"Let me ask you a question, kid." "Did you see that movie Night of the Living Dead?" "Brains!" "Do you ever wonder about all the different ways of dying?" "Eating brains, how does that make you feel?" "It makes the pain go away." "Send more paramedics." "I had no idea that it was gonna have such a long life." "Twenty years later, having people go, "Oh, my goodness," ""you were Tina in Return of the Living Dead."" "I never expected that to happen." "The idea that I got to be in a zombie movie and I got to battle zombies was about the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me." "Shut up." "Christ!" "Sick!" "All of these people, they were just from here and yonder." "Somehow it meshed, and it became a work of art." "Dan, who had never directed, I don't think, before, was open to suggestions from old-timers." "A lot of the kids were young and inexperienced." "I think a few of them, it was their first movie." "He talked Tom Fox into doing the best thing in the world." "He talked Tom into paying for a week or two of rehearsal." "The picture has that improv feeling because dialogue is snapping all over the place." "We rehearsed for a couple of weeks, real tight." "And we did it in sequence, just as though you were doing a play." "And it was marvelous because we all had an emotional map as we went through the picture shooting out of sequence." "We knew where we were emotionally, our timbre of the moment." "You know, I think it's time you tell us what the fuck's going on." "I don't have ton tell you anything, dickbrain." "We think you should." "Working with Clu and Jimmy Karen and Don Calfa was such a thrill for me because I was well aware of all three of them and their previous work." "I was a huge Poltergeistfan, so Jimmy Karen to me was the guy who moved the headstones but left the bodies." "And Don Calfan I remembered from10, and all sorts of stuff." "I had watched in Westerns when I was a kid, so that was really exciting g for me to work with them." "Get him off, Frank!" "When actors are going down, when their career has more or less come to the sunset, that's when they take these types of films, in those days." "One day I asked the director, Dan, I said," ""Dan, how come you chose me for this part?"" "He said, "Well, what other leading man would you have chosen?" ""I mean, who would you have gotten?"" "And I thought and I thought, and I knew he was talking about money and availability and all of that." "I said, "You're right, I can't think of anyone."" "I was really excited about it when I heard that he was gonna do it, 'cause I'd seen him do so many marvelous things, and he's terrific in the picture." "Sometimes Ernie Kaltenbrunner works late on Friday nights." "Well, who's Ernie Kaltenbrunner?" "Calfa and I worked together a lot." "He played one of the greatest characters I've ever seen." "He had a weapon and a holster like a fast drawer he had a pipe, and it was just so inventive." "Dan has a very kinky sense of humor." "Weaponry, you know, we talked about it, and he said, "They'd just do it the best, the Germans."" "The weaponry is extraordinary." "Originally, he wanted to give me a Broomhandled Mauser, which was sold to the Chinese." "Long and unwieldy, you know, pulling it out of a holster." "We went with the P-38." "Crazy Don Calfa." "Crazy Don Calfa, he was so crazy and so wonderful and is." "Burt?" "Frank." "We have a little problem." "When he has a military coat on, he's playing someone where life and death is involved, there's no on e better than James Karen." "But he can also be a littl e cornball, a little hammy." "Wanna see them?" "See them?" "The corpses." "I remember being upstairs in the dressing room or the lunch room or something and Jimmy Karen was, you know, down in the warehouse shooting scenes with Thom Mathews." "What are we gonna do?" "We're gonna kill it!" "We're gonna kill it!" "Screaming and carrying on and, you know, just so over the top and so loud." "And at the time, I honestly thought," ""I don't know about this, it's a little silly."" "Part of that came out of the rehearsals." "Because Tommy was so young and innocent that I was kidding him all the time." "And he was so funny." "His reactions were always so funny." "That's how that came up." "How many bodies are in here usually?" "Well, you know, you don't want to be overstocked." "Kind of like the restaurant business, you don't want your inventory to lose its freshness." "The most challenging part was having to look at Jimmy Karen, I guess, every day." "I always watch the movie and go, "He gets this movie."" "I don't think we got it while we were making it." "But it works." "It ends up working for the movie." "This guy screaming in here, you're sure he's a dead cadaver?" "Why don't you open the door and find out?" "No, it's all right, Frank." "I'll take your word for that." "We had three very, very experienced actors." "There was one other actor I want to talk about named Thom Mathews." "What the fuck is Freddy up to these days?" "He got himself a job." "Oh, no shit?" "What job?" "He's a stockroom clerk." "Well, yeah, that sound s like a shitty job." "Here's something you don't see very often." "You're a privileged person" "These are split dogs." "Wow." "Yep, for veterinarian schools." "Oh, we get a lot of orders for split dogs." "That's really rad." "Tommy Mathews, he was just such a foil, you know, and he believed anything I told him." "All skeletons come from India." "No kidding." "How come?" "How the hell do I know?" "He had so many roles to play in that movie, and he was dynamic." "What's it doing in there?" "I don't know." "It sounds sore" "What are we going to do?" "The three or us said, "Yeah, yeah," and he started acting." "And we