ard to believe now, but there was a time before the dead walked the earth, when corpses rotted in their graves and the living did not fear being eaten alive. That time was the 1960s, before a young independent filmmaker in Pittsburgh named George A. Romero scraped together $100,000 in 1968 to shoot a black-and-white movie about zombies, Night of the Living Dead, that gave birth to a new form of graphic horror movies.
Nearly 40 years later, Romero, now 65, is still bringing the dead to life, and on June 24 audiences will return to the Land of the Dead for the first time in two decades. In Land of the Dead, writer/director Romero picks up the mythology he last visited in 1985's Day of the Dead. The belated sequel is set in an apocalyptic world, where the dead roam freely and the last human survivors have retreated behind the cordons of a walled city. Mercenaries, led by Riley (Simon Baker), Cholo (John Leguizamo) and Slack (Asia Argento), set out nightly to procure supplies in the zombie-infested wasteland, while the wealthy residents of Fiddler's Green, led by Dennis Hopper's Kaufman, dwell in luxury. Meanwhile, unrest is brewing among the residents of the city, while the undead beyond the walls begin to develop a sense of consciousness.
Romero, Baker (TV's The Guardian) and Leguizamo (Ice Age, Assault on Precinct 13) took a moment recently to speak with Science Fiction Weekly and other reporters about Land of the Dead.
George A. Romero, do you feel any pressure coming back to the genre after so long?
Romero: Uh, boy, I don't know. This is the pressure, right here [speaking with reporters]. It wasn't so much pressure. I've done these, sort of few and far between. So I actually started this, the idea for this, before 9/11. ... I had this conceit that I did one in the '60s and '70s and '80s, now I missed the '90s, because ... my partner and I, [producer] Peter [Grunwald], ended up in development hell out here. There was about eight years when nothing happened. Couldn't get a movie made. I ended up making more money in that period, because I worked on all of these sort of high-profile projects, but they never happened. ...
I started to write this, and I ended up having something I thought was presentable, and I sent it around. Right before 9/11, literally a few days before 9/11, and then everybody just wanted to make soft, fuzzy movies. So I put it on the shelf for about a year and a half, and then came back to it with the idea of reflecting, you know, this new normalcy and the war. And so, in a way, it's I think a much more interesting film now. Initially it was about ignoring the problem, and it was the Kaufman [Dennis Hopper] character, and there was Fiddler's Green, but it was more ignoring social ills like AIDS and homelessness and just telling people, you know, don't worry about it, that's their problem. And I think this is more impactful.
This is a political satire?
Romero: I don't try to put it right in your face, I just try to get it in there. Maybe it's a little too on the nose when he says we don't negotiate with terrorists, but I have to say, somebody noticed. A reporter I talked to today said, "Boy, that truck [the armored zombie killer Dead Reckoning], when it comes down that little street in that town, you just can't help but think of Iraq." So I guess the stuff does get noticed. I try not to put it right up in there.
How are you going to follow this up? Is there anything like World of the Dead? And can you talk about your role in Showtime's upcoming horror anthology series Masters of Horror, in which a well-known horror director will helm each episode?
Romero: Yeah, Masters of Horror is something I'm hoping to do. [Executive producer] Mick [Garris is] an old friend, and I'm hoping to do it. It's going to depend, I guess. That's sort of related to what happens with this. I mean, if this opens strong, I might be in a situation where I have to do another one of these or will be asked to do another one of these right away. In which case I've sort of left ... the truck and those characters. I'd want to almost make it chapter two of the same movie if that happens, and just sort of finish the story. I have an idea of which way ... to go with it, and I would think of it in my mind as almost one film. If I had to do it like next year. Unless we get nuked or something, and there's something else to talk about. So that's it. And if that happens, I may not be able to do the Masters of Horror. And I've been so tied up on this thing that I haven't been able to write a script for it. Mick sent me a couple of scripts. A couple of them are pretty nice. So I'm still hoping that I can get a couple of weeks and be able to do that. But I have a couple of other things that we're working on. Again, everything would get trumped if they want to do a sequel to this.
This film really stands out because it's a sort of classic approach to horror, invoking a greater sense of dread rather than just shocks. How much pressure did you face to sort of update this material to satisfy a modern audience or teen audience, and how did you maintain the integrity of the series?
