There's No Magic: A Conversation With George A. Romero

by Rick Curnutte

Richard A. Curnutte, Jr. is the Editor of The Film Journal. He has studied English and Film at Ohio University and The Ohio State University. He is a founding member of the Central Ohio Film Critics Association and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

He is, in my estimation, the greatest horror director in cinema history. His Dead trilogy (Night of the LIving Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead) helped create an ongoing mythology of contemporary zombie films. He recently began pre-production on a fourth Dead film, Land of the Dead.

I talked with George A. Romero in August about his exemplary body of work, his directorial process, and a great deal more.

Rick Curnutte: Night of the Living Dead is generally considered one of the most influential, if not the most influential, horror films of all time.

George A. Romero: Ain't it amazing?

R.C.: It sort of set the standard for the zombie film, as we know it. It's the first sort of "splatter" film, if you will…

G.R.: I don't think it actually was, I think it's the first one that really sort of went wide, you know?

R.C.: It's probably the first well-recognized "splatter film" maybe.

G.R.: Yeah, or that got a little bit…people looked past the splatter. And really, if you look at it now, you know? It's amazing how times have changed.

R.C.: It was even inducted into the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 1999. Did that surprise you at all?

G.R.: Oh yeah. More was the Museum of Modern Art. I mean that was the first one that really blew me away.

R.C.: Obviously, you didn't have a crystal ball, but did you have any idea how significant the project was when you were working on it?

G.R.: Absolutely not. You know, we didn't know that it would ever get recognized. I mean, we took it seriously. We really were trying to make it as much a metaphor as it was a thrill ride. And I've always tried…I don't know, I've never wanted to just do movies about guys in hockey masks with knives, you know? I don't think that way. I sort of think of what underlies it first. And I'm not a good pitchman that way. Like the new one that I'm doing I've been pitching it, saying, "Well it's about people ignoring the problem". You know, in a post-9/11 [world]. And nobody gets it. They say, "We wanna know what the story is." You can put 50 stories on that, I don't care about who the characters are and what they do, I'm much more concerned about getting in some observations underneath it, or some satire.

R.C.: Yeah, I think that's a problem in general with movies today, people are so concerned with just, "What's the story, what's the 5-second pitch?", or whatever…

G.R.: Right! The characters. "What is it, a buddy story?" That's about as far as they go. "Is it a fish out of water?" [laughs]

R.C.: Right, "Which stars can we get?" and things like that, with ignoring the form and the context and things like that.

G.R.: Oh yeah. And then it goes further, which it's just all effects, which, I mean, I haven't seen I, Robot, but I imagine that's just a big eye-candy deal.

R.C.: Oh yeah, I don't have any interest in seeing that, but, I mean, I assume you don't have any interest in working in CGI at all.

G.R.: Well, we're going to have to. I used some in a film I made called Bruiser, but I used it to fly a bat through and do some things for mood, not just for the sake of CGI.

R.C.: Maybe some stuff like, rather than using matte paintings, are you thinking more like background things?

G.R.: Yeah, we're going to need some of that. Well, I actually have a sequence where a bridge has to collapse. So, there's no way the city will let me do that. [laughs]

R.C.: Oh, no. You don't think so, huh? [laughs]

G.R.: [laughing] No, I doubt it.

R.C.: Are you hoping to work with Tom Savini again?

G.R.: I hope so, yeah. I hope so. I don't think he'll be in charge of the effects. I'd like to use him as an actor, actually. And maybe give him one of the zombies to do or something, you know, a special appearance [laughs].

R.C.: I'd like to talk a little bit, actually, about the zombies. First of all, Night of the Living Dead is, sort of by today's standards, or even by your own standards later, relatively tame in terms of the actual blood and gore that it shows.

G.R.: Right.

R.C.: But, it seems like a lot of people, and the same is true of [Tobe] Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, remember it being gorier than it is. Or more horrifying (visually) than it is. Do you think that it's the unrelenting stamina and drive of the creatures themselves that make them so horrifying?

