George A Romero's Land of the Dead Interview Simon Baker (Riley) INTERVIEWER Mark Canton says you are the next Steve McQueen. How do you feel about that? SIMON BAKER Well Mark just flatters me. You just do what you can to make a living. If you put labels on yourself, then you're shooting yourself in the foot, aren't you? If you accept labels being put on you then you might as well be holding the gun. So what are you going to do? I'm just going to shrug it off. Laugh it off... INTERVIEWER There always seems to be a political overtone to George Romero's films. How did you get involved with the project and did you do it for political reasons? SIMON BAKER I wasn't really familiar with the genre before I took the job. If it wasn't for my manager who was persistent and grew up loving the genre, he sort of said, please meet George Romero, just meet him. So I met George, and he was just one of the nicest guys I've met in Hollywood. I looked him up on the Internet and there's a lot of information.There are a lot of people that are very impressed with George and have put him up on a pedestal. I walked in and there's this guy that's really warm and lovely, self-effacing, and is the type that is going to make a movie and have some fun. I was drawn to that because he was very real. From that moment of meeting him and enjoying who he was in Hollywood sort of come-and-meet-the-director-and-the-producer way, I walked out of the room saying, he's really a nice guy. His wife was also there, and Mark was there, and I've worked with Mark before. We sort of shared some experiences, so I had a bit of a laugh and I enjoyed the meeting, which is rare. Then I went home and started to do a bit of research and then more and more research. Yes, I found George's films interesting, both politically and just for what they were. I liked the contradiction, in a sense, that the film can be perceived on a political level, but they're just zombie movies. So they can work on two different, or many different levels. That was interesting to me. I guess, maybe that's why I'm an actor, maybe that's why I like a lot of things. I like things that are somewhat different. I didn't necessarily do it purely for political reasons, but I was drawn to that nature. I think that can be exciting in cinema and in film. Maybe that's why George has such a following because he does do that. He does a lot of way out crazy sort of stuff within his movies as well. Not many people can get away with it. Not many genres can get away with what he does in his films. INTERVIEWER What kind of crazy stuff is George Romero doing in this movie? SIMON BAKER Well zombies. They do crazy stuff. It's pretty wacky some of the gags they do. It took me a couple of days of watching this stuff go on. All of us were running around and getting all excited about the first zombies that we were shooting in the film. Grown, educated men and women running around, getting excited about zombies. I laughed and laughed and laughed for the first few days, and then I found myself really getting into it in a really honest, pure, innocent, child-like level. Like, this is fun, let's see what happens here. We have been shooting a bit with the splinter unit, which they also call the splatter unit as well. It's a separate unit, and they do a lot of the zombie gags. George runs in between the two. They primarily set up largely for the special effects, gore, and blood stuff. It's a great place to hang out. INTERVIEWER How do you think this film has evolved compared to George Romero's other films? SIMON BAKER It's interesting because George hasn't made a George Romero zombie movie for about 20 years or so. I was in high school. A lot's happened socially and within the media since then. In 1985 we were still probably using overhead projectors in class. Look at all this stuff now. A lot's happened and there are a lot more different things that make us paranoid that we can reflect on now. Things are constantly changing day by day. The speed in which our lifestyle moves today is frightening. My five year old uses email. It's pretty scary. That's how advanced we have become. I remember only six years ago or maybe more, fumbling my way onto it. That's how quick everything's changed. On a world scale with the different social issues that are going on - segregation of different countries, fundamentalism, the way power and politics evolves, and control of the media. Everything's just shifted in a real way and there's a lot of innocence being lost. A lot of these big money spending corporations, whether they are political parties or financial corporations, all still prey on our sort of innocence as individuals with and through the media. Do we want to believe something's right or something's wrong, or the truth? I think George had a lot of material for this movie to play around with. The good thing about George is that he doesn't set out and go, I'm going to make this subversive commentary about society. I think he's very much free form with his story and it just flows. George was telling me on Night of the Living Dead, that he had no political intentions by casting a black man as the main character. It just happened and when the film finished shooting, it suddenly became very relevant. He didn't know that at the time and there are a lot of people that would go, I'm a genius, and I knew something was going to happen. We were shooting this film in the middle of the U.S. election. We would run back and forth to the little tiny monitor that had results as they were happening. Since I was away from my family, I spent a lot of my down time watching the news coverage, reading the newspapers and soaking up all this information.  It was just everywhere. Both the parties had advertising campaigns and the way they manipulate the media and try to get you to feel this way or that way, or jump on this side or that side. They won't allow you to ever be in the middle. All this became very relevant to me while we were shooting the movie. That's why I liked it, that's why I'm excited.  I think you can go see this movie, as any of George's movies, if you like a fright, a scare, the notion of zombies being the rejects and the outsiders coming back. There are all these different levels. Depending on who and where you are in your life, you can sort of associate with that and identify with it. I got into identifying with those things that I'd talked about when I was shooting the movie. Not everyone will do that, and I think George set out to do that. If you're going to see the movie for a message, I don't think that's necessarily the front and foremost idea to the movie. I think the movie is about having fun, getting a bit of a scare, reenergizing the genre again, and people having a good time. 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