THE RED SHIRT CHRONICLES: Part 4 — Working With Romero, Phase 2

Part four of the Red Shirt Chronicles con­tin­ues the George Romero theme of Part 3, get­ting deeper into Michael Felsher’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with the leg­endary hor­ror direc­tor on his recent work.  He made a cameo in Land Of The Dead and made the tran­si­tion from ret­ro­spec­tive doc­u­men­tar­ian to on-the-set doc­u­men­tar­ian by cov­er­ing the pro­duc­tion of both Diary Of The Dead and Survival of The Dead so Felsher’s got a lot to say about these films.  There’s plenty of inter­est­ing mate­r­ial to glean here, from a fun anec­dote about Asia Argento to Felsher’s thoughts on Romero’s most recent zom­bie films…

You made a cameo in LAND OF THE DEAD .  Can you tell us how this came about?  Any fond mem­o­ries of shoot­ing that scene that you’d like to share?

Well I live in Detroit Michigan, just a few hours from Toronto where LAND was shot.  At the time I knew George Romero thanks to my time at Anchor Bay where we did so many of his films, and I am also close friends with his man­ager, Chris Roe.  Chris man­aged to get me on the set for a cou­ple of nights, and while I had dreams of being a zom­bie in a George Romero movie (who read­ing this doesn’t?) I didn’t really count on it, since they weren’t really plan­ning to shoot much zom­bie stuff for the nights I was gonna be on set.

However, while vis­it­ing Greg Nicotero on the first night, he said he would try to get me in as a zom­bie on the sec­ond night as there were going to be a few needed for a sec­ond unit shoot that he was super­vis­ing.  He didn’t promise me it would hap­pen, only that he would try.  And sure enough when I got to the set the fol­low­ing night, Greg told me it looked like he had all the zom­bies he needed but to keep close by and if some­thing came up he’d enlist me for zom­bie duty.

Well around 1 A.M., there was a change in plan as the main unit needed some zom­bies for a sequence they decided to move up to that night’s shoot­ing.  Before I knew what was going on, Greg grabbed two make-up guys and I was off being made up for about an hour, and after a while, myself and about six other zom­bies were sent off to the main set for a sequence where we attack a sol­dier who makes a mis­take bail­ing out of a guard tower at the wrong moment.  We did two takes of that, and I was the first zombie to reach him and wres­tle him to the ground.  We also did some close-ups of the group growl­ing and snarling behind a fence.  That was just about the best night of my life, and I remem­ber going over to the mon­i­tors where George was review­ing our final take of the solider attack, and hav­ing him put his hand on my shoul­der and tell me how happy he was with it.  If some­one had put a bul­let in my head right then, I would have died the hap­pi­est muthaf*cka on the planet.

Amazingly I can be seen pretty clearly in the film.  Just look for the moment where that guard makes his depar­ture from the guard tower and the big bald­ing zom­bie that first reaches him is me.  There’s also another shot of the group of us feast­ing on him, and I’m the one strug­gling with his arm.

Truth be told, when­ever I think about those two nights, I am reminded of that moment with George at the mon­i­tors which is one of my per­sonal high­lights and a par­tic­u­lar moment from the pre­vi­ous night which is one of my more embar­rass­ing mem­o­ries of all time.  My first night on set, they were shoot­ing in an unfin­ished hous­ing devel­op­ment for a sequence where Riley and the oth­ers find Cholo and the stolen Dead Reckoning.  It was very cold that night, as it had been for most of the shoot appar­ently.  They had com­man­deered one of the garages in the neigh­bor­hood as a cast wait­ing area and had set up a huge space heater to warm the place.  This thing looked like a jet engine tur­bine.  You could see the fire roar­ing in this thing, and all around the face of the heater were lit­tle black blobs of melted plas­tic and nylon where people’s jacket but­tons and scarves had come a lit­tle too close to the heater and had not sur­vived the experience.

Anyway, I didn’t want to intrude while the cast was up there, so I waited until they were all on set rehears­ing for a scene and I went up and stood at the mouth of the garage about six feet from the heater and got myself defrosted.  Now I had my eyes closed for a minute or so while I did this, and sud­denly I became aware of some­one stand­ing to my right.  I opened my eyes and saw that it was Asia Argento.

