ovie remakes are tricky business. Especially when the original film is a beloved classic of its genre and the new director isn't yet a proven talent. Zack Snyder survived just such a gauntlet with his version of Dawn of the Dead, a remake of George Romero's 1979 zombie epic. Much like the original film, the story follows a group of survivors who hole up in the commercial refuge of a shopping mall to fend off attacking swarms of zombies.
Making his directorial debut with the film, Snyder faced real-life opposition from fans of the 1979 version as the project went into production, despite a cast of acclaimed character actors, which includes Sarah Polley (Go), Ving Rhames (Dark Blue), Jake Weber (Meet Joe Black) and Mekhi Phifer (Honey). Once the fan opposition was overcome, Snyder and his cast dedicated themselves to making a visceral interpretation of the original picture that paid tribute to Romero's gruesome masterpiece while winning a whole new generation of disciples.
Dawn of the Dead is distributed by Universal Pictures and opens on March 19. Snyder, along with Polley, Rhames, Weber, Phifer and executive producer Eric Newman, sat down recently for a press conference to discuss the challenges of bringing this new incarnation of Dead to life. Universal Pictures is owned by Vivendi Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Eric Newman, what was the initial opposition to this remake of Dawn of the Dead like?
Newman: In the beginning, there was a lot of angry people. There was an online petition that was sent to us with a few thousand signatures on it asking us not to do it. I think we always saw it as a challenge. There was definitely an audience that we were very careful not to alienate. We did this movie because we were fans of the genre, and Romero, I think he created and defined the genre, and so as hard as it was in the beginning to read the horrible things about the movie and us personally, it was also nice to slowly win them over and watch the tide turn as the script got out there, and then the early marketing materials got out there, and then they read about our cast.
I can't say enough about how fantastic our cast was, how lucky we were to get the actors we got. I didn't believe that we could get any of these people, and we got everyone we wanted: our first choice across the board, which almost never happens. And one of the things Zack said very early on was this has to be as serious as a heart attack. ... What's going to separate this movie from some of the B movies is the quality of the drama, the quality of the acting, the quality of the pathos, the scenes, all of these things that were really important to us. They were also very important to George Romero, and he did an excellent job in all three films, addressing and preserving these things, and we did the same thing, I think.
What eventually convinced Richard Rubenstein, owner of the film rights to the original Dawn, that your version would stay true to Romero's vision?
Newman: Richard had been approached a couple of times and turned down requests to remake the movie. He owns the movie, and he loves the movie and wants to protect the movie. We called him in 2000 or 2001 and pitched him the idea of this, and we promised him that we would maintain a level of integrity that he and we felt the movie deserved. He was a great advocate for the legions of Romero fans who were at first very put off by the idea of us doing this film and I think who have gradually been won over. And I think they're going to appreciate the finished product.
How involved was Romero once the project went underway?
Newman: Richard and George have a relationship that goes back over 30 years, and they had conversations about it, but George was not involved. I think George wishes us well, but he was not a consultant in any way, and we really didn't get a take from him on it. I think he's hoping that it succeeds, because I think that it only bodes well for him and future zombie movies. It's good for the genre, but as far as any involvement from him, I had no contact with him.
Zack Snyder, can you talk about the ways in which you updated Romero's zombies for modern audiences?
Snyder: For me, it wasn't a question of oh, that's dated, we've got to change that, let's redo this because it was broken. I just felt like the movie relied on the threat being credible and being scary, and I also felt like the aggression and the sort of personality of the zombies, I just wanted them to be a little bit more in your face and a little bit more "They are the enemy."
In the original movie, zombies are the threat, but you end up that the humans are the real enemy, where in this adventure you end up with the zombies themselves that are the things that we need to fear. There's no way around them or past them or through them, and in order to do that I just felt like they needed to move quickly. At the beginning that was a big deal. When everybody saw the zombies could move quickly, we got a lot of backlash like, "Oh, the zombies move quickly! They suck!," but I think as people have watched it you start to understand that they pose their own threat.
There's a moment in the movie where Sarah's character is driving away from her home, and her husband's chasing her down the street, and he's running, and then he sees a neighbor, and he just like peels off and starts to get her, and there's just sort of randomness to the whole thing. ... That moment to me kind of sums up what they are about. They have a very clear focus, a bloodlust.
Ving Rhames, what in Dawn of the Dead's script attracted your attention?
Rhames: I read the script, and what I liked about it was, I thought that it's bringing people from different ethnicities, different cultures together who need each other. So when I read the script I had no concept of what the zombies would look like. I just said, "It's interesting to find these groups of characters in the situation."
And then I looked at Zack's reel—he has a very good commercial reel—and what I did was I turned down the volume and just watched how he moved the camera and how the camera told the story. After that, I said, "You know, I think this guy has a lot of potential, and I'd like to be a part of the project."
How aware of the original film's political tones were you when you joined the production?