G.R.: I think definitely. You know, they're like the Mummy. They just keep coming, and there's more and more of them. It's relentlessness and it's inevitability.

R.C.: Some of the problems that I've had with some of the contemporary zombie movies like 28 Days Later and even the Dawn of the Dead remake is this need to have these quick-moving, running zombies. And, to me, it actually makes them a lot less scary.

G.R.: Oh, me too!

R.C.: First of all, did you have any input in the Dawn of the Dead remake?

G.R.: None at all.

R.C.: Have you seen it?

G.R.: I've seen it, yeah, and actually it was better than I expected it was going to be. You know, as an action piece. Sort of its reason for being is lost.

R.C.: Yeah, all of the subtext is completely gone.

G.R.: Yeah. And I hate the fast [zombies]. I mean, God, I don't know. I guess I left in this ad-libbed line in the original film [Night of the Living Dead], where the sheriff says, "They're dead, they're all messed up" and, to me, that's what they should be!

R.C.: Yeah, I even have that line highlighted here, because it's such a great throwaway line, but it's so true of everything that comes after.

G.R.: The guy ad-libbed that, you know.

R.C.: Oh, is that right? That wasn't scripted?

G.R.: No.

R.C.: 28 Days Later is the same, although 28 Days Later steals liberally from just about every film you've made.

G.R.: Now, they're not dead, right? They're infected.

R.C.: It's sort of like The Crazies. It's rage. Although they have a montage of them shopping in a grocery store.

G.R.: Oh, you're kidding!

R.C.: No.

G.R.: I haven't seen it, so…

R.C.: Well, the whole ending takes place in a military compound, where the military people are almost clones of the soldiers in Day [of the Dead]. I watched Day again last night and was just amazed at how much was lifted…well, I suppose…

G.R.: Homage. [laughs]

R.C.: I suppose it's an homage if you want to call it that, but…we'll leave it at that I guess.

G.R.: [laughing] Ok…Flattered.

R.C.: But if you ever see it, you'll definitely recognize what you're seeing.

G.R.: Recognize a few shots, huh?

R.C.: Yeah. Certainly. It seems to me that the most under-appreciated of the Dead films, although its rep is gaining a lot lately, is Day of the Dead.

G.R.: Day, yeah. Actually, it's become my favorite.

R.C.: I was going to say that I feel that it's at least Dawn's equal. Lately I've actually found myself watching Day a little bit more often.

G.R.: Poor guy…(laughs)

R.C.: To what do you equate the film's polarizing effect on the audiences? At the time, you were right in the middle of the Rambo, macho Hollywood action films, and your film sort of tore that ideal apart a little bit.

G.R.: Yeah…and I think people wanted the same kind of romp that Dawn was. I think they just wanted it to really be…lighter, maybe? And, sillier, and have a cleaner storyline. Except for the military guy, everybody's both good and bad. It's pretty hard to calculate who you're supposed to be with (laughs). You know, it didn't have any of those traditional Hollywood movie things, and it certainly was, it was in an age when movies were beginning to really get vapid. We were going back to a sort of Western formula, almost, in different guises. You know, white hats and black hats.

R.C.: There's a great sequence that I was especially fond of when I was watching it [Day] again last night, which was a speech that the "Fly Boy" character, the "Fly Boy" in Day of the Dead, not "Fly Boy" of Dawn of the Dead. It's when they're at "The Ritz" and he's talking about the irrelevance of all the records and stats and charts that are being stored in there, and how, if humanity is to survive and move on they need to forget about the mistakes and disasters of the past. And also it seems to be the first significant suggestion that the plague is a punishment from God, which I don't recall having heard in the previous films.

