, it starts in Philly and ends somewhere off Delaware. But I've been living in Toronto for five years now. I wish I could say it's political, but it wasn't. Peter [Grunwald, Romero's producing partner] went up to shoot a film... it's a long story. We were in Hollywood in development hell for a while. Then we ran away. I had an idea for a small film, and Peter found the financing. And we went to Canada. We found people we love to work with. The guy who shot that little film shot this film. We're still with the same group of friends and collaborators up there. Then I got a girlfriend. I just wound up staying there. It was just situational; not political at all. But I love it -- it's not going to go away. Pittsburgh went away for a while, you know? All my buddies that I used to work with followed the money to L.A. or New York or Chicago -- wherever the action was. But once we shot a film up there, I fell in love with the place. It's a kinder, gentler nation, number one. I'm a permanent resident. Still a U.S. citizen, though.

This is the goriest Dead film in a while. How much of an imperative do you feel to keep pushing that envelope?

I'm a bit more uncertain about that now than I used to be. Initially I felt... Like, if you see the movie version of M*A*S*H, you laugh your ass off for 90 minutes, and then all of the sudden you're in the O.R., and it's just... [Widens eyes] It's just a slap in the face. I felt that I was kind of doing that. But then two of the films -- Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead -- were released unrated, so I got this rep. The distributor wanted to release them unrated, and wanted them to be as hard as they could be. So I got this reputation, and now it's almost like a mandate, right? So I'm a little uncertain about it now. I don't mind it, and I never have. I mean, I grew up on EC Comic books when they were hard as nails, before the comics code. That stuff used to make me giggle, you know? Using a guy's heart for third base in a baseball game? I mean, come on! That's what I grew up with. I chuckled all the way through it. I've never had a problem with it. But I don't think I would be quite so insistent about it if it wasn't a signature. It's really hard to define how I feel about it. Purely left to my own devices, I don't know if I'd use as much of it.

But the effects have improved so much as well, even in the last 20 years let alone the decades before that. How much does that inspire you to innovate with this stuff?

Not as much as the computer stuff. There are some things you just can't do. Tom Savini cannot melt a guy's head down with acid in a single shot. The computers allow you to do things that are more fun, more Looney Tunes. There's a gag in this one with a fire extinguisher. Actors won't let you do that to them! So that's pretty fun. I would prefer if we could use more mechanical prosthetic effects, but the problem is it's hugely time consuming. The most expensive [part of the budget] is your time on the set -- especially when you're working with limited budgets. You want to get off the set as quickly as possible. So it's much easier to use the computer stuff; it gets you out of there. It allows you to do a film that's this complex in 25 days. in the old days we used to just stretch the money and get 40 days out of it, 50 days out of it. It was an amazing difference. The only thing I think has really changed over the years is time. Salary scales, the cost of everything... it all comes out of the time.

Has horror lost its way? You're having fun with this movie, but there are so few fun horror films anymore.

There aren't, are there? Everything's so mean-spirited. I don't know. "Lost its way"? Has it ever had a way? The biggest disappointment to me is that nobody's using it as allegory. It's not in your face, anyway. Like what you were saying about Hostel. It didn't hit me that way. It just seemed mean-spirited; it's torture porn of some kind. I don't get it. Allegory is gone from it, romance is gone from it, fun is gone from it. Again, those EC Comic books... those were so much fun. They just kept cracking these lousy jokes; you giggled while you barfed, you know? [Laughs, grabs his eyeglasses]

What's the story behind those eyeglass frames? Those might be your real signature.

I know, isn't it weird? I just found them once. [Puts them on] I have good peripheral vision through them! They're big! I can see! Peter found these frames online somewhere, so I finally got a couple new pairs. It's all about peripheral vision, all about peripheral vision. They don't get in the way.

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