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Mekhi Phifer shoots to kill... what’s already dead!
FANS THINK 1979'S DAWN OF THE DEAD IS THE PERFECT ZOMBIE MOVIE.
SO WHY REMAKE IT? SEAN PLUMMER TALKS TO THE CAST AND CREW ABOUT "RE-ENVISIONING"
A HORROR CLASSIC.
THE SARAH POLLEY DEAD ZOMBIE COUNT currently stands at three.
"Which is a pretty good number actually for a girl," she insists.
"How many people do girls get to kill in these movies?"
By "these movies" she means "zombie
movies." It’s late August 2003, and Polley, the child star
of Canadian TV staple Road To Avonlea, is sitting in a fully-dressed
furniture store in Thornhill Square, a decommissioned mall north of
Toronto, answering questions about her role in the big-budget remake
of director George A. Romero’s 1979 zombie shocker Dawn of the
Dead. All grown up now, she plays a "really, really average
lower to middle-class American" nurse named Ana. Her white tank
top is spattered with fake blood but her enthusiasm is real.
Polley, a Canadian indie film mainstay whose forays
into mainstream Hollywood fare have been limited, describes herself
as "a huge zombie fan" so doing Dawn was not a tough
choice, especially after director Zack Snyder and producer Eric Newman
pledged to maintain the original’s satirical spirit. "I wouldn’t
have been able to justify just doing a zombie film unless I felt that
would be a big part of it."
The original Dawn of the Dead, Romero’s
first sequel to his 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead
(Day of the Dead would follow in 1985), follows four survivors
as they set up their own little community in an abandoned mall and try
to fend off the advancing zombie hordes. The film is much loved by horror
fans, both for its outrageous gore (courtesy of make-up effects artist
Tom Savini who patterned much of the mayhem after his wartime experiences
in Vietnam) and sharp script, which equated the living dead wandering
their local mall with the emerging consumer culture.
"Actually, I think it’s more interesting
now that that allegory is somehow clearer," Polley says of Dawn’s
sociological underpinnings. "Because malls are these completely
homogenized places now. There aren’t any mom & pop shops in
a mall. They’re all these huge multi-national corporations. I feel
like [the filmmakers are] constantly trying to find ways of bringing
that in. And, yeah, obviously you do worry when all of a sudden it’s
a thirty or forty million dollar budget as opposed to a $600,000 budget.
What gets compromised?"
‘Compromise’ has been the word on the tongues
of DOTD fans ever since Universal Studios announced the project.
The logic goes something like this: If Universal jettisoned Rob Zombie’s
House of 1000 Corpses because it was too disturbing, what chance
does a Dawn of the Dead remake have of actually being scary?
And why even bother with a remake when the original is a gorehound’s
wet dream?
Exactly how much "rough stuff" will make
the final cut remains to be seen (the film opens March 19). For her
part, Polley can attest to the filmmakers’ willingness to push
the boundaries. "What we’ve shot is, I think, among the grossest
stuff ever recorded," she says. "Sometimes I’ll be watching
– I’ll see everything happening, I’ll see it set up with
the blood tubes and everything – and I’ll still almost
puke. I really think what we’ve captured is horrific and I pray
to God it stays in the movie. There will be enormous pressure to take
it out and I’m sure some of it will go. But I think if a tenth
of it stays in, it’s going to be remembered for a very long time."
The new Dawn of the Dead is already infamous,
albeit for the wrong reasons. Backlash to Universal’s "re-envisioning"
(their word) has been growing since Day One. Adding insult to injury,
in the eyes of fans, has been Romero’s inability to find financing
for his fourth Dead film, provisionally entitled Dead Reckoning,
as well as Universal’s decision to hire screenwriter James Gunn,
the much maligned scribe responsible for 2002's Scooby-Doo and
several Troma Studios B-movies.
The Internet has proven a fertile spawning ground
for fanboy dissent. Negative reactions to early drafts of Gunn’s
script have cropped up on FilmJerk.com, AintItCool.com and CreatureCorner.com.
Unconfirmed reports have Gunn’s work being retooled by Scott Frank
(Minority Report, Out Of Sight); Newman and Snyder will only
confirm that Gunn’s script has been "tightened." One
online report that surfaced last year, quickly discredited by Universal,
had the studio announcing that the film would be cut to a PG-13 rating,
not R, in order to increase its potential audience.