G.R.: I didn't mean it to be so much that…

R.C.: Well, the character suggests it…

G.R.: Yeah, it's his take on it. The guy in Dawn says, as Voodoo Daddy used to say, "When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth." I just am trying, I guess, to apologize almost…because even the T.V. Guide blurbs on Night of the Living Dead begin with, "A returning Venus probe brings this plague…", and I never meant to imply that. When we originally shot the Night of the Living Dead thing, there were three proposed causes, and we cut two of them out because the scenes were boring and the scenes around them were boring, and that one we left in because it was part of that newscast and it made it seem a little bigger. And that became for a while, people said, "Oh, that's what happened." You know, some Venus probe came back and brought some kind of bug. And so I was determined…I don't want there to be a cause, it's just something that's happening, it's just a different deal, it's a different way of life. If you want to look at it as a revolution, a new society coming in and devouring the old, however you want to look at it. That's really my take on it, it doesn't matter. And, people just don't communicate to get to the core of it at all, they just have their own agendas or their own concerns…you know, Band Aids.

R.C.: Yeah, I agree, when it comes down to it, and this seems especially apparent in Day of the Dead, that the zombies, they really represent just about any of the troubles we could have right now, be it global warming or the threat of nuclear winter, it's all about the problems that we create and orchestrate ourselves, and then our inability to deal with it. Is that something you're going to further explore in the fourth Dead film?

G.R.: Yeah, that's definitely still there.

R.C.: Is Land of the Dead the actual title? It was reported that [that's] the title, is that accurate?

G.R.: I have two titles. That is the working title right now, I don't know. My original title was Dead Reckoning. But the producers were concerned about the old Bogie movie. So I don't know. Dead Reckoning, to me, would be my preference. I don't know. Warner Bros. will probably make that decision.

R.C.: Is that who it's set up with?

G.R.: Not yet. I know that the producers are hoping for that. Mark Canton is the producer, he used to be President over there, I think he's got some strings that are still attached to his fingers.

R.C.: And he's with Atmosphere?

G.R.: Yeah.

R.C.: Now, I won't ask too much about the film, because we don't want to ruin anything, but the story involves a city that the remaining living people are in?

G.R.: Well, the fat cats, people that have been able to set it up, and they've taken over the place, they have their own militia. And the working class live down on the streets, and they live in the high rise. The protagonists are these commandos that have to go out beyond the walls, or in this case it's beyond the rivers. I wrote it for Pittsburgh, which is, I don't know if you know Pittsburgh, but it's isolated a little, triangular peninsula.

R.C.: I'm familiar a little bit with Pittsburgh. Are you looking to shoot there again?

G.R.: I'd love to, and the city is really working to try to get the production here. That's what's going on right now. We probably won't know for a couple of days.

R.C.: You're shooting in October, you're hoping to start [then]?

G.R.: Yeah, we're hoping to start the beginning of October.

R.C.: 2005 release?

G.R.: Yeah…I hope they don't want it for 2004 (laughs).

R.C.: That would be kind of hard to throw together.

G.R.: Put the showers in the editing room again (laughs).

R.C.: I'd like to talk about The Crazies a little bit, which is a film that I really love…

G.R.: Oh, great! They're remaking that.

R.C.: That was one of my questions, because a production assistant friend of mine heard that, that they were remaking it. Do you know anything about the remake?

G.R.: No.

R.C.: Again, it's nothing that you have anything to do with?

G.R.: No. They want my name on it as executive producer, but they don't want my creative input (laughs).

R.C.: The funniest thing about the Dawn of the Dead remake, which I must admit that I liked quite a bit more than I expected to, though just in a sort of eye candy way, and in no other way. These films are so much a product of the times that they were made in. I just don't understand…it's even hard for me to imagine someone looking at The Crazies and thinking that a remake of it would be a good idea.

G.R.: Right now, yeah. What they're relating it to, in a very simplistic way, is all of the worry about bio-weapons now…WMDs…so, I'm sure it'll turn into something like The Grid, it'll probably be terrorists or something, I don't know, we'll see what happens.

R.C.: Tell me a little about the history of The Crazies. It began with someone else's story, right?

