George A. Romero: Interviews

Abstract

The early interviews in this volume, particularly Sam Nicotero's from 1973, do a good job of explaining the long process of pitching, producing, shooting, and exhibiting Night of the Living Dead (1968), then conceived as a money-making venture for its funders (Image Ten, a group of Pittsburgh-area investors) but now regarded as a seminal intervention in the horror genre. In his discussions of Diary of the Dead (2007) (especially as related in an interview with Peter Keough), Romero comes across as a media watchdog - the decision to make the film in a largely confessional, cinéma-vérité style seems to have less to do with the massive profitability of phenomenal successes like The Blair Witch Project (1999), and more to do with his fear of the potential duplicity of the blogosphere (pp. 164-65). [...]Williams has done valuable work for readers interested in Romero's ambivalent calling as the sometimes-reluctant paterfamilias of zombie culture.

Tony Williams (ed.), George A. Romero: Interviews (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011)

George A. Romero is primarily celebrated as the world's most intelligent populariser of zombie cinema, but this volume goes some way to expanding on the basis of that success. Taken as a whole, the interviews collected in this book substantiate the claim that Dan Yakir makes in his preface to a 1977 conversation with the director, that 'Romero is undoubtedly the most important regional filmmaker working in the U.S.' (p. 47). Although he now lives and works in Toronto - his most recent features, starting with Bruiser (2000) have all been filmed in Canada, even when set in the United States - Romero deserves attention for having carved out a space for himself in the film business via the road less travelled. Bom in New York, Romero attended what is now Carnegie Mellon University and got involved in the theatre. His most important career decision was to stick around in Pittsburgh. He founded a commercial film-production studio (The Latent Image) and made advertisements, promotional films, and took on freelance contracts before attempting a narrative feature. In a chronologically ordered selection of interviews, editor Tony Williams presents a vivid picture of a man whose career, while idiosyncratic and essential to the history of horror, has been anything but an unbroken string of successes.

The early interviews in this volume, particularly Sam Nicotero's from 1973, do a good job of explaining the long process of pitching, producing, shooting, and exhibiting Night of the Living Dead (1968), then conceived as a money-making venture for its funders (Image Ten, a group of Pittsburgh-area investors) but now regarded as a seminal intervention in the horror genre. These accounts of the struggle to make films outside of the auspices of the studios make for compulsive reading. One of the unexpected delights of this book is the chance to track a filmmaker's personal relationship to his work over a period of a few years. Between 1969 and 1973, Romero wavers and self-contradicts on a few points - the film's budget, for example, seems to change, as do some of the compromises made to get it to screen (shooting in black and white seems to have been both an artistic decision and a budgetary restriction) - but his enthusiasm and sense of retroactive self-awareness never seem to falter. As the book shows, Romero quickly loses his appreciation for some of his films, specifically There's Always Vanilla (1972), initially an attempt to look at what would happen to the burgeoning 60s youth culture a few years on, but realised on screen as a sloppy-but-quirky romance distinguished only by its location-based shooting (p. 42). But he likewise realises (rightly) that there is something special about the films he made between Vanilla and Dawn of the Dead (1978). Jack's Wife/Season of the Witch (1972), The Crazies (1973) and Martin (1977) are premised on tropes that occupy the fringes of the horror genre (amateur occultism, inexplicable viral epidemic, and psychological disturbance leading to imagined vampirism, respectively), and as such their premises have remained fresh. While The Crazies was remade in 2010, Romero himself often claims that he would like to remake Jack's Wife, a film whose bored housewife and negligent husband could easily be adapted to the contemporary Zeitgeist (p. 177). Speaking in 1973, Romero even claimed that 'I'm happier with Jack's Wife than I am with either Living Dead or The Crazies' (p. 22)!

More broadly, Williams's volume relates Romero's anxieties about his place in the film business, his duties as a politically aware filmmaker, and the precarious see-saw of fame and bankability. Both Knightriders (1981) and Monkey Shines (1988) are important to this book. In the former, Romero worked with a large budget while still maintaining autonomy, a stock group of actors and co-conspirators, and the trust of production partner Richard Rubenstein. In the later film, he was working outside of his familiar idiom, making a film from an existing property for mini-major Orion Pictures. After Knightriders, Romero made his leap into the mainstream through his direction of Creepshow (1982), a collaboration with Stephen King. While Romero would maintain his relationship with King through his involvement in Creepshow 2 (1987) and his eventual direction of the underrated adaptation The Dark Half (1993), several of these interviews allude to Romero's sense of missed opportunities throughout the long process of trying to make films of other works by Stephen King, specifically Pet Sematary and The Stand. Although both of these books were eventually brought to screen (Pet Sematary [1989 and 1992] as a two-film series directed by Mary Lambert, and The Stand [1994] as a TV miniseries directed by frequent King collaborator Mick Garris), we can't help but wonder what Romero would have done with the material.

The later part of this collection does a good job of updating our sense of where Romero stands today. While still a popular maestro for horror fans, he continues to make engaged (if sometimes uneven) films. In his discussions of Diary of the Dead (2007) (especially as related in an interview with Peter Keough), Romero comes across as a media watchdog - the decision to make the film in a largely confessional, cinéma-vérité style seems to have less to do with the massive profitability of phenomenal successes like The Blair Witch Project (1999), and more to do with his fear of the potential duplicity of the blogosphere (pp. 164-65).

Williams himself contributes two interviews, one from 2000 and one from 2010. While complementary in some respects to the largely journalistic style of the rest of the book, they are immediately recognisable as the work of a literary scholar. Williams asks Romero precise thematic and interpretive questions that occasionally yield hidden insights, but just as often result in confusion. For example, the 2000 interview asks about Romero's influences. In Williams's The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead (2003, Wallflower Press), a Romero-as-literary-naturalist thesis is used to frame an overall reading of Romero's work. While Romero is quick to acknowledge his debt to Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe, he is blunt in admitting that the American naturalist prose of the nineteenth century (specifically that of Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris) does not play into his ideas (p. 136). For good or ill, questions like these reveal the interpretive split between how an artist conceives their work, and how academic audiences (or audiences more generally) process such material.

Ultimately, however, George A. Romero: Interviews does a great service to scholars and fans interested in the thematic and intellectual depths of Romero's movies. The collected interviews do plenty to promote Romero's status as one of horror cinema's greatest living filmmakers, while at the same time redirect attention to his ambitions in other genres. On the whole, Williams has done valuable work for readers interested in Romero's ambivalent calling as the sometimes-reluctant paterfamilias of zombie culture.

Kevin M. Flanagan