His Night of the Living Dead made as America was being shaken for the first time by its losses in Vietnam
His Night of the Living Dead, made as America was being shaken for the first time by its losses in Vietnam, reveals a country at war with itself as much as with invaders. A new era of realism was ushered in; fear wasn’t confined to vampires’ castles in Transylvania – it could strike anywhere Romero was one of the foremost innovators. But is money dulling its edge?
For those who like their horror rough, ready and covered in cheap blood-effects, there seems to be a lot to mourn. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, film-makers ditched the high camp of the Hammer style and set out seriously to scare their audiences. Now horror is the most consistently popular genre at the US box office, and it’s big business. In 2005, his new film was shown at Cannes to a standing ovation. In 1968, as a struggling rookie film-maker in Pittsburgh, he was putting together Night of the Living Dead on a shoestring, persuading friends and family to dress up as reanimated corpses and tear apart piles of entrails.
George Romero’s Land of the Dead, the fourth in his series of much-loved, much-imitated zombie gore-fests, previews at London’s Frightfest this evening How times have changed. Now when I get a script…” His voice fades away, and he grimaces eloquently.’Last Days’ is released on 2 September. The first day’s shooting was just a trudge into the Oregon woods for himself, Van Sant, the cameraman Harry Savides and a couple of focus pullers “We had a 12-page script and it was just a map,” Pitt says “Gus would kind of orchestrate everyone’s ideas. The improvisation techniques they developed seemed liberating to the actor.
I’m pretty broke now, but I’m sure I could have had a couple of million dollars.”Pitt talks about filming Last Days with a kind of raptness and hero-worship of Van Sant, whom he thinks is “the best American film-maker we have”. What did people want from him?”You grow up in anenvironment where most people think of you as trash, and then you get to this other place where people who normally wouldn’t talk to you want something out of you I could have made decisions to be more known. Filming in Paris with Bertolucci for The Dreamers, he was disturbed when people called him “sir” It seemed surreal and fake. “Because I look up to Kurt and River Phoenix, I’ve been forewarned, and a lot of the decisions I’ve made in my career are to counteract my fame.” He tells with a shudder how he was chased by schoolchildren in New York after Dawson’s Creek Fame makes him nervous. I’m probably an atheist, though I was raised a Catholic – and that whole religion is based on the first suicide, in many ways.”Pitt has spent the past few years steering clear of big Hollywood films, wary even of identifying what offers there have been. Look how I can shock you.” In fact, the most illicit substance on view in the movie is macaroni cheese made with far too much milk, which is apparently the way Cobain used to make it.Does Pitt think suicide is selfish? “I see why people think it is, and sometimes I do And sometimes I don’t think it’s selfish.