Now I was sur­prised, to be sure, but not like stunned into stu­pid­ity or any­thing.  I had hoped to meet her dur­ing my time on the set, and at that time I was still with Anchor Bay and we were in the early stages of putting together a spe­cial edi­tion of Dario Argento’s TRAUMA in which Asia was the lead actress.  So I see her stand­ing there, and I think “Hey I should intro­duce myself, tell her I am a fan of her work  and I work with Anchor Bay and we would love to have her inter­viewed for the TRAUMA DVD”

Ok, well some­where between think­ing that and open­ing my mouth to relay this infor­ma­tion to her, my brain decided to either switch off or have a major reboot of some kind, because what I ended up say­ing to her was…

“You…pretty.”

So I say this to her, and to her credit, she was very sweet and thanked me.  Meanwhile my mind is on emer­gency alert and I can hear myself say­ing “You Pretty!?!?!? Is that the best you could come up with?!!?!  Abort! Abort!”  So I try and recover, and I spew out a follow-up sen­tence that, to my mem­ory, went some­thing like this…

“You know TRAUMA?…we’re doing that….you’d be great for doing interview….hehe”

Well after a few tor­tured min­utes of exchanges sim­i­lar to that, Asia was mer­ci­fully called back out for a take.  She smiled and walked away.  So as I am begin­ning to recover from my dis­as­trous moments with her, I watch as she, in one unbro­ken stride, removed a cig­a­rette from her pocket, stuck it out in front of the space heater where in burst into flames, and put it to her mouth and began puff­ing away on her way down to the set.

It was at that moment I became aware that one of the Production Assistants was now stand­ing to my left and had observed this lit­tle moment with me.  He looked at me and said…”That was the coolest mother#$king thing I have ever seen”

At that moment it was hard to dis­agree.  He would have had some com­pletely dif­fer­ent words to describe the scene just a cou­ple of min­utes ear­lier had he been there,  but thank­fully I was spared that at least.

So any­time I start feel­ing a lit­tle cocky about my LAND OF THE DEAD zom­bie expe­ri­ence, I can always hear two words off in the dis­tance in my mind bring­ing me back down to earth…”Youuuuu Prettttty”

Still I got to redeem myself on SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD a few years later.   Lightning struck twice, and I suited up as a zom­bie again, but this time I got to help devour a guy and tear him in half.  And it was so funny, they actu­ally still had the zom­bie cos­tume I wore in LAND!!  It was like see­ing an old friend you thought had died.  It was a warm reunion, and now that cos­tume is much much more filthy than it was when I left it on LAND.  Plus it was so cold that night we shot it, after we were done, me and other zom­bies couldn’t feel our hands and the blood had lit­er­ally frozen to our face.  It was grand I tells ya!  Check out my doc­u­men­tary on SURVIVAL for the com­plete unedited take of us tear­ing that poor sucker apart…it’s amaz­ing stuff.

It’s impres­sive to see you’ve gone from doc­u­ment­ing a film’s his­tory after the fact to cap­tur­ing the film­mak­ing process as it occurs on George Romero’s last two films, DIARY OF THE DEAD, and SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD.

Well this is a very dif­fer­ent process than doing a ret­ro­spec­tive fea­turette or doc­u­men­tary.  With DIARY OF THE DEAD and SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD there is no dis­tance, no look­ing back years later at the expe­ri­ence.  There’s no track record yet, and no his­tory with the fan com­mu­nity, etc.  So you have to recon­fig­ure your approach to sim­ply doc­u­ment­ing things as they hap­pen rather than by try­ing to force a struc­ture to your work from the out­set.  On DIARY I learned an awful lot about when to do the inter­views dur­ing the shoot and how to adjust my ques­tions to be more “of the moment” than “reflec­tive”.  By the time I was on SURVIVAL a cou­ple years later, I had it down a lit­tle more smoothly, but since both films were so dif­fer­ent in approach and shoot­ing locales, there was still one hell of a learn­ing curve.

Still DIARY was a game-changer for me undoubt­edly.  My being on the film was some­thing that I pitched and worked on for some time ever since I found out George was doing this.   DIARY came together very quickly; we’re talk­ing a mat­ter of weeks dur­ing which every­thing began to fall into place.  A great new pro­duc­tion out­fit, Artfire Films, was back­ing the whole enter­prise and George was in com­plete cre­ative con­trol of the film.

