George A Romero's Land of the Dead Interview 3 Greg Nicotero (Special Effects Makeup Supervisor) Previous INTERVIEWER How long does it take you to do the makeup for each zombie? GREG NICOTERO It takes about two hours per featured zombie. I have 14 makeup people. Some from the U.S. and some are from Canada. Makeup includes dentures and contact lenses, and then they have to all go and have their hair done. You can't just take a girl who's got really pretty hair and make her into a zombie and then just leave her hair. You have to gunk up everything. The idea is that these zombies have been living outside, so we always have to pull the hair forward and make it look stringy, gross, matted, like it's been in the rain, and the wind, and the snow, like they've been walking around for three years. Usually on nights where we have a hundred or so zombies, we're in at 2:00 PM and we do makeup until 9:00 PM and they shoot until 9:00 AM. Then we clean them all up for a couple hours. The circles under my eyes are definitely a product of a lot of hours on this film. But everybody's here because they all want the movie to be great. You don't hear a lot of people complaining. Everyone you talk to says they're here because it's a George Romero film. All of that hard work and that extra effort shows because everyone puts in 150 percent, and George will say, “Greg, I want to do a shot where the zombies are clawing at Dead Reckoning and their fingernails bend backwards and split as the zombies are clawing.”  He'll just come up and say, “It would be cool if we could do that,” and I'll say all right. Then we go and rig it up.  I've been directing some second unit stuff, so I'll say, “George, I shot that shot you wanted last night.”  I look at it like a little teaser trailer and there are shots of the zombies coming out of the water and the fingernails come back and split and bend backwards. Even the people who were there when we shot it said ewwww. It's hard for me because I look at it sort of clinically. I know it's a rubberrubber finger. I look at it as how I assembled it or how my guys assembled it, not the impact of what it will have. Once the movie has that ripping sound, the bone crunching pops as the arms are pulled out of the socket, all that stuff adds so much. It's interesting to watch dailies with people because they'll say it was so horrifying. Then I'll just think, wait till it's cut together with music and all the other stuff because it's going to be ten times worse.  A lot of times they may add a little bit of a digital blood splash or they may extend things a little bit longer.  If we're pulling a guy's arm off, and it pulls off for three seconds, they may add an extra bit of flesh, or a tendon that's still attached so it'll get one extra little stretch and rip, and that's the stuff that'll be really great. INTERVIEWER Do you have a favorite moment or gag in the movie? GREG NICOTERO There's a lot of stuff that we've done that I've been really happy with.  The first bite in the film is set up really well. It's a rookie who's part of our team of guerillas and he gets set up as the newbie who doesn't know what he's doing yet. He is part of the zombie killer group that is raiding a liquor store and he reaches over to grab some stuff. There's a zombie hidden behind the counter. The way that we shot it is, he reaches down and right as he reaches down, the zombie grabs his hand. So he's struggling to pull his hand back, and the zombie just leans in and fights, and tears a huge chunk of flesh. Even the way that we shot it, the blood was pouring down, it just gushed like blood exploded right as the zombie tore the flesh away. What was fun about it was we had Simon Baker and Asia Argento, and everyone came over to look at what we were doing. They just walk up, and they're looking at the monitor and they see this bite. I heard Asia go, OHHHH. So that was a particularly good gag. It's been fun because all my makeup guys and I all have little zombie cameos. Knowing the way that GeorgeGeorge shoots stuff, we would have to build certain fake heads for specific gags so I got to play a zombie. Most of the guys on my crew all play featured zombies who either bit somebody or had something happen to their head that had to be removed. It's been a lot of fun. The hardest thing about the movie really has been the fact that George spent a lot of prep time finessing the script and rewriting things, and streamlining it to fit within the budget and the shooting schedule.  He really wanted to spend a lot more time sitting down and brainstorming a whole bunch of just zombie kills. I remember writing up a list with killings with things like Siamese twin zombies. Just coming up with these cool, weird visuals, like a zombie that was tangled up in his IV line in the hospital. He's kind of walking with his little pole that's stuck with him. A lot of things like that, but it's such a big story to tell because you have a lot of action with the actors…so we really never got to sit and brainstrom a bunch of gags. There was very little prep time for this film. There's not just one group of people like in most of George's other films. We're following Riley's story, Cholo's story, Kauffman's story, and Asia's story. They sort of all meet three quarters of the way through. So you're following all these different factions and the zombies are kind of on the outside getting closer and closer. Then by the end, it's our faction of heroes versus the zombies. INTERVIEWER Do you know the next project you're working on? GREG NICOTERO Currently my company is also wrapping up The Lion, The Witch, & The Wardrobe in New Zealand. We've been on that for almost a year. Howard Berger, with whom I own the company, has been in New Zealand since May. Between that, we're working on The Island with Michael Bay. Next week, I'm going to do re-shoots on Sin City for Robert Rodriguez, which we spent the whole beginning of the year working on. I can't wait to see it. I think it's going to be great. We have Mickey Rourke, Nick Stahl, Bruce Willis, and Benicio Del Toro. To have Benicio Del Toro come in and say that he wants to wear makeup because he wants to look more like the guy in the comic book was a surprise because people usually go the other way when they hear prosthetics, glue, and dentures. They go, what else are we doing? 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