Romero: I don't think necessarily in those terms. The scope of this film was much bigger than anything else, and so it needed money. Although ... we weren't rich. We were under [$20 million], even after they threw money at it in order to get it finished after they changed the [release] date. ... And it was still pretty much guerilla filmmaking. And so on the set there was basically not a big difference. In fact, we were much more relaxed shooting [1978's] Dawn [of the Dead]. We had 42 days to make this film, and the crews were fabulous, the cast was great, nobody finked out, everybody was there to do it. And it was all night, you know? I think of the 42 [days], we only had eight days indoors, and it was all night, in freezing Toronto weather, so it was very, very hard.
As far as the sensibility, ... I've made slight stylistic changes in all of them, I think, to reflect the time, the cinematic style of the decade as well as the politics or the social [situation]. So that was a conscious decision, too. I had a wonderful [cinematographer] here [Miroslaw Baszak].
As far as fitting into the group, I haven't changed my attitudes towards the zombies. They don't run. I always say facetiously that my guys'll take out library cards before they join health clubs. They are more interested in their mental evolution. And I also don't find them as threatening when they're running after you. I say it's like a first-person shooter game or something, and I don't find that as threatening. I grew up on the Frankenstein monster and The Mummy and these things that sort of move at you slowly, even though they're hard to stop. You've got to find the Achilles' heel. So that's just my personal take on it.
With this fourth film, you now have a quadrilogy. It kind of spans the course of your career. What do you think you know now that you didn't when you made Night of the Living Dead?
Romero: Mostly what I've learned has been about craft. I still feel like I'm learning. John Ford made a couple of hundred flicks, you know? You develop a lot of tricks that you can keep in your hip pocket. I think I know how to move the camera better. I'm more sure of myself. I know that if we're pressed for time, I can eliminate this shot, that shot ... and still tell the story. So it's mostly that. And also I think as you get older, ... you just ... feel less intimidated. You just feel more like you can do what you want to do, worry a little bit less about the protocols, and so you feel freer, I guess, to just be yourself, which is something that comes with age.
Simon said something interesting about how George knows what he wants as far as the zombies go, and knows what doesn't work when everybody else thinks it might work, and I was curious what he meant by that. What do you see in the zombies that other people don't perceive?
Romero: I don't think that I necessarily see anything in them. As I say, I like them being personalities. I think maybe what I've done that I haven't seen, maybe, in some other films is they're not just a pack of people all in clothes from the Gap. I mean, I think that you can give them personalities with wardrobe. It's one of the first things that I asked the wardrobe designer to do, was to make sure we know who they are, because they're us. They come from different walks of life. ... I started doing that, really, with Dawn. So it's that. But I also treat them like I've always had real characters, real zombie characters, from Dawn on. And I think in this case it's shooting them, giving them close-ups, treating them like real players, which they are. And they're not just, you know, masks. And of course I was really trying to work on that with this. Big Daddy [Eugene Clark], and particularly his core of people that come from town, all have distinct personalities. But I don't know what he means, exactly, by that. What works and what doesn't work? I don't know. It's like what gets unbelievable. It's like, when you've got a bunch of zombies in front of you, you can't go like this: "OK, so you walk in, then all of a sudden everybody does that [mimes claws]." So I prefer to let them do their own thing, and sometimes you get some really outrageous, over-the-top ... stuff. And so ... I'll say, "That's too much, that doesn't work." ... It's all about believability. I think. I mean, it's a ridiculous premise to begin with, so how do you keep people from going Zzzz?
A lot of zombie films have come out in the last year, including 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead. Do you feel that it actually took the success of a remake of one of your films, Dawn of the Dead, to kind of put you back in the spotlight?
Romero: You know, I don't feel that it did. Obviously I was a little frustrated when those films came out first. But we were already in negotiations [for Land]. I don't know if I told this story to you guys, but we were in negotiations with Fox for like a year and a half on this film, and that started, I think, right around the release or prior to the release of 28 Days Later. So Dawn is not out there yet. But it was one of those things where the contract dragged and dragged, and the lawyers were taking a week to a month to get back to each other to change a sentence, and before you knew, it was a year and a half, and it was just coincidental that [producer] Mark [Canton] said he wanted to make the deal. So I think the film would have gotten made, but I think what happened was, because of the success of those films, that Universal was more willing to pony up a little more dough, which they did even during the shoot. It was originally [$15 million] or around 15, I don't know, 15 and a half, something like that, and they ponied up money during the shoot, you know, extra dough. And then at the end, when they saw the film and liked it, they gave us a little more money to go and shoot three more days.
