How often does a director on the wrong side of 60 get the budget and the resources he deserves for the dream project he’s been longing to make? Not often, but Romero has done so and done it brilliantly. LandoftheDeadis fast, mercilessly funny, gleefully gory and uncommonly thoughtful about the times in which we live — a horror picture to shake audiences from the complacency engendered by so many Ringsand Grudges.Promoted as Romero’s “ultimate zombie masterpiece,” Landis a rare case of truth in advertising, little dulled by its arrival in the midst of so many other comers to Romero’s throne. “You know,” Romero muses, “people ask Stephen King, ‘How do you feel about these directors ruining your books?’ And Steve says, ‘They didn’t ruin them. Here they are right now, on the shelf here.’ ” Last week, during his stop through L.A. en route to yet another career tribute (this time at Las Vegas’ Cinevegas festival), I talked with the director about the latest chapter in his ongoing zombie epic.



L.A.WEEKLY:TheuseoftheoriginalUniversalPictureslogoatthestartofthefilmisanicetouch.
GEORGEROMERO:It’s a way of saying, “Guys, this is going to be a little old-fashioned here!”

ThisisyourfirstDeadmoviein20years.Wasitchallengingtofindanewapproachtothematerial?
I always wanted to do another one and then we got hung up, my partner and I, in that seven or eight years — stuck on projects. I fled after all of that and made this little film called Bruiserwhich nobody’s seen. Then I started working on this script mid-2000 and finally got a draft and sent it out days before 9/11 — after which everyone wanted to make soft, friendly movies. So I took it back home and, sometime after the invasion, dug it out and twisted it around a little bit.

ThoughthefilmissetinPittsburgh,budgetarymattersdictatedthatyoushootmostofitinCanada.
I wanted to shoot in Pittsburgh. If we would get smart here, productions wouldn’t keep going to Canada, but they offer such incentives over there, and they also take care of their personnel. The regs that we all complain about when we go up there keep those people working. I think they do a fabulous job.

Often,particularlyinafilmlikeMartin(1977),yourworkhascontemplatedthePittsburghlandscapeasakindofNormanRockwelltownthatneverwas,orthatwasonceandthenvanished.
Which it is. When I got there — I went there to go to college and I’ve lived there ever since­ — the mills were all still open. Of course, you had to have your headlights on at noon and change your shirt three times a day. Nowadays, there are still people living in little towns like Braddock saying, “The mills will reopen someday. Don’t worry about it.” It is about lost potential. It was a thriving immigrant community. It was sort of the industrial American dream, but what nobody realized at the time was that it was the Carnegies and those boys who were keeping the city going. It seemed for a while like Pittsburgh was built on the backs of the workers, but it never really was. Those people have always been second-class citizens and the town has always been, at its core, very wealthy. So there’s a little bit of that in this movie too — it just so happens that it’s now a reflection of the entire country.

Daddy breaks loose.

Thoughthezombieshavealwaysbeenhumanontheoutside,thisisthefirstmoviewherewereallysensethembeinghumanontheinsideaswell.
Exactly. I tried to throw that big ace out there right away, because I’ve always had an African-American lead in the other three, which was a conceit. So this time I said, “Okay, I’m gonna switch sides with this guy.” I do have this idea in my mind that if I go on, if I live to do another one, that the humans are getting nastier and the zombies are getting a little more human. I’ve tried to follow a pretty clean line with it, though. Even in Dawn,some of the principals that get turned into zombies are showing cognitive signs, and at the very end of the film there’s a zombie who’s been dragging a rifle around not knowing what it is, who grabs the hero’s rifle and decides, “That looks better!” And then Bub in DayoftheDead— he’s an experiment, but he’s basically imitating the scientist. “Push the button, Bub.” And he pushes the button. So now, there’re other zombies that are imitative, up to a point, but they have Big Daddy to imitate now. So I don’t think this has taken a giant leap forward. It’s just the idea that they’re getting more dangerous.

MichaelMoorenotwithstanding,itstillseemsriskytomakeamoviethispoliticalinwhatiseffectivelyarisk-averseHollywoodclimate.I’mthinkingparticularlyofthosesceneswhereweseecaptivezombiesturnedbytheirhumancaptorsintoAbuGhraib–stylesideshowfreaks.
I’m not sure if you showed this movie at the White House that anybody would get it, except when the money burns at the end — then they might feel a little pang of sadness.

Youweremakingshortfilmsfromaveryearlyage.
But I never thought I could have a career in it. I went to Carnegie-Mellon to study painting and design. My dad was a commercial artist, and I realized I wasn’t very good. They happened to have a theater school, so it was just on impulse that I decided to transfer there. But then I had to take, you know, movement and speech and all of that shit. Pass! So I walked. Back then, cities the size of Pittsburgh at that time had film labs. I had an uncle who supported me, got me an apartment for a year. So I just went and spent a year hanging out at this film lab, back when the news was on film — journeymen guys with cigarettes hanging over the flammable glue pots gluing together the shots.

Oneofthemostdistinctiveaspectsofyourfilms,theearlyonesinparticular,isthewaytheyachievemovementthroughthecuttingofwhataremostlystaticshots.Howdidyoudevelopthattechnique?
It’s a little bit of a throwback to Michael Powell’s stuff, the war movies that he did, which were very much staged that way. It was also a little bit of ass-covering, in the early days, when I couldn’t afford dolly track or a dolly. So I would just shoot a lot of coverage, and I developed more of an editing style than even a shooting style. It was really only with TheDarkHalfthat I started to feel more confident, to shoot longer dialogue scenes and do things more efficiently. You know, you start learning some tricks. John Ford, after 150 films, probably had a bag full of tricks. I’m still learning them.

LandoftheDeadisthefirstofyourfilmstobeshotinthe2.35:1widescreenaspectratio.
I’ve always loved the frame. I grew up on all of those movies too: Ben-Hurand all of that stuff. It’s always been either a little too expensive or a little hard to achieve. But now with the digital intermediate process, we shot film and did all the finishing digitally. That enables you to change the frame, do whatever. It’s really like a darkroom; you don’t have to time the whole shot — you can go in and touch things up. That was fun, and we had a wonderful d.p. who got it and I think did a beautiful job with it.

Evenwiththecomebackthey’vemadeinrecentyearsattheboxoffice,horrorfilmsstilltendtobelookeddownuponbymanyso-calledseriousfilmaficionados.
It’s a shame, but I have to say that there aren’t a lot of people out there who are doing stuff with real heart. John Carpenter did a few things that I thought were wonderful. I loved TheyLiveand TheThing.But there’s not a lot of people doing Caligarithese days.

Howdoyoupersonallyviewthezombies?
I think of them as a primitive society. It’s the quest for fire, putting two and two together. I always tell the actors, “Just think of yourselves as infants discovering things for the first time,” like when Big Daddy is looking at the real building and its reflection in the water. But they’re almost an external force. It’s this incredible sea change in the world.


LANDOFTHEDEAD| Written and directed by GEORGE A. ROMERO | Produced by MARK CANTON, BERNIE GOLDMAN, PETER GRUNWALD | Released by Universal Pictures | Citywide