THERE'S ALWAYS ROMERO

THERE’S ALWAYS ROMERO Johnny Mains

This interview was conducted with the late George Romero on 7.8.2014 not long after his visit to London Film and Comic Con where I first met him and gave him a copy of an anthology that his short story ‘Clay’ had appeared in. As it was a UK book club edition, George hadn’t seen it before and was thrilled to get it.


As with all best intentions, I meant to transcribe the interview straight after, but life, as it is wont to do, got in the way.

So, for posterity, here it, never before published – I only had half an hour with George to get as much in as possible. I hope the resulting chat acts as a tribute to how warm and generous George was. He is very much missed.





JM: Do you still like doing the convention circuit, and how much of a cut do they take from you?



GR (Laughs): Well, they’re all different, sometimes you have to give them a cut, sometimes they just want you to be there, so they’ll fly you out; they’re all different. The circuits are tiring actually, but I enjoy meeting with the folks and enjoy meeting people in safe places. You never know who’s out there.



JM: I found that the whole experience of just being a punter quite a difficult one and it took a lot out of me, so I can only imagine what it was like for you.



GR: This one was unbelievable, it’s vast, it’s really incredible. But some of the comic book conventions are even worse. There’s one in San Diego that’s complete chaos. I didn’t mind it, I just sit at the table and sign!



JM: I would like to start off with is your work at Latent Image; the very, very early days.



GR: That’s the company I owned with a couple of friends of mine. We were doing commercials and the like. Commercial advertising was our principal source of income, however Pittsburgh at the time was a hive of industry, so we were making industrial films for Alcoa and US Steel. And eventually we wound up getting enough equipment to attempt a feature film and we got ten people to put in a certain amount of money to get started. And over the course of shooting Night of the Living Dead we gradually raised more money from outside investors.



JM: And what was the tipping point for you to move forward into making movies? Was Latent Image started with that end goal in sight?



GR: We always did feel that…we always wanted to. We were movie fans, and that’s really why we started the company. Back in those days, news was on film. There were no videotapes, news was on kinescopes, so cities the size of Pittsburgh had film laboratories. 8mm, 16, 35 where you could process film and there was mixing equipment. We eventually got our own mixing equipment when we were starting out – and we were able to go to any one of these; there were three in Pittsburgh at the time so it made it easy for people that wanted to shoot film. Actually I shouldn’t say that, it’s much easier for people to shoot on video today, just harder to get distribution! But because everything was in Pittsburgh, we didn’t need to send anything out. In later years we had to go to New York or L.A. for processing and printing.



JM: Was the cost of buying film prohibitive at that time? Was it something that amateurs and professionals could equally afford?



GR: I’d say that both could afford it. For a 400 ft roll of 16mm, would cost a couple of hundred dollars, and that’s a fair amount of film. You could do it if you had a little stash.



JM: So Night is shot, processed, printed – was it too early for you then to see the film as a genre gamechanger or was it just as basic and as brutal as getting it out there and recouping the money?

GR: We definitely had hopes that we would be able to put it out there and someone would show it! It took us a while to get distributors. One of the distributors who looked at it wanted us to change the ending. We, at the time, naively refused. I don’t know if we would have stuck to our guns if we knew it would have taken us longer to find distribution. But that’s what happened and we were able to leave the film the way it was and I think that’s one of the reasons for its success.


JM: I’ve screened the film for some friends recently who had never seen the film before, who knew they still existed! And one of my friends cried at the ending, broke her heart and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone cry watching a horror film.


GR: Oh boy! That’s quite incredible.


JM: To come off from Night and to go onto There’s Always Vanilla, a film that you’ve gone on record saying that you’re not a fan of, however, I think that it’s your bravest film – to go from pure horror to Vanilla, a romantic comedy. Why take the risk?