G.R.: Yeah. It was called The Mad People. And it was purely about, I mean, the whole movie, the resulting film, is basically based on the first three or four pages. I guy named Paul McCullough wrote the script, and he had the incident and he sort of got rid of it and he just followed people through their everyday lives. They weren't as much refugees, there wasn't an immediate military response, it was just the weapon spilled and people went nuts, and the whole point was you can't tell who's nuts and who's not in today's world. And that was really the point of his piece, and it was really a character piece, it was people doing things, doing life that you see in the papers every day. They were just driven to it. And when Paul sold it to…he agreed to sell it to a company that wanted to just make it more about the initial deal, so I tried to keep some of Paul's concept in there, but then make it more about the incident and the response to it and all that.

R.C.: You had a pretty small budget on The Crazies, right?

G.R.: Oh, God, yeah.

R.C.: And it was the first film you did with unions?

G.R.: Yeah, well with…

R.C.: Acting unions?

G.R.: SAG, yeah.

R.C.: How did that effect your budget, your shooting style? As far as casting, how much did it change the way you would cast the film?

G.R.: Well, we had to bring…there was nobody here in those days (laughs), and we had to bring everybody from New York. That was basically the big difference. But it was no different than when you're down in the trench.

R.C.: A scene that's talked about a lot is Lynn Lowry's death scene.

G.R.: Right.

R.C.: It's unique, it's sort of tranquil, especially following the rape by her father and his suicide, and the surviving members of the party sort of starting to step over into madness, some of them. How did you come across Lynn Lowry?

G.R.: She auditioned. I didn't know her from her past. I guess it was pre-…oh God, what's his name, the Canadian…

R.C.: Cronenberg? Shivers, she did.

G.R.: Yeah, I think so. I think it was before that. I don't know. Actually, I just heard from her. But, she just came in and auditioned, I thought she was beautiful, and I didn't know she'd been doing the soft-core stuff or whatever.

R.C.: (laughing) Yeah, well apparently, she says that she didn't know she was doing some of the soft-core stuff…

G.R.: (laughs)

R.C.: …apparently there were some insert shots done that weren't her, or whatever. We're actually also doing a profile piece on her in this issue. I think she's a very interesting actress.

G.R.: Yeah, she is.

R.C.: So The Crazies is obviously about the most primal emotion we have, which is rage. And you even just said a little while ago that by the end of it the people that are in charge are almost indistinguishable from the people inflicted with the illness. Is that ultimately the story that you hoped to tell with the film?

G.R.: Yeah. That was Paul's original point, and I tried to keep that. And the same sort of communication problems, you know dealing with it superficially instead of getting to the core, and all that stuff that I like to do.

R.C.: In past interviews and a couple of online chats that I've found, you've said that Martin is the film in your oeuvre that most fully represents the original vision that you had for it.

G.R.: Yeah.

R.C.: Do you still feel that way?

G.R.: Yeah. Bruiser comes close. Nobody gets Bruiser, though (laughs).

R.C.: I love Bruiser, by the way.

G.R.: Oh, that's great! I'm so glad!

R.C. But back to Martin…

G.R.: At the time…I mean, that really is it. There's so much…when you say, "What's your favorite film of yours?", so much goes into it. It winds up having less to do with the film itself; in other words, its content and its impact, and so much weighs into it. Are you satisfied with your own work? What kind of experience did you have making it? Like, I thought I did OK work on The Dark Half, but the experience was hell. So I can't list it as one of my favorites. So, there's a lot of that that goes into it, and also, and the main thing is that I was able to pull it off very close to what the original script was. It was a lot longer. I actually had an almost 3-hour version of it, I mean we shot, basically, nearly a three-hour film. I had a lot more narration in it, which in the novelization of it you can see. And I wound up just feeling that I didn't need it. So, in that sense it doesn't look like the script, but the sequences, the set pieces and the characters and John's performance and everything just came so close to exactly what I wanted, so I was just really happy to be able to pull it off very close to what I had on the page. Which, usually you wind up compromising on day one, so I was really thrilled with that. And I just loved the concept and I was just happy to be allowed to do it the way I wanted to, again, instead of taking the traditional route.