This is the shortest of the movies so far; it's a really tight 88 minutes or so. Was there more that you shot in terms of storyline, things that'll be on the DVD?
Romero: There are a few things. There's one scene in particular, there's one scene where Cholo, before he meets Kaufman, ... goes into a neighboring penthouse and finds a human that hung himself, and [he] has to kill him. That scene was one that ... we didn't think that it turned out as effectively as it could have, and we didn't think it was necessary, so that's really the only piece, the only major scene from the original script that's gone. The DVD version—we're working on it now—I think it's about six minutes longer. But it's all just adding back some of the ... some effects that were excised and adding just little things and little bits of dialogue back in existing scenes that we cut out just to tighten the pace. It's mostly that. And that penthouse scene.
What recent zombie move that's been coming out did you like the best?
Romero: Shaun [of the Dead].
Shaun director Edgar Wright and star Simon Pegg have cameos in Land of the Dead, playing zombies in a photo scene. How difficult was it to get the guys to do the cameo?
Romero: Difficult? They flipped. They were great guys. They sent me a print, actually, [of Shaun]. I was on a little island in Florida called Sanibel. Universal sent me down a courier with a print before it was released here. So I sat in this little theater one morning all by myself and watched it and flipped for it. Called them up right away. And we've sort of been in touch ever since. Oh, they're great guys. They would have been there, hell or high water.
This movie is in part a critique of the current administration, but one of your stars, Dennis Hopper, is a well-known Republican.
Romero: Yeah, I know. But who knew? Easy Rider's a Republican, goddammit. But he came in knowing what it was. The first thing he said to me: "You know, people want me to play my villains way over the top. I'm not going to do that here. This guy has to be Rumsfeldian. I'm not going to go over the top with this at all." So he has that one moment when he shoots at Big Daddy, and he goes [strange noises]. But he's kept it pretty restrained. But he got it, you know. We haven't had any big arguments about politics.
Given the illustrious history of this series and your filmography, there must have been a lot of people eager to work on this. Can you talk about the process of assembling this cast?
Romero: Well, Asia [Argento, daughter of famed Italian horror director Dario Argento], ... I've known Asia since she was knee-high through her dad. And so I went in saying, "Well, I'd love to use Asia for this." And the studio went along with that. And Simon [Baker], I had never met him, but he shot a series in Pittsburgh called The Guardian, and he was there for three years, so we at least had some commonality there. Dennis, I'd never worked with, never met either, but again we had that '60s commonality, you know, that frustration: "Too bad it didn't work out." And you know, Easy Rider [which Hopper directed] and Night came out within a year of each other, I think, so we had a lot to talk about. Robert Joy I had worked with before. Leguizamo, I was saying right before the beginning of casting, we could get somebody like John Leguizamo. And Mark Canton arranged to call him up, and it turns out that John knows my work and said yes right away, so I was in hog heaven. And this cast, man, they really came to work. No one was in their trailer. It was a rough, rough shoot. Everybody was right out there, crawling around in the mud, doing it. So everybody took it quite seriously and got it, got the point of it.
In the film, Dennis Hopper says, "Zombies, man. They creep me out." Was that him, or was that you?
Romero: That was him.
He improvised that on the set?
Romero: Yeah, he did. And he picked his nose.
Simon Baker, was it difficult to find the heart of your performance when you're surrounded by extras in zombie masks and the entire thing seems kind of silly in the light of day?
Baker: It took a little time the first day that I shot. I think it was, you know, it was a scene with the Dead Reckoning and zombies, and zombies getting sort of run over by the truck. And I kept kind of just walking around and laughing, because, you know, there's a lot of people on a film crew, and everybody was so upset with watching it back on the monitors. They saw bodies getting crushed beneath the wheels and getting excited as to whether it was right or not and having to redo it. Peter Grunwald was one of the producers sort of sitting next to me—he's a great guy—he's sort of sitting there next to me in his suit. He looks down, and I said, "This is, like, crazy. We're grown men concerned about getting this splatter right, of this body." And he looks at me and says, "I know, and I'm Ivy League educated." He goes ha ha ha ha, and sort of shakes his head. So, yeah, it took a while. And walking into the catering area for lunch and seeing tables of people sitting there with, you know, sort of half their face eaten away. And occasionally someone would say, "Hi, Simon!" And [I'm like,] "Who's that?" And it'd be someone from the crew or something, and it'd be, "Oh, it's Gino. Oh, hi, Gino, how are you today? Good, good." So that was always really weird.