GR: I just didn’t wanna get stuck. I resisted making another zombie film for ten years. We made There’s Always Vanilla, Jack’s Wife (Season of the Witch) and then The Crazies. None of those were strictly horror films, there was some witchcraft stuff in Jack’s Wife, but it wasn’t strictly a horror film at all. I made them because I didn’t want to get typecast at all. But they never made any money, they never got any attention at all and it took me a while, but then I hooked up with a different partner. Latent Image collapsed, and I hooked up with a business partner, producer called Richard Rubenstein. We took some time off and did some documentary work for three years and then we made Martin. That strictly wasn’t a horror film. Theoretically, it’s supposed to be a vampire film, but to me, it’s more of a psychological drama. It still remains my favourite film of mine. It was after that all sorts of people were writing about Night of the Living Dead, all of these high-minded literary people were talking about this film and saying that it was really important. So I felt that if I was going to do another one I had to have a pretty good idea. I was looking for something to satirize and I socially knew the people that developed the Monroeville shopping mall and I went out there before it was even complete, and I saw the trucks all rolling in bringing all this stuff in, anything you could ever want, and I got the idea for Dawn of the Dead right then. Coincidentally Dario Argento phoned up and said if you want to do another I have money for you. He brought me to Rome and we wrote the script in Rome. And that has become the most popular of all of my zombie films.
JM: I prefer Day of the Dead of the three.


GR: I do too! [laughs]


JM: So, when Dawn came out and everyone was re-evaluating Night, was there a bit of you that was sad that the films in-between had been neglected somewhat by the critics? And was there a part of you that thought that if you were going to be typecast, you’d be typecast to the very best of your abilities?


GR: Well, yeah. Obviously, you come around to that after a series of failures! Incredibly my stuff has a lot of shelf life, they’re still out there on video and I have fans – I have 70 year old fans and I have 15 year old fans. I’ve had a kind of curious kind of longevity and I think that’s because of remaining independent. I only made two studio pictures, both for Orion. Creepshow was a negative pick-up, we started independently but it was sold to Warner Bros. The two studio films I made were The Dark Half and Monkey Shines. Even though Monkey Shines…I didn’t make that film for Orion. Again it was an independent producer who bought the rights to the book and hired me. So the only film I started with studio filming was Dark Half.


JM: I love Dark Half, that film just came along at the right time for me.


GR: I think Dark Half is well crafted; I mean I’m very pleased with the craftsmanship in it. I’m pleased with the storytelling aspects of it. I felt that the whole time I was working on it I could stray too far from what Steve’s original intention was. I felt like I was working with the Bible or something (laughs).


JM: And something that could have been extremely interesting was the proposed Pet Sematary film, which you had written the screenplay for.


GR: And The Stand. And the fella I was talking about, my partner, Rubenstein, had wound up with the rights. He and I had a falling out and I wanted to go off on my own. He had taken the company public and he wanted to do what he felt were more stable productions. And he turned to television productions and I wasn’t interested in that at all. And he wound up with the rights to Sematary and some other properties that Steve let us have. But Steve gave Dark Half directly to me.


JM: What would you have done differently with Sematary than what Mary Lambert finally did? I’ve sadly never had a chance to get a hold of your screenplay so haven’t able to compare the two.


GR: I don’t think she read my screenplay either! You know I felt the same way as I did with Dark Half, that I needed to stick close to what Steve wanted. It’s been so long ago, but when I saw finally the movie; Mary’s vision is true to the book with regards to the central premise, but it doesn’t have Steve’s voice at all. I also wrote, and it still hasn’t been made, my ex-wife is trying to promote it, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon…


JM: That would be a terrifying adaptation.


GR: I would love to shoot that, but nobody wants to do it again the way Steve wrote it because the only star in it is the little girl. No studio wants to put that money on a ten year old girl. For a while we had Dakota Fanning, but even that wasn’t enough. They want to beef up the parents roles so they can get stars in it. Finance. (sighs). I’ve put so much time and spiritual investment in it.


JM: Another King property which has slipped through the cracks somewhat, but another one you and he both worked on was Creepshow 2…


GR: I enjoyed writing that so much! I worked directly with Steve on that; he wrote the stories and I wrote the screenplay and he trusted me on that. The problem was in making the film, I think it was under-financed and not particularly well-directed. Creepshow remains the only number one film I’ve ever had in the box-office charts. I heard recently that they made a Creepshow 3…


JM: You do not want to watch it, seriously.


GR: Well, I had nothing to do with it, nor did Steve.


JM: A case of someone getting the rights and having a hack to do the job.


