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July-August 2019|FILMCOMMENT| 35dream for me. And I love writing for Chloë. But I do that often: I
write for main actors, and hope I can trick them into being in
the film. But not just the main actors. I could make a whole film
about any of the characters. I had a great cast, getting Carol
Kane in there, and Steve Buscemi. Steve is a very old friend. We
go back to the late ’70s, and Steve is the least racist and most
generous, nice, open person that I know, so from the start I’m
like, “Make Steve a real racist because he’ll do it.” [Laughs] And
Tom Waits. I haven’t worked with him in a long time and I just
loved having the chance to hang out with him.And then almost all of them die. Most of them are nice people,
and they die because we’ve messed up the planet so badly.
The problem is that the world is full of good people who don’t
want this broken operating system, but they’re also oblivious andthey’re controlled, and so they are kind of zombified. They just
follow like sheep. Most people aren’t inherently bad, but the
people that want power are bad. That’s not new, it’s the history of
humans. And it’s also about the loss of soul. 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. We have a little
reference to “phone zombies.” That’s what I call people on the
street who are looking at their phone as they walk along. They
aren’t even here. I find it so annoying. But the phone thing is
insane... It’s amazing—if you just told me in 1989 that in 2019
you’ll have a thing that’s got movies and music and a camera and
your phone, and you can look up anything in the library, you can
listen to the radio all over the world—it’s incredible. But it’s a drag
when people are so sucked into it. So I don’t know what to do! I
keep trying to keep in mind this quote of John Cage, who was a
Buddhist: don’t try to change things, you’ll only make them worse.
[Laughs] I don’t want to talk about politics. We’re in the middle of
the sixth mass extinction. Everyone should be concerned with try-
ing to instigate a Green New Deal immediately, but instead it’s all
about “what did Trump tweet today?” It’s a soap opera and it’s just
to distract, but it’s successful. I’m more interested in the Sunrise
Movement, these young people on the West Coast, or the Extinc-
tion Rebellion in London, England, where there’s civil disobedi-
ence to draw attention to the climate crisis.You’ve made this apocalyptic movie about the demise of the
planet. And one of the strangest things about the entire
movie is the light. How did you do it and why?
To go back to Night of the Living Dead, what Romero did was to
allow the constraints of his low budget to create a kind of deliberate
awkwardness, that somehow is engrained in the message of the film.
He did really interesting things through crude acting and cheap
effects. We also were limited in our budget and in our time—seven
weeks, and only three weeks with Adam. We were shooting in
summer when nights are really short, so we knew right away that we
had to shoot day for night. So we designed for that. The other real
artifice was that all the car interiors were shot in a warehouse
in Kingston, New York. The actors are just sitting in a car in a
warehouse, acting to nothing, and then we put in the plates later.
That’s called poor man’s process. So that was very artificial, and it
affects how the film looks. And Fred Elmes [the cinematographer]
did a beautiful thing of using the artifice so that it doesn’t look like
artifice—it’s the look of the entire film. So a lot of the look comes
from collaborating with people I’ve worked with before: Fred, and
also Alex DiGerlando, who is our production designer, and
Catherine George, our wardrobe person, and not to forget Affonso
Gonçalves, the editor. Even though I’m the editor and in the room
with him every day, he’s got these beautiful, kind of liquid hands. It
was also the first time I worked with a lot of visual effects. We had
these remarkable people from Chimney. They’re in New York and
Sweden [and elsewhere]. They’ve done some interesting films. One
of my favorites is Atomic Blonde, the Charlize Theron action film.
Charlize Theron is my feminist action hero, you know. I couldn’t
stand Wonder Woman, but Atomic Blondeis fantastic.
I like, when I work in genres, to put something in that no one
else has put in that genre before. So in Only Lovers Left Alive, the
vampires wore gloves and when [Swinton’s character] touched
things, she knew how old they were. And with The Dead Don’t
Die, I don’t know any other zombie films where the zombies are
dust. I wanted them desiccated for two reasons: I didn’t want to
make a splatter film, and I didn’t want blood coming from the
zombies. They’re dried up—they’re soulless.