I have a very quiet life. There's nothing weird.
George A. Romero
I liked the '28 Days Later' films, but they're not zombies; they're not dead. They're not using it in the same way.
I also have always liked the monster within idea. I like the zombies being us. Zombies are the blue-collar monsters.
I always thought of the zombies as being about revolution, one generation consuming the next.
'Day of the Dead' remains my favourite zombie film of mine.
I wanted 'Night of the Living Dead' to look naturalistic, but we weren't able to do it because we were shooting with a blimped 35mm camera, which is automatically static.
The grotesque has never really affected or frightened me. I guess it's real-life stuff that frightens me much more.
Horror will always be there, it always comes back, it's a familiar genre that some people, not everyone - it's sort of the cinema anchovies. You either like it or you don't.
My zombie films were all sort of satirical, with political messages. So I was doing them inexpensively and quietly off in left field somewhere.
If you look to the few films that have been really successful, 'Insidious,' 'Paranormal Activity,' it's all basically the old monsters.
As movie monsters go, zombies are the most human. They were human at one time. So we are confronted with ourselves in a way, which is much more frightening and disturbing.
With 'Dawn,' I wanted the slick look; I wanted to bring out the nature of the shopping center, the retail displays, the mannequins. There are times when maybe you reflect that the mannequins are more attractive but less real - less sympathetic, even - than the zombies. Put those kinds of images side by side, and you raise all sorts of questions.
The very fact that you thought of it means that, somewhere in your mind, it's believable to you. All you have to do is convince your audience that it's possible.
Nothing's ever real until it's real.
After 'Land,' I wanted to do something about emerging media and citizen journalism, so I got this idea for 'Diary of the Dead.'
I saw 'Dracula,' 'Frankenstein,' 'The Wolf Man,' 'The Invisible Man.' I saw all those guys on the big screen at RKO in the Bronx. I just always loved that stuff. I loved other stuff, too. That's the thing. That wasn't all I wanted to be.
On the other side of that coin, and far outweighing it, is the fact that I've been able to use genre of Fantasy/Horror and express my opinion, talk a little about society, do a little bit of satire and that's been great, man. A lot of people don't have that platform.
I'd love to make a film like 'Pan's Labyrinth.'
A zombie film is not fun without a bunch of stupid people running around and observing how they fail to handle the situation.
When you're working with a low budget, the most expensive time is the time spent on the set. The words of the day are, 'Get off the set as quickly as possible,' and so CG enables you to do that.
Collaborate, don't dictate.
I love a couple of Fulci things. I just had a gas watching them. It's not what I would do, but I loved watching them. They were fun.
I think you're only free if you're working on very low or huge money.
I grew up on EC comic books and 'Tales From the Crypt,' which were all loaded with humor, bad jokes, and puns. I can have that kind of fun and make these comic book movies but, at the same time, talk about things I want to talk about - whether it's consumerism or the Bush administration or war.
The main thing people took from 'Night of the Living Dead' was that it was a racial statement movie, and that was completely unintended.
I like guys who are understandable and good guys who are flawed.
I grew up in New York City. And I lived in the Bronx in a place called Parkchester.
'The Thing from Another World' was the first movie that really scared me. But the one that made me want to make movies was 'The Tales of Hoffman.' That's my favorite film of all time. It's a fantasy film. It's an opera. I never get tired of it.
I thought Godzilla was a mess, the monster had no character and the humans didn't either. They forgot to make the movie that went along with all these wonderful effects.
I've never had a zombie eat a brain! I don't know where that comes from. Who says zombies eat brains?
When we made 'Night of the Living Dead,' we got riddled. There was this famous article Roger Ebert wrote just blasting the film because he had gone to see it at some screening where there were all these kids in the audience. I don't know why that happened. We didn't make the movie for kids.
A lot of my friends are people who do horror films: Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Stephen King.
If one horror film hits, everyone says, 'Let's go make a horror film.' It's the genre that never dies.
To me, the zombies have always just been zombies. They've always been a cigar. When I first made 'Night of the Living Dead,' it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion. The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon's Silent Majority or whatever. But I never thought about it that way.
Film is a very expensive medium.
Anybody who tunes into Rush Limabaugh already knows what he's going to say and is already inclined to agree. So it winds up creating tribes.
My zombies will never take over the world because I need the humans. The humans are the ones I dislike the most, and they're where the trouble really lies.
People say you're trapped in this genre. You're a horror guy. I say wait a minute - I'm able to say exactly what I think. I'm able to talk about, comment about, take snapshots of what's going on at the time. I don't feel trapped. I feel like this is my way of being able to express myself.
If I fail, the film industry writes me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart.
Zombies to me don't represent anything in particular. They are a global disaster that people don't know how to deal with.
My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines.
When you are working with low budgets and you have a gunshot with a squib and it goes wrong - the gun flash does not synchronize with the squib or whatever - it takes half an hour or 40 minutes to clean it all up and reset it. It's much easier to use a computer to paint in the flash and splatter.
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.
I expect a zombie to show up on 'Sesame Street' soon, teaching kids to count.
I'm more alarmed by people reacting violently to the violence in my films than I am by the violence in films.
One thing about a film production is that it must run efficiently; there is no room for dead wood. So somebody that hangs around by the coffee wagon won't get hired again, but somebody who is dedicated and works hard and really puts out will get noticed by the people that matter around there and will get asked to come back again.
I'll never get sick of zombies. I just get sick of producers.
There are so many factors when you think of your own films. You think of the people you worked on it with, and somehow forget the movie. You can't forgive the movie for a long time. It takes a few years to look at it with any objectivity and forgive its flaws.
As great as Ed is, the wisdom out here is that he can't carry a movie. They'll pay him $3 million to be the second banana in Julia Roberts things. But they won't put up $3 million for an Ed Harris movie.
As a filmmaker you get typecast just as much as an actor does, so I'm trapped in a genre that I love, but I'm trapped in it!