I had been in com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the film’s pro­duc­ers (includ­ing John Harrison, who I now owe about 10,432,831 favors to) for sev­eral weeks before the film began pro­duc­tion and they hired me to come up to Toronto for the entire 4 week shoot plus a few days of pre-production time.  So I pretty much hit the ground run­ning once I arrived in Toronto back in mid-October.  My goal was to doc­u­ment as many dif­fer­ent aspects to the pro­duc­tion as pos­si­ble and try and inter­view every­one I could from George right down to the grips.  I had the for­tune of being set up with a great cam­era­man up there, and we ended up with nearly 30 hours of footage from the whole shoot.   We ended up even cov­er­ing a cou­ple days of addi­tional shoot­ing and the pre­mière of the film at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival.  It was funny to be able to do the exact same thing for SURVIVAL in 2009 almost two years later to-the-day.

The most reward­ing aspect of my role in both films was sim­ply becom­ing a mem­ber of George’s crew.  My cam­era­man, Graeme Potts, and I became essen­tially embed­ded jour­nal­ists of a sort.  Very quickly the crew began to accept us and trust us, and Graeme was able to get footage that most on-set doc­u­men­tar­i­ans don’t get access to.  It was a ter­rific group of peo­ple and they all just stepped it up a notch because of George.   And with SURVIVAL, it was even eas­ier to win the crew’s trust since there were so many car­ry­overs from DIARY.  And let me tell you, it was inter­est­ing to observe George on set on both films.  On both DIARY and SURVIVAL he was so active and engag­ing on the set, he’d be up and excit­edly block­ing scenes with the actors, laugh­ing it up, and just hav­ing a great time.   George has the spirit of a young film­maker who is con­stantly excited by the chal­lenges of the medium.  This is a very unique film in that a lot of the stan­dard rules and tra­di­tions of film­mak­ing aren’t being uti­lized.  In many ways, George is learn­ing new things along with every­one else.  With DIARY the chal­lenge was the unique nar­ra­tive of the film and the extended takes and first-person per­spec­tive that ener­gized that expe­ri­ence.  With SURVIVAL it was the grand epic/comic-book style of the film cou­pled with the adver­sar­ial nature of the shoot, which was cursed with the shit­ti­est fuck­ing weather EVER.  Even with that, the crew ral­lied around George and made it happen.

The result­ing doc­u­men­tary for SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, titled WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT is one of my per­sonal favorites of the work I’ve done.  It was shot so beau­ti­fully by Graeme, and I took a very dif­fer­ent approach in the edit­ing process.  Rather than divide it up into the usual chap­ters of a multi-part fea­turette, I wanted to make this a very unique doc­u­men­tary with more of a on-the-ground approach that would take us from the first day of shoot­ing through the pre­mière of the film at the Toronto Film Festival.  This was an approach I had wanted to do with the footage on DIARY, but the hec­tic post-production chaos on that project (cou­pled with NOTLD’s issues) forced me to adopt a much more con­ven­tional approach to the final prod­uct on that one.  With WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT, I took the risk of putting myself on cam­era as sort of a host through­out the var­i­ous days of pro­duc­tion, and it was some­thing I was not 100% com­fort­able with at first, but in the end I felt it added a more per­sonal touch to the pro­ceed­ings.  The reac­tion so far has been thrilling for the most part…though a few crit­ics have sin­gled my pres­ence in the doc out for crit­i­cism.  Which is fine…if you’re going to put your­self out there, you have be pre­pared that not every­one is gonna respond in the way you’d like.

Magnolia/Magnet Films was a won­der­fully sup­port­ive com­pany to work for and they really threw their sup­port behind SURVIVAL and let me do what­ever I wanted as far as the spe­cial fea­tures and the doc­u­men­tary.   Time was a con­stant issue as always, but I avoided the night­mare of DIARY/NOTLD 2008 by giv­ing the documentary’s first assem­bly cut to an edi­tor friend of mine, Andrew Kasch who sorted through the 30 plus hours of SURVIVAL footage and found the cream of the crop.  That was one les­son I learned…I was so in love with every­thing we shot on SURVIVAL that I couldn’t really be objec­tive enough and choose the essen­tial footage that was needed.  It required an unbi­ased pair of eyes to see what I couldn’t.  Once I had Andrew’s assem­bly, I was able to go in and shape the thing in just a few weeks, and the results were beyond my expectations.

