Interview with Gregory Nicotero - Part 2 of 3
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[Photo: Staci Wilson interviews Greg Nicotero] Part 2 of 3 = = =
On the influence was Tom Savini's work:
Gregory Nicotero: Tom's work has always been tremendously influential because he comes from a misdirection sort of background. There's a couple of things that he taught me really well that we used later. A perfect example is in Misery when Kathy Bates lifts the sledgehammer up and she looks at James Caan and says, "God, I love you," and then she swings the sledgehammer down and the leg breaks. What we did was instead of… you know, the audience would sort of assume that its going to be a fake implement because you'd never really hit someone with one.
So the way we did the misdirection was we had her hoist the real sledgehammer up so you saw that there was a little effort and energy to actually lift it up. It swings down and we had fake legs in the bed that she would make contact with. But it's always about, you know, you want to establish the weapon first. Tom was really good at[that] he'd pull out the machete and you'd go, "Ah ha! Machete!" and then you'd hit the zombie in the head with something else. So Tom's effects were always tremendously ingenious and even on Land of the Dead when we were designing a lot of the makeup effects and a lot of the gags, I took what Tom had done and sort of finessed it a bit.
One of the things I really wanted to do for a zombie bite was I wanted to be able to do a bite where you didn't have to just bite in one place but you could do multiple bites in one take. Ultimately from a cinematic standpoint you don't really even need that because you're going to see the zombie go in and then you're going to cut to the person screaming and cut back and a big chunk of flesh is going to tear out. But one of the first things we tested was I said I'd love to be able to give George the freedom to have an entire arm rigged for a bite where you could just go in anywhere you wanted and that's what we ended up doing. That was tremendously effective. So Tom's work was always inspiring because of that, the simplicity of it. And the fact that it was always very ingenious.
On making the zombies in Land of the Dead different from others that have gone before:
Gregory Nicotero: One of the things that we really try to do in Land of the Dead which hadn't been done in previous zombie movies was we tried to eliminate the pink/red color on the inside of most of the zombie's mouths. Because that sort of signifies life, when you see red and pink in the mouth. So we concocted for the movie a mouth rinse that was sort of a dark greenish-black. Before every take, for the majority of the zombies we would go through and we would drip food coloring onto their tongues and they would swish it around their mouths so that every time a zombie would open his mouth he would have a black tongue and a black inside of the mouth. It was just something that we wanted to do besides that, every single zombie in the movie has custom contact lenses. What we really wanted to do is we didn't want it to look like it was a person with kind of pale blue makeup or a big wound on their face but normal alive-looking eyes. So we put contact lenses into every single zombie so that when you see close-ups of all of them they have custom dentures, they have this black rinse in their mouth, and they have custom contact lenses.
It was quite an ordeal because we had thirty sets of lenses so any particular shot we had to stand right next to the camera and watch the rehearsals to see which zombies got close enough to the camera to make sure that they all had their contact lenses in or else it would kill the illusion. And one of the things I'm most proud of when I watch the movie is that every single zombie makeup looks camera-ready. I had a crew of fourteen people that were just constantly cranking out zombies from 2:00 in the afternoon until we would start shooting at 8:00 at night. And then we would wrap at 7:00 in the morning and it would take us 2 hours to clean up the zombies. So we were doing an average of 40 makeups, 50 makeups a night for 42 days. We did thousands of zombies over the course of production.
On his favorite zombie movies, and recent zombie movies:
Gregory Nicotero: There's been hundreds of zombie movies. I love zombie movies. I'm a huge fan of Dead Alive, I thought that was just so much fun. I loved Shaun of the Dead. I even liked the Resident Evil movies. I thought they were fun for what they were. I would have liked to see the Resident Evil zombies eat more people. Truthfully, I really wanted these zombies to look a little different. We did a lot of different things in terms of color schemes. We knew that the majority of these zombies were going to be seen at night, outside, so we went with kind of pale or yellow bases. We did a lot of wounds and stuff but we also made a lot of hairpieces. We were finding a lot of people that were bald or had a little bit of hair, we would put these real sparse, kind of shaggy wigs on them. Everybody had custom dentures, everybody had custom contact lenses.
So the color schemes that we picked were different enough that the zombies didn't look like the standard zombies that you had seen in a lot of other films. Also we used a lot of puppet work and a lot of CG work. A lot of the head hits in the movie...you know, George said to me one day, "You know, things are so different now than they were back in Day of the Dead." Because in Day of the Dead we would build a squib, we would stick it on the back of somebody's head and you know "Boom!" and blow the blood out and they would fall down. Nowadays you can't do that. We would just grab an extra and go "Hey you — come here, you look good, let's blow you up". But nowadays there's stunt things to consider and there's safety issues and stuff.
So one of the first things we did was come up with air mortar ways to do head hits so that we could blast blood with slime out of the backs of zombie's heads and stuff. After a while the problem is that those have to be so specifically lit, the light has to be in the right spot. This is kind of one of those things I said to George, I said, "George, you're breaking your own rule." He said "What do you mean?" I said, "In Dawn of the Dead every zombie that got shot in the head was standing in front of a mirror or a window of a store so that when the blood sprays out the back of the head you have something for it to spray against."
Like when David walks in at the very end and Kenneth shoots him in the head. There was that perfect blood spray on the wall. I said that's why those work because the guy is standing right in front of a wall. On Land of the Dead we were doing these air hits and they were spraying blood but it was with a black background, because it was a dark sky. So you didn't see it very well. They didn't take any time to set up.