Rhames: I didn't see the original, and in general I'm not a fan of the horror genre. But originally when I read this script, what really stood out to me was the fact that unfortunately I find many times in life, it takes an atrocity to occur for us to work together as a country, as a nation and as the world environment. And so, what really touched me about this piece is that if we can put aside skin color and race and culture and ethnicity and just work together, why do we only work together when an atrocity happens? Maybe if I can love you and you can love me now, maybe we can make the world a better place for our children, and we don't have to wait for an atrocity to occur.
I think that God or the universe sometimes says, "OK, you guys don't want to love one another? Here's an earthquake. Oh, you still don't love one another? Here's a famine. Here's a flood. Here's 9/11." So hopefully that's a subliminal message of the film, but for me, probably most importantly, that's why I decided to do it.
Since you haven't been in a horror movie since 1991's The People Under the Stairs, was it difficult to give your character a basis in reality?
Rhames: I find that something that Stanislavsky said, that if you stay true to the moment-to-moment reality of the given circumstances of that situation, and if the actors commit 100 percent, you'll always be fine with whatever the outcome is: humor, drama, tragedy, what have you.
Sarah Polley, how difficult was it for you to make a transition from smaller, independent projects like The Sweet Hereafter to a studio film like Dawn of the Dead?
Polley: You know, I never ever thought I would be in a movie of this size. I met with Zack and Eric one night at a restaurant near my house, and they convinced me they were going to make a really sort of daring, sick, twisted movie that was going to be true to the allegory of consumerism that was in the original. I loved them, and I believed they were going to make a great movie, and if it was a big disaster, I'd be with people I'd be willing to go down with.
As we were shooting, I often wondered what was I doing. But I saw the movie last night for the first time, and I was shocked to see that the movie was exactly what they described to me that first time. Completely sick and twisted and made by incredibly perverse people.
What was your most frightening moment on set?
Polley: The most frightening moment for me was the second day, when I realized I was going to have to run every day. That was horrifying. The poker through the eye, I couldn't do that as many times as Zack would have liked me to. It made me, I was going to puke if I had done it again.
Jake Weber, how difficult was it for you to access real human emotion in an effects-driven piece like this?
Weber: I find fear a pretty accessible emotion, so it wasn't hard to generate it.
What about the material attracted you?
Weber: I think one of the best things about [the film] is, the character development in the movie is just touched on, you get just a little bit of it, and just enough so you get the idea, but it's not dwelled on, there's nothing sentimental about it, there's nothing maudlin, there's nothing like where you would go, "Oh my God, what are these people doing? They would never do that, what, they're falling in love and there are zombies everywhere, and they're going to like, flirt?" All of that stuff, you know, it's just enough that you care about the people, you believe, you know who they are, they're people that you know, but it doesn't detract from the real thing, which is killer zombies.
Mekhi Phifer, how did you become a part of this cast?
Phifer: I'm not a big horror buff, but I'm a big fan of good movies, and when I read the script I was really intrigued. I knew it had some in-depth characters and could be different than something people were used to seeing. I wanted to be a part of something like Dawn of the Dead, which is like a classic, and I wanted to make it a classic again.
How did you develop your character and bring depth to the role?
Phifer: It's just like Ving said, it could be anything outside of those doors, you know, that's what makes me keep it real. If we all got trapped into a situation, no matter what it was that would kill us or unleash our demise, we would have to band together. So I think keeping that in mind, I mean everybody knows there's no such thing as zombies, or at least we hope not, but it's not about the zombies. They're more of a backdrop to these characters and these situations.
Having completed production, what is the secret from an acting standpoint to making an effective, unironic horror film when movies like those in the Scream series have debunked the formulas and cliches of the genre?
Polley: I think it takes a lot more nerve to not be in on the joke. I saw it with an audience last night, and people were kind of shocked, because we're so used to that kind of ironic, tongue-in-cheek [approach], like we're all way too sophisticated to actually be scared. I think that era has had its day, and I think people actually want to experience real things in theaters again. And I think that it's really brave to make a movie that isn't just making fun of itself the whole time. And it's funnier, actually.
Zack, what's your opinion from a production standpoint?
Snyder: We didn't care. There are tons of cliches out there about "This is scary, that's scary, zombie movies, whatever," how you frighten someone. Those cliches are tried and true. But instead of say avoiding those, and saying, "Oh, God, if I do that people are going to think I made a movie that can be made fun of," the movie can be made fun of. That's the point in a lot of ways. We just sort of said, "Let's just do what we want to do and not care so much."
You can imagine that when we were given this opportunity, what people were expecting us to do was take Dawn of the Dead, the original, which is a bumpy, gangly thing, just polish off the edges of it and turn it into a nice, smooth PG ball and just hand it back. And I think we avoided doing that. What we did was just say, "You know what? Let's just have fun, let's just go nuts and see what we've got." And that, to me, is the best ride for the audience.
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Also in this issue:
The cast and crew of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