kind of reared back and he was keeping up with us." "We said, "He can't do that."" "You have no pulse, your blood pressure is 0/0." "You have no pupillary response, no reflexes, your temperature is 70 degrees." "Are you saying we're dead?" "Let's not jump to conclusions Are you saying we're dead?" "No, obviously I..." "I had been working so hard to become an actor and it was just, you know, it was a milestone for me at that time." "As quiet and shy, perhaps, as he is, he knows what to do and he goes for it." "I can finally see the one thing" "and one thing only that can relieve this horrible suffering." "What, Freddy?" "What?" "Live brains!" "It was, you know, the scenes where it's, "Oh, Freddy, Freddy, " the whole time, and then we just kind of laugh and someone would make a joke afterwards." "She was from the good side, little miss goody two-shoes and stuff." "She is one of the sweetest women in showbiz." "You know, when you're an actress and you're young, you get a lot of scripts to look at, and you go," ""That one looks good, that one's..."" "This one, for some reason, I wanted really badly." "I saw what Beverly went through and Beverly went through a lot." "At the time I was so skinny, 'cause, you know, you have to be pretty skinny when you work." "And I was freezing and it was just muddy and yucky." "Mister, there's a hundred of those things out there." "That was rough, that was hard." "You know, she really toughed it through." "It's amazing." "I had done a film a couple of years earlier," "The Last American Virgin, which has its own very different cult following." "And because of that, I played the nerd in the movie, much closer to my real sel f than Scuz was." "And my agent would only send me out for nerd roles." "So, a dear friend of mine, actress, was up for Beverly Randolph's role." "So I called my agent, said, "Look, I know they're casting for this movie right now," ""because my friend has gone in on it a couple of times," ""and I really want to go in on this role."" "And he finally said to me point blank," ""You know, Brian, you're not right for this movie." ""They want punk rockers, you know, these are like guys with Mohawks."" "And I auditioned and called back and eventually got the role, which was sort of the ultimate revenge on my agent." "The rock hounds, I just thought they were marvelous to look at." "I mean, that crazy hairdo that Brian had..." "Dan O'Bannon was very determined to have blood shoot out of someone in a Shamu the whale-like blow hole, geyser." "I don't know, he just really wanted blood to go everywhere." "Kenny Myers took a mould of the side of my head, made this acrylic plate that you can glue directly onto my scalp, and it had this little metal nozzle that was gonna shoot the blood out of it." "And they were literally able to hide it in my Mohawk hair." "And then that plate had a tube that ran down behind my ear, down my neck, and then went down my shirt and down my pant leg, and then went to, you know, a giant vat of blood, and then an air compressor." "At the point that we finally filmed it, the crew literally was wearing plastic ponchos, and they said, "Action."" "There was nothing that wasn't covered in blood by the time that scene was over." "I compared it to going into the army, 'cause it was like boot camp to me." "'Cause I was, like, "I've gotta make it through." "I've gotta make it through."" "I think it was tougher for us girls than the guys, they're a little bit stronger, and maybe a little warmer at night." "It was hard to dance naked on a tombstone because I had everybody down there and I was up there." "I did have this piece which was called a Barbie Doll piece." "It was kind of like a G-string sort of piece and they glued it on." "So every time I had to go to the bathroom," "I'd be like, "Hello, somebody unglue me."" "Linnea's such a great actress, and she's never ha d her just due." "Boy, she's talented." "Who's there?" "Brains!" "Well, I auditioned for the role just like all the other actors did." "It wasn't anything special." "I remember going into the audition and being told," ""Well, this is a little bit different." "It's not a regular kind of a role."" "I remember Dan saying that he really wanted to see the Tarman character thinking." "He didn't want it just to be this big lumbering monster." "And the other thing he told me, of course, was about the physicality." "That he was just sort of being held together by good and hardly anything at all" "That if he would make the wrong move, he would just completely fall apart" "That whole movement that he did, that dancer's body that he has..." "In my mind, it's sort of a feeling like," ""Well, if I lean a little bit too far one way or the other, I'm just gonna break in half," ""and that'll be the end of it."" "So, it was sort of like this.." "I remember thinking of it as sort of a balancing act" "Like if I went a little too far, I would fall over but if I just sort of kept everything..." "It's like, you know, when you balance a broom in your palm of your hand, it's that type of thing." "And that's sort of what was going through my mind in terms of the movement, I guess." "I didn't see Allan before." "I think they had put up drapes because Dan wanted me to be very scared when I saw this..." "Brains." "...outfit he was wearing." "And so I didn't get to meet him." "I didn't get to see anything until we actually shot this." "And it was good." "It was a great costume." "It was wonderful." "And his body movements were so unique that you just couldn't help but react to it." "That poor, weepy girl who had to just cr y all the time." "It was very intense, actually." "It got to a point where inside I'd be crying and I'd be very upset, and then it