The 70-year-old auteur sat down with Movieline recently to discuss what ideas made the Survival cut, his William Wyler influence, his second thoughts about having revolutionized gore, and just how hard it is to find those signature eyeglass frames.
How are you?
Fine. [Pauses]
I'll take your word for it.
Obviously, this is not my favorite part of the process. I'd rather be off shooting. But, uh... hello!
Well! On that note: After 40 years do you just run out of ways to explain what this genre -- this particular franchise -- means?
I don't know. I made the second film, and it was only then that I thought, "I can have fun with this. I can talk about other things, I can poke fun at society." The first film was angry, and it seemed to be about more than it was actually about, in a way. It's been overanalyzed to death. But I actually got this conceit that I could do this every once in a while and have fun. I could talk about things I like to talk about, express myself and give my opinions on things. And bring the zombies out. It's easy to get it financed. I don't know. Maybe I'm the Michael Moore of horror. That's what it's been for me. But it's just great fun. I grew up on EC Comics; I love doing this stuff. I can't get enough of it. They're really fun to do -- except for the weather. That'll bite you in the ass.
You've said your films "need to be about something." Themes I picked up from Survival are war, class warfare, immigration, gender roles... Is there one message in particular that you wanted to assign more weight than the others?
I think enmities that don't die. Is it Ireland? Is it the Middle East? Is it the Senate? It's just that: People can't disagree without being disagreeable. It's more universal. It's not necessarily about today. I mean, it is -- I think all of North America could use an anger management course right now. But that's not what spawned it, in a certain sense. It needed to be a more universal theme. It basically exists because Diary of the Dead made a lot of money, and so it was, "Pick a topic." I do have this conceit to do a couple more; I'd like to do this as a set of films. I planted a couple seeds in there that I'd like to keep working on.
Anything you can elaborate on?
No. But they do eat a horse!
Well, yeah, I was going to say -- without giving too much away -- the implication here is that the series is winding down. Are you in your endgame?
Oh, no. I don't know. End it? No. I don't know. Of course at some point I'm going to stop, so at least my films will stop. But no. I never want to go to the point where the zombies rule the world or anything like that, or go beyond Thunderdome. The stories are really people stories. They're classified as zombie films, but the zombies are really just, like, mosquitoes. "There are a lot of mosquitoes out tonight!"
Those are some nasty mosquitoes.
An annoyance, you know? But my stories have always been people stories -- how they respond, how they fail to respond. That's the most fun for me. I would never want to leave that or do the last man on Earth or anything like that.
I read that you were inspired here by the Western The Big Country.
"Inspired by"? No. Well, yes: Once we had the idea of the Hatfields and the McCoys, I remembered the big country. So I got my department heads together -- my production designer, the D.P. and everybody -- and we all sat down and watched The Big Country. It was just an added bit of fun to almost work in a different genre. We did it widescreen, didn't mute the colors, and tried to make it look like William Wyler. Like I say, that's just fun. I'd love to try it again, though I don't know where we'd go. Noir, maybe. That would be great, wouldn't it?
Oh my God. Black and white! Zombies in the shadows!
Maybe I could pull a [Frank] Darabont. I don't think anyone would let me shoot it in black-and-white, but maybe I can make a black-and-white print like with The Mist.
Hide behind it? I don't know; I haven't seen any ideas. Maybe ideas are hiding behind the guy with the knife.
Well, let's take Eli Roth, who's attempted to explain Hostel away as a commentary on inhumanity, or... something.
Oh, well, God. OK.
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.