Newman, who spent years trying to get the project
greenlit, is diplomatic about this virtual hostility. "If we deserve
to be criticized for making a bad movie then we’ve earned it,"
he says. "To come after us before they know exactly what we’re
doing... yeah, it’s a little precipitous; it’s not the way
that I do things or the way that I evaluate things. I actually kind
of... like being involved in something that is getting people passionate,
for and against."
Snyder, a horror fan himself, understands fan suspicion
but assures them that Romero’s legacy is being respected. "I
try the best I can to listen to the zombie purists," he says, "because
there’s a whole subculture of people that take the movie’s
messages and its look as genius, which it is. So what I try to do is
treat the issues they have as carefully as I can because I feel like
they’re not wrong a lot of the time. I try to give them enough
zombie rough stuff without getting too far into any CG (computer generated)
stuff."
For her part, Polley is confident that both the studio
and the fans are going to get the film they want to see. "If you’re
going to take something that was such a huge thing for so many people
in the ‘70s, you don’t want to get in their way," she
says. "And I think they’ve done a good job of keeping the
spirit of the original but not trying to imitate it in any way so that
it really is its own movie. We’re really not trying to make Dawn
of the Dead with more money. We’re making a different zombie
movie that was inspired by the same central idea."
So why remake Dawn of the Dead at all?
"I really believe – and I have from the
beginning – that remaking this movie has nothing to do with the
quality of the original," insists Newman. "It has nothing
to do with setting out to do it ‘the right way.’ I love the
original movie, and if I felt that making this movie would diminish
the original I think I’d have a different opinion about it. But
I don’t believe that’s the way it works."
Newman points out that horror is rife with examples
of the same idea being executed differently, if not better. "I
don’t believe that Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body
Snatchers [1978] diminishes in any way Don Siegel’s [1956 version],"
he says. "It’s a subjective thing. I don’t really look
at one and say, ‘Oh, it makes the first one less of an experience.’
Howard Hawks’ [1951] version of The Thing.... that’s
an enjoyable movie, and John Carpenter’s The Thing [1982]
is one of my favourite movies of all time."
Stylistic objections weren’t Newman’s only
obstacle. Original Dawn producer Richard P. Rubinstein owned
rights to any remake and had fended off many other advances over the
years. But Newman’s perseverance and vision eventually won over
Rubinstein, who wanted to make sure that any remake wouldn’t just
be a matter of "let’s take the title and... slap it on some
bad teen horror flick starring a bunch of WB people."
The rights secured, Newman still had to find a studio
to put up the money. "You look at the numbers on zombie movies,
they’re not promising," says Newman. "There’s not
a single zombie movie that’s made $50 million. No one has ever
attempted to make a zombie movie on the level financially that we’re
making it on."
Which is why Universal, eager to broaden Dawn’s
appeal beyond the "horror" audience, refers to the film not
as a horror movie but as a "zombie-driven action thriller."
"You know, it’s risky," says Newman.
"You want to stack the deck as best you can. And, yes, the horror
audience is essential and we’re giving them what they require.
This is a pretty bloody movie, it really is. There’s some pretty
shocking s**t in it, and I think that crowd is going to be excited about
it. But at the same time we’re servicing the action crowd, we’re
servicing the thriller crowd, we’re servicing the event/Armageddon/Signs
crowd and Independence Day crowd. And then we’re also servicing
the crowd that actually wants to see a drama."
Not ghettoising DOTD as pure horror increased
its appeal to the talent, as well. Character actor Jake Weber (The
Cell, U-571) plays Michael, a Best Buy salesman who finds a purpose
in life when confronted by the undead threat. He’s no horror fan
but appreciated the script’s serious tone. "I think that they’re
trying to make as grown-up a movie as you can about zombies," he
says in between takes with co-star Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction).
"I think the intention is to make a movie that’s real and
to buy into the surrealness of this crazy world that these zombies somehow
inhabit. You’ve got to make everything else as real as possible,
then you can make the leap of faith into perhaps believing that, as
a metaphor, you can take [the idea of zombies] at face value."
Grounding Dawn of the Dead in reality was a
necessity for both cast and crew. Snyder especially recognized that
too many laughs would dissipate the drama. "I think a lot of people
expect it to be a little camp," he says, "and I felt like
there should be a retro vibe but not necessarily a laughable retro vibe
‘cause I want modern audiences to believe the threat, the zombie
threat. ‘Cause once you believe that then the rest of the movie
you can do whatever you want with ‘cause you know you can’t
go outside. If you feel like the threat’s kind of dodgy then you’re
like ‘why don’t they make a run for it?’ And so that’s
where I try to go as hard as I could with it."