R.C.: John [Amplas] worked behind the scenes on Dawn of the Dead as casting director?

G.R.: Yeah. He does a little cameo in it. He was in Day. He's in Knightriders.

R.C.: Did you know John before working with him on Martin?

G.R.: No. Well, I knew him before I wrote it, because I was developing the idea in my head, and I sat down, it took me only a couple of weeks to sit down and actually write it, I had it all worked out and had some notebooks and so forth. It was during that time that I went and saw John in a play here in Pittsburgh, and I said, "Boy, that's the guy. Gotta be the guy." So, I went backstage, and he agreed to do it.

R.C.: A lot of people have read the film in different ways. Some people have flat-out said it's about a crazy kid. Some people think it's a little bit more…is it meant to be a little bit more ambiguous than that? Did you in your mind have…

G.R.: Well, I tried to keep it…I didn't try to come down on one side or the other, you know, I like the lady or the tiger kind of thing. But, in my mind, he was just a disturbed kid. So you try to stay true to that. Just like in Bruiser, I tried to cover all of the…leave it ambiguous, did it happen to him or not? I tried to cover both sides of it.

R.C.: It seems to me that the way the film is shot, the way it's pulled off, it really can work for either reading anyway. If he's not a vampire, of course he would die in the end.

G.C.: Well, the stake will get you either way (laughs).

R.C.: But if he is a vampire, he's sort of spent the whole movie talking about debunking the superstitions behind vampirism. Saying, "There's no magic.", something he talks to the radio guy a lot [about]…

G.C.: Yeah, by definition he's vampiric, but not in a supernatural sense. He's very open about it, he's very honest.

R.C.: Is there an extant director's cut of Martin.

G.R.: No. We had a print of the long version, and it's one of the big mysteries of my life. It disappeared one day, so somebody copped it.

R.C.: Really? It's in a vault somewhere with Welles' [Magnificent] Ambersons cut, maybe…in Brazil somewhere. (laughs)

G.R.: Maybe it's in the same vault? (laughs) With some of Tod Browning's stuff, too. (still laughing)

R.C.: We talked a little bit about CGI. Do you think the state of the art can be destructive to the form itself? Obviously, with movies like I, Robot it becomes so much about the spectacle…

G.R.: Yeah. Well, I think anything that...it's no more destructive than anything that's sort of faddish. Whether it's, "Hey, here's an Olympic ice skater, let's make an ice skating movie", so it's the same kind of deal. It's the wrong reason to make a movie. And very often it just spawns things that are basically snores, I mean, who cares? Why make this movie at all, except for that reason?

R.C.: I recently read that they're going to remake The Ten Commandments, so…

G.C.: Oh, terrific…who's doing it, Mel? (laughs)

R.C.: I don't know who's doing that, but that's definitely a fad that I did not think was going to catch on, just because of that movie [The Passion of the Christ], but apparently it is.

G.C.: (still laughing)

R.C.: A little bit just about your approach to filmmaking in general. Do you like to do a lot of set-ups of shots? I'm interested in the kind of coverage you do in conversations between lead characters, things like that.

G.C.: Yeah, well when I was working with limited budgets but with people that were willing to just put in 150% and really work hard, like with Martin, I'd shoot a lot of coverage. Very often I'd cover my ass and shoot conversations, I'd shoot masters here and there, but then I'd do coverage on basically everybody that was in the scene. I found that, it was basically an ass-covering technique, if I wanted to make dialogue edits or whatever, I'd have the ability to do it, and I wasn't locked in to master shots where you either cut the whole scene out or you're stuck with it. So it was just a technique that I developed, and I used to edit my own stuff in the early days, and I found that it was a way to really leave yourself flexible for when you had it in post, and you could really mold it and basically edit it, edit content without having to lose the whole banana.

R.C.: When you cut your films, you would always cut to temp soundtracks, right?