But I think the intention always was that we were going to have a couple of days where we were going to have green screens set up and shoot a bunch of different head hits on green and then comp them in. And they worked really well. The CGI company, Spin, that did the visual effects, they did an amazing job. I would call them from set almost every other day and sort of give them a heads up as to what I thought they were gonna need to be doing. There was a lot of intention to do ring removal and to add some digital blood here and there. That was one of the devices that we really used because George was so concerned about the ratings and so worried about some things being too bloody and some things some things not being bloody enough because blood gags are kind of unpredictable.
So the plan always was that we would do a pass dry, and we could put digital blood in you we could control exactly how much you wanted. So for the unrated DVD you could add more blood to it! And it looks great. I mean, the visual effects in the movie, I think, are pretty seamlessly put in. There's one or two shots that I know are digital but the nice thing is that there are enough practical gags in there as well that it mixes up nicely. The audience feels like they're getting a good sampling of both. So it makes everybody kind of happy.
On his inspiration for Land of the Dead:
Gregory Nicotero: I take, truthfully, most of my inspiration is from old films that I love. For me, I can watch movies like the original Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead and even films by, you know, John Carpenter. What I'll do is to strive to put something on screen that we haven't seen before. One of the reasons why we wanted our zombies to look different was because I'm a fan of zombie movies and I didn't want our zombies to look like something we had seen before.
So for me what is most inspiring is for people to walk out of the theater going "Wow, I never imagined a zombie would look like that before." So for Land of the Dead we did a combination of prosthetics, we did puppets, we did some CGI stuff. We used sort of every trick in the book to come up with this sort of world of zombies that we wanted it to feel fresh and new. And I think that we actually accomplished that.
On shooting on location in
Gregory Nicotero: I've shot in
So a typical day would be we'd leave the hotel at 2:00 in the afternoon, we would show up on set, the first wave of zombies, the first 12 or 15 zombies would come in. An hour and a half to two hours later, the next wave would come in. An hour and a half to two hours later the next wave would come in. So as the waves continued to come in I would start breaking people free to go to set so that by 10:00 or 11:00 at night, we'd have 35 or 40 zombies made up and then the background masks. So the shots would get bigger and bigger as the night went on. The challenge of that is that by 6:00 in the morning when the sun starts coming up you've got a hundred people wearing masks and then 40 people wearing makeup and you have to clean all of them up. You've got to check all the masks back in. Then you've got to clean all the zombie make-ups up. We would probably end up driving home by 8:30 or 9:00 in the morning. Then we would do that every single night and it was so hard. The big challenge that George always said to me when we were shooting the movie, he said "You know, we did Dawn of the Dead, we were in the Monroeville Mall and we could just set up a light and we didn't have light it." The whole place was lit.
Day of the Dead we shot in a limestone mine outside of
For me the pressure was really on. I was sort of stepping into the role that Tom Savini had carved for himself over the years. I was doing the effects for a guy who I considered the guy who gave me my start in the business. So as far as I was concerned it was my chance to repay George Romero for the career that I feel he opened the door for. I put a lot of pressure on myself and I drove my crew crazy because I wanted everything to be perfect. I remember George went, "I don't want perfect. Perfect isn't fun. Imperfect is more intricate. Don't worry about it." Because I would worry so much about stuff. As did he. I mean the irony was that he would say "Don't worry about it" but then George was in the exact same boat that I was in. He's getting the chance after 20 years to make the film that these fans of his have been waiting for, for 20 years. So as far as George, if I thought I was under a lot of pressure, George Romero was under 500 times more pressure. He wanted to be able to deliver a movie that the fans would love and that the critics would love.
And, lo and behold, the movie was so critically praised and I couldn't have been more pleased with the reviews of the film. Being as close to the movie as I was, I mean I was there for every single shot of that film, I had dailies of the entire movie. I had seen every single shot. For me to sit in the theater the first time I saw it and be as amazed as I was with what George was able to pull off. With the support from [the support team]. It was really a tremendous accomplishment that all these people did. It was really because everybody believed in George's vision. Every single person on that crew, costume designer, production designer, everybody was there because they wanted to give 150% because they believed in George's vision and they wanted to be a part of his movie. They were able to help him deliver the movie that he wanted to. Of course, I'm sure if he had another 20 million dollars or another couple of weeks the movie would be different. But you can say that about anything.
His thoughts on another George Romero zombie movie:
Gregory Nicotero: From a fan's standpoint, yeah I'd love to see another zombie movie. I know George has ideas as to where he wants to go with it. I thought that Land of the Dead was the perfect progression from Night of the Living Dead to Dawn of the Dead to Day of the Dead.
Back to Day of the Dead you had the Buck character who was sort of starting to show a little bit of ingenuity and intelligence and the you take it a little bit further sort of swap the societies. Yeah, I think it would be amazing to see another zombie movie. I think for me sometimes it's more fun to watch them only because I'd love to recreate the experience I had watching Dawn of the Dead in the theater for the first time. Which was seeing that, in the tenement building seeing that zombie bite the other one on the shoulder for the first time and a big chunk of steam coming out. That shot changed my life. That movie changed my life. Because you're so unsettled by what George presented to you in the first 10 minutes of the movie that the rest of the film you distrust everyone. You don't trust the filmmaker because you don't know what he's going to do next. You're so unsettled by the adventure that you're going on but you can't take your eyes off of it. I loved that experience and I would love to relive that experience.
That's what I look for when I go to movies. Unfortunately not a lot of films have that. If you see Seven, which I think is an amazing movie, I felt like I was taken on that kind of journey when I watched that film.