The serious approach taken by Snyder, a former commercial
director making his feature debut, helped secure him the job. "What
he said to me in our first meeting was ‘this movie lives and dies
on whether or not people accept that this is really happening and these
are real people,’" Newman says. "Because when it’s
not, when it’s Carmen Electra wearing a bathing suit and going
into dark places by herself to investigate strange noises, it takes
you out of the movie. And if you’re going to embrace that and make
Freddy vs. Jason, that’s fine, that works. But if you’re
trying to sell an event movie, which is the way we look at this movie...
It’s a zombie epidemic, and in a lot of ways it’s kind of
a combination of the old Irwin Allen movies and a movie like Signs
with the third act of Aliens. We’ve always looked at it
that way."
NOW I’M FEELING ZOMBIEFIED!
Make-up artist Dave Le Roy Anderson talks about bringing the dead to
life
 How
did you come up with the zombies’ look?
We opted to stay away from any of the fantasy aspects of zombiedom and
stick to actual reference pictures and images of real dead people and
all phases of decomposition.
The movie was conveniently already divided into three
acts. So everybody you see in the first day of this attack or plague
is considered a Stage One zombie, and they’re fresh looking; kind
of ER room victims, trauma victims, whether it’s from a bite or
just a fight or an attack from something, or just bleeding from the
nose.
Second stage is that same look two weeks later. So
the discolouration begins and the emaciated quality starts. And the
third stage of the zombies – it could be four weeks later, it could
be six weeks later – that’s when they get really bad. That’s
when they fall apart, and that’s when they start to look a little
more classic, with the protruding brow bones and the nose bones sticking
out and the face hollowing away and the teeth beginning to protrude.
How does Universal like the zombies?
For the first couple of weeks I think the studio got a little nervous
because they started seeing the footage and our zombies just looked
like bloody people. And then they started seeing the footage from the
middle of the movie and they said, ‘Now you’re going somewhere,
now it’s starting to happen.’ It was like ‘just wait,
man. Wait, wait, wait!’ And then I just heard from Universal last
week and they’re thrilled with the last three weeks of dailies
because it’s all been Stage Three stuff: big, gnarly, scary-looking
monsters.
Have you watched the original recently?
I watched it about six weeks after we started. I was going to watch
it right at the beginning [of filming] to refresh my memory and then
I thought, ‘You know what? I don’t want to do that because
I don’t want to start putting those images in my head. I’m
going to rely on my childhood memories and what that impression was
as opposed to that reality.’
 Tom
Savini, the make-up artist on the original, has a cameo. Did you meet
him?
Yeah. He was just about ready to perform. It was a nerve-racking day
for me because I had an MTV VJ in my chair and an MTV camera in my face
and I’m doing an interview while I’m doing this guy’s
make-up. And so while the MTV camera is there interviewing me and videoing
the make-up that I’m putting on their VJ, from the door in the
back of the trailer Savini comes in and walks into the shot. And I met
him right there on camera, and then he met our VJ.
Fortunately, Ian Robinson, the MTV VJ, is a huge fan.
Ian was speechless and stole the show and stroked Savini, and they had
this great moment. I just kind of sat there and watched it. And it was
wonderful because it was exactly what Tom wanted when he came in. Just
to hear from one last fan on camera for MTV.
Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames greet their appreciative (but dead) fans.
SARAH POLLEY (Ana): I don’t like it when people know
my name and I don’t know theirs. It’s terrifying to me.
There’s something really disconcerting to me when I walk down
the street and someone says, ‘Hey, Sarah!’ and I don’t
know who they are. I think that’s the worst feeling in the
world. That’s why I don’t really understand people who
have always wanted to be famous. I think it’s really the most
horrifying thing I can think of. |
ZACK SNYDER (director): A lot of stuff. Not that I’m
on edge but I’m a believer so I’m easy to scare. I’m
not sceptical. I allow myself to get sucked in. So if it has a teeny
bit of credibility I’ll go with it. |
JAKE WEBER (Michael): What scares both me, and what I’ve
tried to incorporate in this guy, is that you’re faced with
choices in your life, and given really dire conditions, life and
death conditions, you always wonder how you would react, and fear
is a huge part of that. And I would hope that I would not be paralysed,
that I would in fact rise to the occasion. Because you never know.
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KEVIN ZEGERS (Terry):
Loneliness scares me. |
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