I’m seri­ously con­sid­er­ing going back and con­struct­ing a new doc­u­men­tary for DIARY that would fol­low WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT’s style.  There’s so much footage on DIARY that never saw the light of day due to the rushed post-production, and it would be nice to really doc­u­ment that one properly.

So in the end, I’ve got­ten to spend sev­eral months up in Toronto work­ing on George Romero movies over the past few years, as well as being able to edit and release my doc­u­ments of the time I spent there.  I really have noth­ing to com­plain about!  After those expe­ri­ences, I have really come to the real­iza­tion that my sec­ond home is a movie set.  I need to spend more of time there rather than at home in front of my computer.

One more ques­tion about DIARY OF THE DEAD -  any fun sto­ries about your cameo as “the corpse behind the couch?”

Basically I was on the set that day and they needed a pair of legs to be stick­ing out from behind the couch in a scene where Debra (Michelle Morgan) and the gang dis­cover her mother zomb­i­fied emerg­ing from behind said couch while munch­ing on the hid­den remains of daddy.   The pro­ducer, Peter Grunwald, just came up to me and said “Felsher, we need some legs…get in there”..and so I just lay there behind the couch for sev­eral takes.  Now you would think that would be about as pain­less a job as pos­si­ble, but due to the com­pli­cated nature of the shot, they had to do it almost a dozen times to get it all timed out right.  One of the ele­ments was the mother char­ac­ter emerg­ing from behind the couch at just the right moment while gnaw­ing on a bloody sev­ered hand that she has to drop once she sees the kids run into the room.  Well in the first few takes, she would just gen­tly drop the hand to the floor in front of where I was lying…but as the takes went on, they asked her to drop it from higher and higher up each time out.  The last five takes all resulted in this gooey gelatin hand land­ing on my face hard and slowly slid­ing down leav­ing a trail of thick fake blood in its wake.  And I couldn’t adjust my posi­tion, because my legs were exactly where they wanted them to be and I wasn’t sup­posed to move.  When it was all done, I had blood all over me.  Which just goes to show you, there’s no safe job on a George Romero movie.

I’ll close with a ques­tion about SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD: Critics and fans have responded to this film and DIARY in a very dif­fer­ent way than they responded to the orig­i­nal DEAD tril­ogy, some­times harshly and some­times with great praise.  What are your feel­ings on these films?

Oh boy, I could go on for­ever here, but let me say this.  Alot of the neg­a­tive reac­tions to George’s recent work, includ­ing LAND OF THE DEAD as well, have a lot to do with fan expec­ta­tions not being met.  For some, if it’s not NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD or DAWN OF THE DEAD, it’s not wor­thy.  Now on the other hand, there are many who sim­ply don’t think George’s recent work has the same fla­vor and rich­ness that his ear­lier work have and they dis­like LAND, DIARY, and SURVIVAL for rea­sons that can’t just be dis­missed as prim­i­tive fan­boy bitch­ing.  Some peo­ple truly dis­liked LAND’s more main­stream approach to the DEAD saga, and oth­ers couldn’t stand the char­ac­ters and shoot­ing per­spec­tive of DIARY at all.  And with SURVIVAL, there are those who don’t enjoy the film’s car­toon­ish effects and humor and found other aspects of the film lack­ing.  Then of course there’s a wide­spread rejec­tion of George’s embrace of CGI in his lat­est DEAD films, as well as a gen­eral feel­ing that this series has had enough entries for now.  I can under­stand that.  Personally I find lots to love in LAND, DIARY, and SURVIVAL and they are very very dif­fer­ent films just as NIGHT is dif­fer­ent from DAWN and DAY, and vice versa.  Are they flawed?  Sure of course they are, but I really admire George’s desire to use the DEAD films as an avenue to explore polit­i­cal and social themes and his will­ing­ness to try new approaches to his art.  DIARY in par­tic­u­lar was a huge gam­ble for him.  Would peo­ple find the documentary-style approach inter­est­ing or off-putting, and it did man­age to split the opin­ion down the mid­dle.  And yet, SURVIVAL would seem to be much more of a film that DAWN fans would enjoy, and yet it still split the dif­fer­ence with many fans and crit­ics.  Of course it’s hard for me to be com­pletely objec­tive about these films since I’ve been involved in the pro­duc­tions to var­i­ous degrees, but I really feel time will be kind to these films and that George has made some very enjoy­able and chal­leng­ing cin­ema in the past sev­eral years.