George A Romero's Land of the Dead Interview 2 Greg Nicotero (Special Effects Makeup Supervisor) Previous INTERVIEWER How about the budget? It is not huge, but it is the biggest that George has had to work with. Have you had to sacrifice anything significant because of the budget? GREG NICOTERO The one thing that amazes me is that George will pull me aside and he'll say, “I want to get a shot of this and I need a shot of that. I just want to make sure that there's enough gingerbread in this movie to please the fans.”  He really wants to make a movie that the fans are going to walk out of the theatre feeling like they have gotten their money's worth. You can go see Resident Evil and you can go see all these other movies that are out there, but everybody knows that they've all been inspired by George. ShaunSean of the Dead, which is my favorite movie of last year, was so lovingly inspired by George that it's creating this new group of people who are intrigued by George Romero and say, oh, isn't that the guy who started the whole ball rolling? George is really aware of wanting to make sure that he pleases his fans. That's first and foremost. This is a tremendously ambitious movie. Like I was saying earlier, it's not just set in a shopping mall or a missile silo. It takes place all over the outside world, as well as inside the downtown Pittsburgh area where the fat cats live. The movie has a way bigger scope than any film that George has ever done before. I remember when the original script for Day of the Dead took place on an island off of Florida, and there was a guerilla faction. There was this character who ran this commune area. It was jokingly referred to as the Ten Commandments in zombie movies because it was this huge epic. George kept a lot of those aspects that he wasn't able to make in Day of the Dead because of his limited budget and put them into this film. It's really interesting to see George with not only such a great cast, but a movie that has so much scope to it. You look at the dailies and you really feel like you're looking at a dead world. Look at the way the director of photography used colors in the outside world to make everything feel cold and dead. There's kind of this bluish tinge over everything and it just feels cold. Then you cut to our actors inside Day of the Dead, which is their battle vehicle and it's sort of warm and alive. It's really interesting to just get that feel. INTERVIEWER Do you expect this film to be as violent as George Romero's previous films? GREG NICOTERO We had a lot of outrageous gags planned. What's intriguing about this is that it's a different filmmaking world than it was 20 years ago when we made Day of the Dead. Audiences are much more sophisticated. They're not going to want to see gags that are rehashed from films they saw 20 years ago. Part of what we had talked about was using every trick in the book, using tried true techniques, using a few CGI techniques, and using rod removal. A couple times we had talked about having the puppeteers actually in the shot moving the zombie puppet. You could get a little extra bit of life out of it and then erase the puppeteer out of the shot. You can get it to do things that it wouldn't normally do so it doesn't look just like a puppet on a stick. It's been really helpful, and even some of the shots that I designed, George would look at the temp little digital augmentation and he'd go, wow. INTERVIEWER Because we are all so used to the horror genre, do you find it really difficult to frighten an audience these days? GREG NICOTERO There is a difference between gory effects or makeup effects and scares. I love the scene we're shooting tonight. There's a woman who finds her husband who hung himself. George is describing the shots and the son comes up and he's about to cut the dead man down, and the dead man's eyes open. You see him sort of lurch and all of a sudden, he pulls the chandelier out of the ceiling. There's a big explosion and sparks. When Cholo comes around, all you see is the lamp being dragged away. So you know that it got tangled into the zombie's foot. You just see it being dragged down the hallway. Visually, it's interesting just seeing the zombie sort of walking away. You go, okay, there goes the lamp so he must be going that way, but you don't see it. George has so many little things like that, where I go, wow. It sort of gives you those moments where you see his mind wide open, and go, God, no wonder he's been responsible for scaring the hell out of so many people for so long. It's just the way his mind thinks. It's really pretty amazing. I think the biggest challenge was the volume of zombies and the look of the zombies because it's not like a movie where you have fast-moving zombies who are running 90 miles an hour, and you never really get a chance to look at them. Our zombies are slow and you see them, and the camera's on them for great lengths of time. They don't just take off, which makes it hard for us because every single zombie has to look great. If you have 150 zombies, they all have to look great. You never know at what point one of them is going to come out to the camera, or whether a couple of them will take someone down. You'll just start seeing them ripping at a person and just the sheer volume of it. I always thought what was interesting about Day Of The Dead was that we had a very small group of people so not very many of them were attacked. The big show stopper was when Rhodes is killed by the zombie and sort of torn in half, and you see his legs get dragged off. We kind of thought, well, we can do that and then just keep going with it. So, not only is one of our characters bitten on the neck, and he's bitten on the wrist, but then he gets taken down and his arm goes and his leg goes. Then everything comes out. These zombies are pretty ravenous. They haven't eaten very much so when they get somebody, it's like they're taking bits and pieces of him and it's been really great. We came up with a sort of new way to do a zombie bite that involves a little vacuform protective plate that goes on the actor's arm, and then gelatin over the top of it. The plate's perforated with little holes so you pump the blood up through the holes so it's bleeding before the zombie ever bites it and the zombie can go in and bite anywhere he wants to. So you don't have to hit a specific spot, he can go in and bite, and as soon as his teeth break the gelatin, the blood that's pooling up squirts out. Then he can go, oh, I'm so hungry, and just go in and keep biting. You can get actual shots where a zombie can just keep biting in the same arm, like various places. That was one of the first pieces that we tested and I showed George and the producers and they were like thrilled. I said, “George, you don't have to cut.”  In Dawn of the Dead, there's that great shot of the woman in the tenement getting bit on the neck. It's always funny because you don't see any blood, it's just raw foam being bitten into but it is such a shocking effect. When you first see it, you see the mouth going in and you go, oh, this is not going to happen, I'm not going to see this. And then chomp. Then it comes away, and you react, I saw that. So I talked to George and I said, “What would be amazing is to do a bite and right when the audience goes, `Okay, that's it. I've seen it. I'm not going to see it again,' then the zombie can go back and the audience will go, `No, not again. I'm not going to see it again.'” It was really exciting. We've done a lot of stuff like that. George just gives his freedom to manipulate the audience, which he does so well. Next		Home Interviews Antoine Fuqua Interview King Arthur Interview Arv Grewal Interview Asia Argento Interview Behind the Scenes of "War of the Worlds" Bernie Goldmann Interview Clive Owen Interview Dakota Fanning Interview Dennis Hopper Interview George A Romero Interview Greg Nicotero Interview The Hulk Press Conference Ang Lee Press Conference Ioan Gruffudd Interview John Leguizamo Interview Kathleen Kennedy Interview Keira Knightley Interview