Se7en Questions with Filmmaker
George Cameron Romero
Who are some of the artists or some of the works
that inspired you to get started in this field? Of today’s current artists, who do you draw inspiration from?
I began devouring movies when I was about six. I couldn’t get enough of them. I figured out that there was this genre of films that my Mom wanted me to stay away from until I was older and that my Dad was involved with this thing called horror. I was hooked. I watched Night of the Living Dead and was addicted. Argento, Bava, Bunuel… those were the cats who were seriously messing with my head and I loved it. But I think what kept me “healthy” about it was that when I would spend time with my father, I would listen to him talk to me or his friends about horror and about filmmaking as a craft and his passion for it… the way he moved when he talked about it… the way he lit up… it was infectious.
My mom gave me my first 8mm camera when I was eight years old and I was off to the races, making what I lovingly call my “Hey” series of horror adventure films… “Hey, there’s buried treasure in my back yard,” “Hey, there’s Klingon monsters in my basement” I had a Klingon mask my dad had given me one year, “Hey, there’s reptile monsters on the block.” I didn’t understand editing as anything more than a concept, so I did all my effects in camera and would have my friends teleport across the yard. My mom acted impressed, even though I’m sure she wasn’t and my dad told me that he was “blown away” by how much I seemed to have “picked up.”
Regarding today’s artists… I think we all need to find inspiration where we can. I still devour movies, good and bad, because I believe that even a completed bad movie is a good movie on some level. There may be a lighting gag or a camera trick or a moment of a performance or practical effect that makes an entire film worth watching for me and you never know when you may have to call on that visual vocabulary on your own set. So many people in this business fail to realize that all any of us are doing is standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before us and trying to see further than they could see. With technology advancements and storytelling techniques available today, inspiration is all around us everywhere we look. We just have to remember to see it.
What have thus far been some of the negatives of being an indie artist in your field?
This is a question I am asked pretty regularly… I wish there was a straightforward answer, but I just don’t think there is. To explain is to say that the “negatives” have got to be harnessed as positives if we are going to commit to this as our life and livelihood. For every thousand “no’s” you hear, you will hear one “yes,” and on the day when you feel that you’ve been in a marriage to a partner for 25 years and you wonder if they have ever loved you at all, you will get a message from a fan or be approached in public and you will realize that there is at least one life you touched. And that’s huge… it can be the difference between quitting and pushing that extra mile.
If you are asking about the biggest challenges, I would say that, pretty universally, the biggest challenges are always going to be finding the funding to make a film. Orson Welles said, “A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.” It’s a simple way of saying that if your particular creative affliction is filmmaking, you have to be able to create a perceived value out of your concepts and build a track record of paying back the people who are brave enough to invest in you. Here’s the rub… even that may not be enough anymore. While a lot of artists can brood or isolate and emerge after a time with their latest creation, a filmmaker has to be 100% artist, 100% salesman, 100% businessperson, 100% marketing professional, 100% passionate, etc… you never know when you walk into a room who you may meet… you never know who may be a fan, who may be interested in collaboration, who may be interested in investing… it can be exhausting, but it’s also an exhilarating existence because when the stars align and the perfect storm puts you on set, you breathe a rarified air and you know the sanctity of hallowed ground and you know, in that moment, that it’s all worth it… every scar, tear and drop of blood… every struggle, argument, collaboration… it’s all worth it.
What have thus far been the positives of being an indie artist in your field?
I think I answered 2 and 3 together in 2.
What have been your favorite completed projects to work on up to this point? Can you tell us a little bit about them?
Geez… all these “having to pick” type questions… I think I love everything I’ve been lucky enough to do to this point in my career. I love all the movies… even the bad ones… and the commercials that were all great learning experiences and steam valves for my inner creative between larger projects (even though I’ve done some commercials with bigger budgets than some of my films). I think Staunton Hill will always hold a special place in my heart for a lot of reasons but mostly because at the end of the day and in the face of a LOT of adversity, I was still able to release a film that showed my love for all the greats I came to love and admire in this business.