G.R.: Yes.

R.C.: To sort of keep the flow of things…tell me a little bit about how you like…the sound always stands out quite a bit in your films, especially a lot in the earlier films which you cut yourself.

G.R.: Yeah. I think what people forget often with film is that half of it is a radio show. And, you know, dead air is dead air (laughs). So I know, I've done things where if I don't like the timing or if there's a pause in dialogue that I don't like, I'll throw a dog barking in the background or something in there that just keeps the ear occupied. And I really believe that a lot of filmmakers don't realize that can really add a certain degree of pace that is subliminal almost. I don't think the audience sits there and realizes it, but if you listen to the films, very often when I have it on the table, I'll run it once and close my eyes and just listen to it. So it's sort of like doing sub-chords, I don't know what the musical term is, but doing undertones and just sort of keep the flow going. I really like to do that, and I've been able to it even if I'm not actually the editor. I've been able to influence it to some extent. Of course time is becoming so precious, you know, they want it the day after you shoot, so a lot of the post-production basically starts right after your first day of shooting. (laughs)

R.C.: Yeah, they want to see everything the day after.

G.R.: Yeah.

R.C.: In action scenes, and of course I've been watching the Dead films, The Crazies and Martin specifically for this interview, but in general you use a sort of mixture of close-ups, medium and long shots. Do you like to constantly crosscut between the different shots to accentuate the flow of the action?

G.R.: It depends on…you know, sometimes you just make mistakes when you're shooting, or you don't…I try to think of how it's going to cut, and I like to mix it up, I mean, I like to learn a little bit about the geography, but that's not as important to me as, say it was, to Hitchcock. I want to know where people are, but I'm much more involved with the people themselves. And as I say, it's a lot easier to edit performance and edit content the more coverage you have. For example, in Bruiser, we had such limited time and such a limited budget, if you look at that film, I really had to choreograph it. I had to do a lot with each shot, and so that was really an eye-opener for me. And I actually enjoyed doing it, sort of like doing a Rubix Cube or doing a complicated jigsaw puzzle or something, I had to figure out a lot more beforehand in order to make sure that each shot would accomplish, without coverage, what I wanted it to accomplish.

R.C.: A lot of contemporary filmmakers mourn the emergence of the MTV aesthetic, or whatever, the [fast] cross-cutting that a lot of the music video veterans are bringing to their feature filmmaking. You started in commercial filmmaking…

G.R.: Yeah.

R.C.: In a lot of your films, and I know you talked about this a little bit in Document of the Dead, that you sort of enjoy the fast-cutting, maybe not to the degree that it's used today, but, I mean, how do you feel about the dynamic of quick-cutting as opposed to some of the longer takes in some of your films?

G.R.: I think you can make it work. I think sometimes it just shatters the eyeball and your awareness. I mean, if you look at Armageddon, you don't even know who just died (laughs), so I do believe in sort of visual storytelling. I think fast-cutting can work, I mean I've done some pretty fast cutting here and there. So, I don't know, it's sort of Cubist or something, it's not meant to just move the eyeball. It's mean to either create some kind of, I've used it a couple of times as a cheat to bring a little bit more energy. And other times to just tell the story from different views or give you a better understanding, different angles.

R.C.: I was just wondering, you've said a lot of things about covering your ass and things like that, I was wondering how you temper your carefully-planned story elements with the "happy accidents" that occur, and do you encourage improvisation at all or do you like to plan things out more?

