For four decades now George A. Romero has been the Godfather of zombie movies. With the release of his latest flesh-eating opus Diary of the Dead, Paul Kane caught up with the director to talk about his career…

Did you see any particular movies growing up that might have influenced you later?

When I was growing up, when I was old enough to go to the theatre alone, they were re-running all the classic Universal movies: Frankenstein, Dracula…and then that’s dissolved in my mind into the 50s. The Thing was probably the one that knocked me out, the one that scared me the most.

I was also a big fan of Michael Powell, even early on. The first movie that I ever saw was on a TV my dad brought home, and it was Thief of Baghdad; that blew me away. And then I really followed Michael Powell, as much as I could.

So where did that desire to become a filmmaker come from?

I always had the desire – but it really was seeing Powell’s The Tales of Hoffmann. That’s the movie that made me want to make movies. We didn’t have any money; I had one uncle who was a doctor and had some dough, and he had a movie camera. So I would horse around with the camera.

I went to college to study Painting and Design, transferred into the theatre department, and then never graduated. I met people in the theatre department that were also interested in film. And the same uncle bought us some 16 mm equipment and we set up a company to do commercials, and we were successful. We kept buying more equipment, audio stuff, and eventually decided to make a flick.

How did the original Ten Image group of you settle on a horror movie?

We initially tried to do a very high-minded Bergmanesque kind of thing, set in medieval times. We never got enough money together to do it, though, so then we said we should switch over to something more obviously commercial. We all loved horror films, we loved the genre. And I said, “You know, I’ve got this story…” So that’s how we decided to do Night of the Living Dead.

Was it hard to work out who would do what within the group? Like who was going to be the director?

I was gonna direct, right, first off! I got the gig, I guess, because I’d done the most work, I knew the most about shot-making and everything else. But we all did everything; we all could record sound, we could all do any of the jobs on the crews that we would send out to do jobs. So really with the whole gang, the central core, everybody was a filmmaker in their own right.

Is it true that you stayed in the house while filming?

Yeah. We only had these little cots and we were sleeping on the couches, in the chairs. No running water, so we’d have to go to the stream out back in the morning! It was real guerrilla filmmaking stuff.

You’ve said before there’s a social commentary about all the ‘Dead’ films – and that there’s almost a chronology?

They’ve all grown from what I see happening externally. I resisted make a sequel to Night for 10 years, and I didn’t want to do it, until I met socially in Pittsburgh the people who’d developed this shopping mall. It was this first big indoor mall in Pennsylvania – and they invited me up to the grand opening. One of the guys was telling me, “There’s all these crawlspaces up there, and we have all these civil defence supplies, bomb shelters… You could live here, man.” So I said [clicks fingers] “There’s the idea…”

It’s funny. I started to write it and again, serendipity: within three weeks of that Dario Argento calls me up out of the blue and says, "Did you ever think about another zombie movie?" And I said, “Funny you should ask...” He flew me to Rome, put me in a little apartment, and said, “Write, you write!” And he brought in the first money to do it, then my partner at the time found matching money in the states.

Which is your favourite of the zombie films?

Day.

Why is that?

Beats me! I can’t look at them as films, I can’t say this is a better movie than the other one. I can’t; I don’t see them that way. So much of it is my evaluation of my own work, the experience we had making it, people that worked on it – the whole process, the whole experience. Camaraderie, everything that goes into them. And it was my favourite by a far stretch.

You’ve said before that they’re not meant to follow on from each other…

They’re not meant to. I mean, in each one you get the idea that it’s a little later in the course of the phenomenon. And in Land of the Dead I finally put a number on it, I think someone at one point says three years. So there’s this loose connection. But the story doesn’t continue, the characters are different. It’s just a little later in the process.

The zombies are developing a consciousness, aren’t they?

Yeah, but I really started that, not in Night, but in Dawn. You see little glimmers of that, and right at the very end there’s one zombie that’s been carrying a rifle around for the whole film, probably not even knowing it’s a weapon. But then he gets Peter’s gun, and consciously makes a decision. So that was my first real overt attempt at that. Then, of course, in Day, Bub’s a genius compared to the rest of these guys! Big Daddy not so much, but in Land it’s more organising - I don’t know exactly what it is, they’re becoming a bit more societal.

How have you felt about the remakes?

You know, the Dawn remake I thought was a pretty good action film – it had a good action director. I thought the execution of the film was terrific, but I wasn’t really keen on the script… It was closer to a video game than anything else. The first 20 minutes were terrific, that whole opening sequence. But I just thought it sort of lost its reason for being.

And I don’t understand fast moving zombies. My zombies don’t run! In fact I played a little hell with that…I threw a couple of tomatoes at that one in the new film. It’s sort of a running gag in Diary of the Dead, which is all about alternate media. Going back to the first film, I liked the idea that the only contact they had with the rest of the world was media.

Where do you get your energy from?

I dunno, man. I think I actually died three years ago! I don’t know…I just love doing the work. I just love it, I love it. And I stay involved with it all the way through, so I don’t walk away after the shoot; I’m in the editing room right till the last day. I probably would have made maybe a couple more films, but…No, I just love doing it.

Did you ever think you’d still be making zombie films all these years later?

Never, no. Not until after Dawn. After Dawn went out and was very successful, I knew there’d be more. And again I resisted. I said, “I want to wait until I’ve got some kind of idea.” Luckily the US distributor who wound up buying the rights for Dawn said, “Let’s make three movies.” Those were Knightriders, Creepshow and also Day of the Dead – but we did the others first. So it was great, it marked time until I got an idea. And I still think Day is the subtlest.

Diary of the Dead is out now in US cinemas and is released in UK cinemas on 7 March 2008.

With thanks to Christopher Roe and Collectormania (www.collectormania.com).