Can you talk a little about how George would balance directing the actors with the makeup and the effects work, how he would keep it an actors' piece while also making it a zombie movie?
Baker: George was really generous with us as actors. He sort of sat down with us all individually and sort of talked, made sure we all understood what the story was, what the deal was. And ... he let us go a fair bit. He let Leguizamo and I, we worked together a bit in my hotel room, and we worked out certain stuff so that the characters were defined and different. Because often with a lot of pieces where there's conflicting characters, the characters sort of end up becoming like the same kind of character, and we wanted to make them very clearly defined and very different. And George just sort of ... welcomed that. He just let us go with that.
But then on the set, you have a question, George would be right there, or he'd sort of be like, you know, he'd sort of drop the zombies and do this. A lot of it, it was a very piece-y film to shoot, because a lot of it is cut back to different zombies. And he had these whole makeup effects guys there, [special-effects makeup supervisor] Greg Nicotero, that whole crew. So he'd work, they'd have their little meetings and run over, and then ... the actors would be doing their thing. It's like, "Where's the zombie? Oh, he's going to be there, right." He's still in makeup. So we're shooting it before the zombie is even there. It's like, "Can someone just sort of stand there so I know where it's going to be?" It's just piece-y and separated, but George was fine. He seamlessly sort of goes from one thing to the other. But watching him direct the zombie stuff is fantastic, because he knows. He's like, "No, nope, that doesn't work." He knows exactly what's going to work. He's like a mathematician. He can see the equation from every single shot, and you see him putting all the pieces together in his head. And he knows. And you go, "Oh, well, I thought that was going to work." And then you go, "That's why it's not going to work." And he gets the next piece.
To horror fans, the first three films are sort of like the holy trilogy. Did you feel any extra pressure, trying to live up to those first films?
Baker: I felt the pressure for George. I didn't feel that much pressure. I thought that it was kind of very much due, you know? It was really a right time to make another one, almost overdue. So I think that [it was] interesting working with ... the makeup effects guys, because they're so entrenched in the genre. They know every detail and everything about it, so you've got 20 guys walking around the set at all times that are encyclopedias of the genre. So you can find out information. "Well, that's not right. That is right." I think the most important thing for me with my character—you know, I'm [the] straight guy—that's kind of to tap into what ... zombies are and where they fit in, and that's sort of the moral compass thing. The most important thing was just to try and find the truth in that for George, because otherwise I ... didn't want to send that up at all. But, no, I didn't really feel that kind of pressure. And once you see George on the set, you know you're safe. He knows exactly what he's doing.
Even though you were there for all the makeup and behind-the-scenes stuff, was it possible to still be disturbed by all the gore you were seeing around you? Or is it just the sort of thing that you can laugh off?
Baker: Well, no, it's funny. I've seen it twice now. I saw it once without an audience. ... I found myself ... at a few of the moments moaning and groaning fairly loudly, and then afterward laughing because I enjoyed the fact that it was able to make me do that. Then I watched it again last night with an audience, and, yeah, ... those moments shock me, and I even know when they're coming now, but they still shock me and scare me. And ... there's some very precious gore moments in there that just slipped in, I know they just slipped in, because the ratings people ... said, like, "You've got to shorten the shot of that. You can't show any more of that." I know that George, ... since he finished this cut, has been up in Canada working on an unrated cut, which is going to be crazy. I think it's going to be crazy.
I wanted to ask what you think this film in particular, without putting too fine a point on it, is actually about? Aside from the obvious stuff, it seems like George is making a lot of points about where we are today, but in your mind, what is this movie really about?