GR: (laughs) That happens too! All the time! I know that Rubenstein has the rights to Martin and he’s trying to get a remake deal out of that and I just can’t imagine doing that. He produced the remake of Dawn too. My Dawn was a satire on consumerism and I don’t know what the remake of Dawn was about. Zack Snyder’s a pretty good guy, I just felt that it had no reason for being.


JM: I think the first twenty minutes or so were pure cinema and then it just ended up being really rather boring.


GR: Yeah, just another generic horror film.


JM: But a remake you were in control of was the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead .


GR: I wrote and produced it – the only reason I did it was that we lost the copyright on the original. I wanted to do it as a company in order to try and re-establish the copyright which didn’t happen, but at least we have the second film and the title. And Tom did a pretty good job on it and I want to apologise to women for Barbara being such an ineffectual character in the first Night.


JM: How hard has the transition been from traditional film to digital film making?


GR: It’s been the opposite of what many might think, it was just so easy. We used a Red on Survival and it’s wonderful to be able, it’s almost like having a darkroom again. When I had Latent Image I used to love spending time in the dark room just enlarging parts of the picture, parts of the frame. It’s also good with regards to effects. Now, I love the look and the feel of practical effects; gore effects – the ones in Day are really remarkable…


JM: The guts dropping out onto the floor!


GR: (laughs) I love that. But when you’re running against the gun and I did with Diary and Survival I was running away…when we did Land it was the biggest budget I’ve ever had for a zombie film. I’m not used to…I’m used to working much less expensively and intimately…one of the biggest line items we had on Land was Dennis Hopper’s cigars (laughs). I don’t say that as a dig on Dennis, I loved him and we got on great, rest his soul, I just wasn’t used to it, and I fled and I wrote a little script we could do inexpensively. I found some money from a single source and I went back to making two and three-million-dollar flicks. Diary was two million and Survival was three million, even though I think it looks bigger, which is what we were trying to do with it. And that too, that was amazing, those cameras, we were just able to do much more than I was ever able to do with traditional film and lights. And going back to the effects, I know it doesn’t quite look as good but it’s much easier to have one actor point a gun and the other fall to the ground and you add the blood in later when you’re off the set. If you’re doing it live and it screws up somehow it costs you an hour to clean everything up and do it all over again.


JM: What do you think of the state of the zombie film at the moment?


GR: I think that World War Z might have killed the little zombie film. A budget of $300 million with Brad Pitt; who is going to listen to a pitch for a little zombie film? Until somebody makes a little zombie film that kicks it all off again, I think it’s basically killed it. Video games have been keeping it alive for all those years. I’m a friend of Max Brooks and I know that he wasn’t thrilled with that film. Nor was I; Paramount set up a special screening for my wife and I before it opened. I think they were hoping to get a good comment from me. I didn’t like it very much. Then about a week later I saw Man of Steel and all of a sudden World War Z looked a lot better to me. However, Zombieland (2009) did really well and I think the remake for Dawn did $35 million domestic. But I don’t make them in order to make money, I make them in order to make movies and I found this niche and unfortunately, the niche has been taken away by the Walking Dead and everyone’s in the same playground now. That’s why I decided to take a break and do a comic book for Marvel.


JM: Can we talk a little about Tales from the Darkside? It’s something I remember very fondly.


GR: I do too (laughs). I really enjoyed doing it, but again we were able to do it independently – we were able to shoot some episodes in New York and some in L.A. and using mostly our friends, Savini did one and we had a wonderful story editor for the first season, Tom Allen, who died in the late 80s – I enjoyed doing that. They were for syndication, they were a half-hour and they were very inexpensive to make. I love the anthology format, but it’s been considered to have been poisoned.


JM: It’s such a shame because looking back at anthology movies, Dead of Night, the Amicus films...


GR: Yup, I love them. People that don’t like them are missing something! And particularly with horror, it’s the perfect way to do it. I think that the reason why producers got away from it is that it’s cheaper to have standing sets and not have to re-gear for every story. When we did the first Creepshow it was really tough to have to build all those sets and hire all those actors and not have any sort of elements repeated.


JM: But then you are responsible for ‘Father’s Day’, one of the best segments of any anthology film ever made.


GR: (laughs) Okay, wow! That one was fun to do. END