G.R.: No, I love the collaborative process, and I really do encourage contributions like that, and I've always sort of been successful that way. I mean, my sets are very open, and everybody's allowed to say whatever they want. I don't have a given…I think that if you're confident in what you're doing, and if you know the direction you're going, you accept ideas that fit, and you reject ideas that don't. On Bruiser, for example, the location guy, the location scout, found this house, and he said, "You know, there's this house that this guy is trying to finish, and he's a builder, and when he gets a job he puts the money into the house, and then he has to stop because he runs out of money," and that gave me the whole idea for Henry's house. And I said, "Oh man, that's perfect!" I had him living in a house that was sort of a pale imitation of the boss' house, in the script. At the moment this guy said, "We can get this house, and the guy needs money", the moment he told me that, I said, "Oh, man, that just fits perfectly, the guy can't afford to do it", and that was just a wonderful idea, and I think it's an important element in the script, and it just came from a location guy. So I'm happy to go with things that I think really fit the direction that we're going, you know, I'll buy anybody's suggestion if it works. So that was a really happy accident. And then I figured out ways to use it, with the saw, and the sort of filmy vinyl curtains, foggy curtains that are up. I was sort of like a kid in a candy store with that.

R.C.: So, most of that stuff was there already?

G.R.: No, we put a lot of that in. We put all of those curtains in and the saw and all the other garbage. I actually rewrote a draft of the script that accommodated all of it.

R.C.: With Dawn of the Dead, I've read some articles where you talked about the need for a non-X rating for non-pornographic mature films. The NC-17's been a bust, pretty much…

G.R.: Yeah.

R.C.: Do you foresee having problems with ratings on your new film?

G.R.: Oh, definitely. Well, I've agreed to, basically, they're going to let me make the film, and then I have to agree to cut it down to an R for initial U.S. theatrical. But they're happy to have it, I mean, these days, there's video and there's Japan and places that they'll be able to go out with the harder version.

R.C.: Yeah, I mean obviously Tarantino released a version he specifically cut for Eastern audiences, with Kill Bill: Vol. 1. So there would probably be a longer cut, on DVD at least, for domestic distribution?

G.R.: Well, it would be shorter domestic, initially.

R.C.: I mean home video domestic distribution.

G.R.: Oh, yeah, absolutely. The way these companies work, they'll probably want four version, you know they keep putting them out (laughs). You know, "New footage!".

R.C.: Dawn of the Dead: Ultimate Edition comes out [soon].

G.R.: I know it. I can't imagine what, well, I know the one thing that will be the most fun about that, they've really went out of their way and have interviewed everybody, and that's the stuff I'm looking forward to.

R.C.: Yeah, that's the stuff that, these different versions have been available, with the Argento cut, which is the shortest cut, and obviously you prefer your cut the best.

G.R.: I do, yeah, even with the mixed-up music, part Goblin and part library, it's so corny, but I couldn't resist letting it go (laughs).

R.C.: One of the things that I have to talk about is a shot that's legendary, it's in Night of the Living Dead. I think that, without throwing on too much hyperbole, it's probably just about the single greatest shot in all of horror. There's an extreme close-up of a single zombie, with his hands on his face, and it gives way to a long shot of a bunch of zombies in the background. Is that one of those happy accidents, or was that a sort of planned out…do you know which shot I'm talking about?

G.R.: Yeah, well, I don't know exactly which one. You mean when they're in the yard?

R.C.: Yes.

G.R.: Right, yeah, I mean we did that stuff, we were able to choreograph that to a great extent. I mean, that was a deliberate shot. So it wasn't [an accident]. I don't know, maybe his behaviors were, I can't exactly get it in my head right now.

R.C.: It was something that was played in Document of the Dead and it's just something that I've always been amazed by.

G.R.: Yeah, it was meant to say, "Oops!"

R.C.: So you're starting work in October on the new film. Are you currently in the writing process or do you already have the script finished?

G.R.: I just finished the final script, a couple of script changes, and we're ready to go. We interviewed casting directors and line guys, and we're basically rolling. We're just waiting for these couple of days to see if Pittsburgh can offer enough incentives to keep us out of Canada. Or South Africa.

R.C.: South Africa?

G.R.: That's actually in contention.

R.C.: Is that right?

G.R.: That seems to be the place to go now. It's all about you can buy five hundred Rands for a dollar or something (laughs).

R.C.: Well, I wish you the best of luck with that, obviously.

G.R.: Thank you.