came to a point where the waterworks wouldn't work anymore." "There were no tears in my eyes and I'm thinking, "Oh, no, Dan is gonna kill me."" "And so I went to the makeup woman, Robin." "I said, "Robin, I can't cry anymore." "I can't get any tears out."" "And she started blowing peppermint in my eyes and that didn't work." "There just was no more water left." "And then, Don Calfa, gave me some music to listen to in the attic scene, and that really helped, and for some reason water found its way to my eyes." "I put together a tape, which I used on a number of occasions, of different pieces of music." "You know, some of them obvious." "Samuel Barber, John Lennon and, you know, I'd listen to it and it would break me up." "I, you know..." "I just gush." "I don't think I probably cried for a couple of years after that, but it was intense and it was good." "They left us, those jerks!" "They left us!" "They had to." "Give me brains!" "Brains!" "People always ask me," ""Where do you get the zombies?"" "Well, get them out of central casting, right?" "Well, yeah." "Unless you find them on the street." "My favorite zombie was a guy without legs" "He's on Hollywood Boulevard, he used to be, making his money" "They found him, said, "You want to be in a movie?"" "He said:" ""I'm in a lot of movies."" ""Well, this is a horror movie."" ""I'm in a lot of horror movies."" ""Well, you'd be kind of featured in this."" ""Ah!"" "But he said, "In this, I don't want these." "I wanna walk on my own."" "And he started doing this..." "And walking on his knees, he had little pads on, and walking." "He walked until he fell." "And they used that cut." "It was really, really weird and terrifying." "The zombie without legs, it worked." "Linnea, you know.." "That was very rough, we were..." "The stuff was shot at night mostly in the cold and wet and she was so exposed" "In L.A. it gets pretty cold at night, and you're just standing there going, "Okay, they're counting down," ""one, two, three, and the rain's gonna hit me," ""and I'm gonna be freezing forever now, all night long."" "And being buried in mud, and all kinds of things like that." "I actually got strep throat from it all." "Her scene is a very intense scene, and the extras were very rough on her." "Extras fascinate me, for some reason, but they're always overly zealous." "They're all on top of me and I was in the mud, too, you know, being drowned, like," ""Hey, I'm under here and I'm really a person ", you know?" "I was getting tired of being wet, and there was just..." "There was nothing more for me in the movie except to run around outside and wait for the nuke in the rain." "And I thought, "Gee, I'm too old for that." "I don't wanna do that." ""I'll get arthritis or something."" "So I went to him and said, "You know," ""I think he's revolted He doesn't wanna be." ""a living corpse, a zombie"" ""I wonder if I could kill myself" ""in the crematorium."" "And he said, "Well, how could we work it?"" ""'Cause I'm such a wisenheimer anyway, I could turn to Tommy and say..."" "Some big favor." "I can operate that goddamn thing." "Later, when I escaped from some room," "I think the chapel or something, and I escaped and I ran into the crematorium, and Dan wrote that scene, and he said," ""Keep the crematorium, don't destroy the set"." "The scenes we shot in the cemetery were really, really cool because it was this olive grove out in Sylmar, and it was a very, very, very impressive set." "I mean, as good as it looks in the movie, it was honestly more impressive in person." "It was laid out, you know, as this huge interior cemetery." "I mean, from the front gat e to the walkway past that kind of Civil War canon, down the road, and there were tombstones everywhere, there was Spanish moss hanging from all the trees, to the mortuary facade." "They put in a paved road and a parking lot." "That little hill that the front of the mortuary is on, they built and planted grass." "And it was so funny, because if you went up to the door of that mortuary and opened it, it was just a flat, and what you saw behind it was a pasture full of cows." "And I can remember filming there at night, and we'd be doing our dialogue and we'd hear..." "Just cows back there." "And the whole place smelled like cow crap." "Christ, I never smelled anything like that before." "Dan O'Bannon is a genius." "A genius writer, and I must say, he must be a genius filmmaker." "After it came out, I realized what a difficult balancing act had been carried out by this film." "That, you know, there's a point where too much is not funny anymore, but just enough is right." "It's like you look at our cast, everybody is so different and so unique." "So off-the-wall, even, and I think that's what keeps this movie going." "I got off a boat on a little Island in Greece, and somebody was yelling, "More brains!"" "Some kid who saw me, said, "More brains, more brains." "Send more cops!"" "These fans, it's 20 years later..." "There's one fellow, Jason, who had us autograph his arm, and he tattooed our autographs." "I've done over a hundred pictures now and I just have never had an experience like that before." "I loved it and, curiously, of all the pictures I've done..." "I've done some pretty good ones, actually, some respectable ones." "This is the one I'm known for." "I have worked and worked and worked as an actor, and how many works of art?" "Probably five out of over 500 I've done." "But what do you mean by works of art?" "Return of the Living Dead is what I mean, that's what I'm talking about." "Return of the Living Dead is a work of art by man." "How it got here, I don't know." "Should it have gotten here?" "Not on your life." "Am I proud of it?" "You bet I am."