Did you play zombies when you were a kid?
Not very often, and I’m not a zombie aficionado. I like the classic
things, but [George] Romero is my postmodern zombie hero.
Pre-Romero, zombies were outside the social order. Haitian
voodoo zombies—you could get a zombie to control, and have
them do your bidding, and a “white zombie” was a girl they
zombified. Monsters always came from outside the social
order—Frankenstein, Dracula, Godzilla—but when Romero
made Night of the Living Dead, he had the zombies come from
inside of a social order that was malignant. It’s from the inside
that everything is falling apart, and he’s the first to do that. So I
love Night of the Living Dead, and also Dawn of the Deadand Day
of the Dead. And I like extreme zombification. The Korean movie
Train to Busanhas thousands of zombies, and they move really
fast. That was some pretty badass zombification. But I don’t care
about The Walking Dead. I’m a vampire guy, I like vampires.
They’re sophisticated, they’re shapeshifters, they’re survivalists,
and they’re not really undead, they’re not reanimated, they’re
just immortal by their situation.
So what made you decide to do The Dead Don’t Die?
I don’t know. I don’t know why I decide anything. I guess just for
the inherent metaphorical potency of zombies, especially now.
And people behaving like sheep. Romero also focuses on con-
sumerism, as a malignancy. So it’s a good metaphor for now.
Zombies are part of our modern mythology.
I didn’t think of your zombies as coming from within or from
without, but that they’re called into being because we’ve
destroyed the planet!
Which is true of Night of the Living Dead. But even that cause of their
reanimation is from within. It’s not like aliens from space invading
us—it’s like we messed up, you know? As Hermit Bob [Tom Waits]
says at the end, “What a fucked-up world.” We fucked it up.
Speaking of metaphors, for the first half of the movie I was
totally suspending my disbelief, buying into this dark fairy tale
of zombies taking over this sleepy town, and the actors also
were perfectly balanced between being inside the story and
their characters and being a little bit outside it too. But then
Cliff (Bill Murray) asks Peterson (Adam Driver) why he keeps
repeating “This is all gonna end badly,” and Peterson answers
that he read the script. And I thought, oh no, this is too bald,
Jim blew it. But later I saw that you needed to do that to get
to the next level, so that by the end we realize that it’s not just
the fictional characters, but everyone—the actors themselves
and the audience—for whom it’s gonna end badly.
There are early hints to the meta thing about it being a film. We
hear the theme song “The Dead Don’t Die” over the opening
credits, and then it’s playing on the police car radio, where we
see Bill and Adam for the first time. And Bill’s character says,
“Why is this so familiar?” and Adam’s character says, “It’s the
theme song.” There are little hints to it, but you won’t get them,
hopefully, until you’ve already seen the whole movie.
One of the most delirious moments for me was Tilda Swin-
ton’s character saying “Excellent fiction” when she sees the
Star Warskeychain, because you understand how much the
actor and the character are from a different universe. But if
you don’t want people to notice the meta thing, what do you
want them to pay attention to?
I love the performances. I wrote for Tilda, Bill, Adam, Chloë,
Steve Buscemi, for a lot of these people, and I was very happy to
get to work with them. What do I want? I don’t even know what
I think the film means! Not that I ever really do—it’s not really
my job. I wanted to make something entertaining, that had a
little bite to it somehow, and some sadness. One thing that I was
very conscious of is that the only survivors that aren’t zombified,
or killed to prevent them from becoming zombies, are the Tom
Waits character, Hermit Bob, who divorced himself from any
kind of social structure decades ago, and the teenagers, who
escape from the detention center. They didn’t function well in
the social order either because they are teenagers with problems.What happens to them? They say something about a safe house.
And we don’t see them as zombies in the end, so my heart is with
them—that they will somehow survive. I love teenagers. They form
our aesthetics about style and music and fashion. If you think of the
great teenagers through history that have given us things, from Mary
Shelley to Carole King, who wrote most of her greatest songs as a
teenager... I made a list at one point: [Thomas] Chatterton, Mozart,
Joan of Arc, Bobby Fischer was chess grandmaster at the age of
15, S.E. Hinton, Anne Frank, King Tut [laughs]. Emily Dickinson
wrote as a teen as well. But I love teenagers, and they have so many
problems. Everyone tells them, “Well, you’re not an adult, stop acting
like a child,” but they’re not an adult exactly, and they’re not a child,
you know? And they have all kinds of hormonal things going on,
and everyone’s telling them, “You’ve got to behave like this!” [Now]
we have this incredible pop star Billie Eilish. Her lyrics are super
dark. She wrote a song called “Bellyache” at the age of 15. And I love
the actors who play the teenagers in our film. And we have Selena
Gomez, who started as a teenage pop star and actor. She plays one
of the out-of-town hipsters. They’re on a road trip in a vintage car
that’s the exact model of the car in Night of the Living Dead.When you say you wrote roles for these specific actors, do
you hear them speaking the dialogue as you write? I love the
dialogue in this movie. It’s like songs with choruses, like when
Adam repeats, “I’m thinking zombies, ghouls, the undead.”
Often I get in a certain zone where I’m not writing dialogue:
they’re talking to me and I’m just transcribing what I hear. And
especially, hearing Adam and Bill together, which was a kind of34 | FILMCOMMENT| July-August 2019
THIS^PAGEANDTOMWAITSANDOPENINGIMAGE:ABBOTGENSER/FOCUS^ FEATURES;^©^IMAGE^ELEVENPRODUCTIONS,^ INC.Jim Jarmusch
on location“Zombies don’t have souls; they don’t have
identities. They’re drifting from identity into
non-identity. Zombies are a metaphor for
people who are not conscious of having
lost their consciousness.”