Baker: Well, I think if you asked all of us that question, we'd all probably have pretty different answers, and you guys likewise. For me, a lot of the movie, you know, with my character and the way I approached it and the stuff that I thought about a lot, was the idea of having and making decisions on your own and not being told or believing the propaganda. I mean, you've got to understand, the time we were shooting this, the U.S. presidential election was taking place. In fact, I can tell you the night, the scene we were shooting, when it was happening, you know, the actual countdown, and we were shooting on nights and I'd go back to the hotel and turn the telly on just to sort of chill out, and there'd just be CNN, and it'd be all the propaganda, and it was just so hard for anyone to have their own idea or their own opinion without being influenced by the publicity machines of each of the parties, you know, the spin, or someone's opinion on CNN and then who they were owned by or affiliated with, and it was like, "Hang on a second, how can one person [make up their mind]?" ... My character tends to want to go against the grain and say, "No, this is my [idea], or this is what I think." Or "I'm trying to work out what I think. I don't buy into this. I don't subscribe to that way of thinking. I want to sort of look at it more like this." And that's what it was more about for me.
Are you contracted, maybe, for a sequel?
Baker: I am, yeah, there is an option for a second one. ... You know, who knows what's going on inside of George's head? He's probably got things put together already, with ideas and stuff. He's mysterious. He's Mr. Mysterioso. He doesn't really let too much on. ... He's a pretty special guy. So I think that there's obviously sort of room for it. I liked the movie a lot, that's why I saw it twice. And I'm a pretty harsh critic. Very harsh critic.
John Leguizamo, have you seen it?
Leguizamo: Everybody saw it last night? Everybody? Don't lie. What did you think? Because I really loved it. ... I was hoping it was George's masterpiece, because I haven't seen it. I only saw the first 14 minutes at Cannes, and, I mean, I really thought it was an ambitious flick. ... It's an apocalyptic world. It's part action movie. It's part political satire. Did you catch the satire? [Laughs.] Just curious, just curious, you know? Who do the zombies represent?
The proletariat?
Leguizamo: Yeah, that's what I thought. ... It was definitely the proletariat. And then what was curious is what did me and Simon represent? That's what I couldn't totally politically figure out. I mean, we're not the bourgeois.
You use a lot of Spanish profanity. Was that all ad-libbed?
Leguizamo: Yeah. There's a lot of ad-libbing. I mean, I didn't know what to expect working with George. ... I admired him, of course. Night of the Living Dead is one of the great movies of all time, outside that it's a horror movie, and it started the whole zombie genre, but it's still a great movie, and I used to watch it in New York. I saw Chiller Theater [on TV]. ...
I didn't know George was going to be, how he was going to be with real actors. I know he's got the horror thing down, and he's got certain rules he has to have how a zombie's got to move slow, because they have rigor mortis. How can they move fast? He doesn't tell them how to move, because he doesn't want them all to [look] like CGI armies, so he lets everybody find their inner zombie, which is pretty cool. And he's good with the acting. You know, he really let us loose, but he would also rein us in, you know? He was really watching the acting. I was really impressed with that, so I was making up s--t all over the place. Some of it stuck, some of it will be on the DVD. It will go somewhere. It's never wasted.
This film has a classicism that most modern movies don't possess. How did that affect the way you and the crew worked?
Leguizamo: I've never done a horror movie in my life. This was the first, and it's hard. It's just as hard as doing a comedy. I mean, it's a lot of work to make things real and natural, you know what I mean? That's what's tricky: To make it all believable, you work extra hard, and I think the difference between this movie and all of the other horror movies is he's always got a sense of humor about it. I think I really responded to the script. I thought the characters were really well defined. I'd never seen them that well defined in a horror movie before. I mean, my character had a whole character arc. I had, you know, ulterior motives, very Iago in a way, but that really appealed to me. Political commentary, social commentary in it, I thought it was pretty deep, kind of operatic in a way, and that's what ... what appealed to me in the script.
What do you think the movie is trying to say politically? Did you know that Dennis Hopper was a Republican?
Leguizamo: I learned that he was a Republican on Super Mario Brothers, so I learned never to bring politics up, because I really dig the guy, you know? [In Hopper's voice] "Dennis Hopper is so cool, man. He'll always sort of be that hippie cat." Even at his age right now he's still like, "Man, everything's going great. So cool, man, I love working with you." We did Super Mario Brothers together, and we did this, and this was much more exciting to both of us, because the way he was playing the villain was so much more realistic, and the scenes between us, even though we were in this heightened reality, this heightened world, we still were playing everything for real and for keeps.
Are you signed for a sequel?
Leguizamo: I don't know, because George is getting excited about [it], [but] I guess it all depends on how it does. No, no option. I have points, though, on this one.
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Also in this issue:
Nicole Kidman and Shirley MacLaine of Bewitched