The Screening will always be another one I hold dear mainly because it was a perfect example of a group of absolute underground fringe-dwellers coming together and literally pulling off an impossible task. We shot over 46 nights in Pittsburgh. 30 of those DAYS were under 30 degrees so by the time we got to set temperatures were already near or below zero… we had a location with no hot water, the only heat we had came from propane heaters we borrowed, and we had literally hundreds of people turn out to help us pull it off. In the end I didn’t get the movie I set out to make, but I got something much better, in my opinion… I got my trial by fire and the snuff films we made for that movie were so gnarly that when they were cut with the film’s climax of 500 people killing each other and themselves with everything from guns to hacksaws, broken bottles and hatchets, the film was ultimately deemed too gory for a wide release. If the internet had been what it is today, I would have just uploaded it…
There are other things as well… like this series of things I did that we called “filmmercials.” We did them for companies like The Lending Tree and they were essentially short films set within a branded world. In fact, my favorite one was called They Lend by Night. Inspired by the old noir piece The Live by Night, I did this 7-minute black and white short film that talked about home mortgage refinancing or something… but everything was period… from the cars to the suits to the house and set dec down to the Arri BLII we shot on with Cooke lenses from the time period. It was so much fun.
What projects are you currently working on or have planned for the near future?
So many cool things going on right now. Most prominent is Rise of the Living Dead. I won’t get into too much detail here because I’ve put a pretty transparent look at the project online at . I spent a long time working to earn my bones in this industry and with the horror community and this is a story I’ve been working and living to tell since I was a kid. We are still a minute away from principle on the film, but as you can see at the site, there is a LOT to look forward to from this one.
Beyond that, all of my upcoming projects are listed at http://romeropictures.com/projects. There is everything from an underwater thriller that I’m working to bring to life for traditional theatrical release as well as VR, a skate thriller in the vain of the skate flicks I LOVED in the 90s, a fantastic film called THE RED (investment trailer on site) about a woman searching for her missing son in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge who gets trapped out there and has to ask (and answer) a lot of questions she may or may not be ready to face. Outlaws and Lunatics is an awesome grindhouse style crime thriller. Rogue is a much more artsy take on an outbreak film and The Riverman is a seriously fucked up serial killer project of mine that I’ve always wanted to make. So, there you have it…
I’ll just leave this here as well… I had an extremely exciting phone call yesterday that began when I answered and the gentleman on the other end said: “you ready to smile?” When I obviously answered “Hell, no!” he replied with “well too bad, because you know that thing I’ve been working on with you for the last year and a half?” I replied “yeah…” to which he responded: “THEY’RE IN!”
We are working out the details of the option right now, so I can’t give specifics, but I will say this. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to do what I can to help our vets whenever and wherever possible, I did a lot of trauma counseling in LA and when I traveled the country with my best friend a couple years ago while he was on tour, I made a whole new family of brothers who all served and sacrificed. Somewhere in Texas a few years ago, one of these brothers got a call from a phone chain of Marines that stopped with him saying that I was in trouble at one point. A Marine I had never met received a call from another Marine I had never met, dropped what he was doing, showed up and very literally saved my life… I didn’t ask for it… Hell, I didn’t even think I deserved it… but it happened… he and I became extremely close after that and began to talk about something that happened to his brothers in 2004. As of yesterday, I have earned the unbelievable privilege and honor of being trusted with telling the story of that thing that happened to them. I can’t think of a single better way for a guy like me to say thank you, not just to my new brother for saving my life, but to all of his brothers, many of whom lost theirs fighting for ours. I’ll be announcing it soon, so stay tuned.
Where do you see yourself in a few years and what would it take for you to consider your career a success?
I have no idea and while that was an exciting thing to say 25 years ago, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a little unsettling these days. With regard to considering my career a success? I don’t know if people like us will ever get to that point. I think if I woke up one day and said “WOW! I made it! Holy Crap! That’s it! I can’t beat where I am now and there’s literally never another story I could tell that would top the last one,” well I think that’s the day we stop chewing on the barrel and just squeeze.
The life of a career filmmaker isn’t about the destination at all… it truly is about the journey. When we stop allowing the universe to take us where it KNOWS we need to go, even without any idea of what it’s trying to tell us, then we stop creating and begin copying… and that’s no good.
If you couldn’t do this anymore, what career path do you think you would have followed and why?
That’s easy… filmmaker – wait… Well, shit.
