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George Romero on Diary of the Dead
By Fred Topel | Image property of TWC.
George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead
George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead
"I made a film just a few years ago called Land of the Dead," said Romero. "It was my fourth zombie film that I made. I was pretty satisfied with it and I know that some of my fans were not. When I looked at it, even though Universal really left me alone to make that movie the way I wanted to make it and it wound up being pretty much largely the film I wanted to make, when I turned around and looked at it it seemed so big. It was Thunderdome or it was approaching Thunderdome and I didn't know where to go from there. I had this sort of track going, the zombies were sort of learning and evolving but this movie was so big, I just couldn't envision what to do next."
Instead, he went back to the beginning. Diary portrays the experience of film students documenting the very first zombie outbreak. Through their document, Romero gets to explore social themes which are ultimately more important to him than the monsters.
"Zombies are my ticket to ride. It’s how I get a deal. I don’t care what they are. I don’t care where they came from. They could be any disaster. They could be an earthquake, a hurricane, whatever. In my mind, they don’t represent anything to me except a global change of some kind. And the stories are about how people respond or fail to respond to this and that’s really all they’ve ever represented to me. It’s what I thought in Richard [Mathison]’s book, in the original book I Am Legend, that’s what I thought that book was about. There’s this global change and there’s one guy holding out and saying, ‘Wait a minute. I’m still a human.’ He’s wrong. I mean, go ahead, join them, you’ll live forever. In a certain sense he’s wrong. On the other hand, you’ve got to respect them for taking that position. Zombies to me don’t represent anything in particular. They are a global disaster that people don’t know how to deal with and that’s what it’s about because we don’t know how to deal with any of this sh*t, man."
Of course Romero made his Diary before Cloverfield came out. He wasn't trying to recreate The Blair Witch Project either. He actually hired a cinematographer to shoot the point of view footage.
"First of all, [actors] don't shoot that good. I wanted it to be theatrical. The one thing about this is I think it walks that line, maybe unsuccessfully, I'm not sure. It might be a little too arch and a little too theatrical, but I didn't want it to be Blair Witch. Blair Witch was dizzying to me and it didn't quite make sense, so I wanted to explain a little more and I wanted it to have some traditional elements, more gothic elements in it which requires a bit more staging and a bit more just carefully constructed plot. Not only plot elements but production elements. I guess that's also one of the things that really is disappointing to me, that a lot of films these days sort of leave those values out. I went to see Atonement and I expected to need a tissue. It didn't happen. That same week, Turner Classic Movies showed Brief Encounter. You laugh at the style, you laugh at the techniques and everything else for 90 minutes, and then at the end of the film, there's a tear in your eye. I find that films are hollow that way today. People are afraid of that. Not that this film is an emotional film in that same way, but I like some of the old sort of gothic values. We were trying to walk that line and put some of that in, at the same time make it feel free and easy."
Romero did call on some of his horror buddies to provide vocal tracks for Diary. "We would record right into the Avid a million different little tracks and sound bytes and it was all just us. So in the end we picked some of these things and said, ‘This works, this works, this works, and this works.’ So we had a soundtrack except it was all us. So at first I had the idea, I said, you know, we should just call up some of our buds. So the first guy I called was Steve King and I said we got this preacher thing. We sent him an email of the script and he read the script. Over the phone we were able to do them all over the phone because they were all distorted anyway. They were all on radio. They didn’t have to have any fidelity. And he said okay and he did the script and he said, ‘But I wrote this other thing. Do you want me to do it?’ And I said, ‘Sure, man.’ And he just rattled out the thing that we actually used which of course is a hell of a lot funnier than what we had sent to him. Guillermo del Toro did the same thing. I wound up just calling these old buddies up and saying would you do this voice and everybody said yeah. So all those special thanks to Tarantino, Savini, Simon Pegg, that’s it, they all do those news voices, Wes Craven. It was great because these are guys that I’ve known and it was great that they sort of came out and lent their support to this. That’s a nice touch."
George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead opens to theaters on February 15th.
For the trailer and more movie info, go to the Diary of the Dead Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of TWC.
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