"The fundamental decision was this." "George Romero is making a serious bunch of movies about the living dead." "I don't want to walk on his toes any deeper than I have to." "I'm gonna do it as a comedy." "Directing is what I came out here to do, country boy, getting off the Greyhound bus." "I wanted to be a director." "And I asked, "How do you do that?"" "And I was told, "Can't do it in one step."" "I was given all kinds of advice." "One school said, "Become a film editor first."" "Another school said, "Become a writer first."" "So I became a film editor, a film actor and a writer, mostly in film school." "And the writing sort of took off for me before anything else did and wasn't what I had in mind, but that's how it ended up." "And Alienended up being directed brilliantly by Ridley Scott, which was both a joy and a disappointment." "It was a disappointment 'cause I wanted to direct it, but it was a joy because of the quality of the work that he did." "And then things began to be offered to me to direct which I didn't like much." "I didn't think they were quality projects" "And Living Dead, Return of the Living Dead, came about oddly." "The producer turned to me and said, "Can you direct this?"" "I said, "Yeah, sure."" "He said, "Would you like to direct this?" I thought, "Yes."" "And so the horror began." "And it isn't all on the screen, either." "Part two was history of that movie and screenplay, going all the way back, of course, to Romero's film, Night of the Living Dead," "Russo being his writer on that." "They subsequently split up gave each other the right to go and make more Living Deadmovies." "Russo wrote a script calle d Return of the Living Dead." "Romero made Dawn of the Dead." "This independent producer named Tom Fox bought Russo's Return of the Living Dead, set up a production deal with whoever, whenever, however." "You know, these things happened." "When it finally arrive d to me to write it," "I read Mr. Russo's script and I didn't want to make that script." "I didn't think it was right to intrude so directly on Romero's turf." "It was a sequel." "It was a serious sequel to Night of the Living Dead, which was going its own wa y in Romero's films." "I know one of the hesitancies that Dan had about hiring me, originally, was..." "He was very familiar with my work because we were both mutual friends of Ron Cobb and we'd see each othe r at parties and Dan had seen my dinosaur book." "He was very confident I'd have no trouble designing the corpses." "His concern was that I wouldn't know how to do any high-tech stuff, high-tech design." "And then I did a comic book cover called Alien Worlds, and it showed a spaceman being sucked into the ground with all these little creatures surrounding him." "And Dan looked at the detail on the spacesuit and he said, "Hey, Stout can do high-tech."" "And that's when he decided to put me on the shortlist for production designer." "I knew right away I had to have some very strong artist to design the stuf f in the picture." "It had to have a look, and it had to be a capable artist." "And I've always tended to go more toward a good artist, rather than a movie professional designer." "And so I thought of Bill Stout." "I asked him, he said he'd like to do it and we got together and we just thought our way through the thing." "And Bill did wonderful, wonderful, wonderful designs, some of which we were able to pull off very much to my satisfaction, like, for example, the Tar-Man, that black, drippy , skeletal guy." "I mean, we got that right." "I don't know if Bill still has the artwork he did for it, but it was quite gorgeous in a hideous way, and I think we did it justice." "Pressure of time, budget.." "It was a very low-budget picture." "The rest of the corpses, we had a very specific vision." "We wanted them to look lik e actual dead mummies, like you would see in Guanajuato." "I like to do as much of the design and effects as possible before you do the principal photography, which wasn't fully possible." "But, yeah, I got Bill right away." "We got cracking on this stuff." "Dan's a really smart guy and a really good storyteller and, as I said, he's very visual." "Usually, as production designer" "I'm usually the first person that a director hires, because they want to get a really good visual hookm on the film early on so that we're saving money we're not wandering all around visually, trying to find out what this film is going to look like." "Dan was smart enough to do that." "We didn't have a whole lot of lead time." "I ended up working seven days a week." "I think I took half Saturday off, but the other days were 18-hour days, minimum" "It was pretty grueling" "I just figured that's what I had to do." "Plus, also, working on the other films that's what I saw the othe r production designers do." "So I figured, if I was doing anything less than that," "I was not really working my full job or benefiting the film as I could." "Challenges?" "Yes, I found challenges." "I found many, many, many." "In fact, they all blurred together into one giant challenge, sort of the way that little neutrons come together and crush together into a neutron star and become one big neutron" "All the little challenges came together and became one great, big challenge that just rolled all over the place" "Well, Dan had very specific views on what this film should look like." "He actually made my job as production designer very easy, because Dan is a very visual person." "I don't know if you're aware, but Dan can really draw well." "Really good artist." "And so he made my job much easier because he was very specific with what he wanted." "He wanted the corpses to look realistic." "And so that put me on this path of discovery in researching actual corpses, preserved corpses, and what they look like." "I got a huge photo book on the mummies of Guanajuato." "I began doing research at the LA Public Library, looking at police pathology photographs." "Our intent was to make this film look as real as possible." "Even though there are a lot of comedic aspects, we thought that, by making it as real as possible, it would actually sell the comedy even better." "My basic design point of departure s were the mummies at Guanajuato, actual police pathology photographs, and then, also, Dan and I are both big fan s of the old EC Comics," "Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Crypt of Terror, things like that." "And so we wanted to pull some of that influence into it as well, especially because the EC Comics sort of treated the resurrection of the dead as a horror piece, but also with a lo t of humor as well." "And so I went back and looked at the Graham Engels and the Jack Davis work and used their corpses, their revivified corpses, also to influence the look of the corpses." "And Dan treated the corpse s as principals in the film." "In fact, his phrase for it was "the principal corpses."" "So we had the principal actors, but we also had the principal corpses," "Tar-Man being the main principal corpse, also the half-corpse, the woman on the gurney, another principal corpse, the Yellow Man, another principal corpse." "And then there were all these subsidiary principal corpses, or not-so-principal corpses, such as the fellows up here." "This was based on a Guanajuato mummy, as was this." "This was more EC-influenced." "In fact, I named this one E.C." "I thought it would be funny if one of them had lost their lower jaw, since there really isn't anything that connects the lower jaw to the head once you're dead, especially if it rots away." "And so I named him Jaws." "This was also based on a Guanajuato mummy." "This was a little tribute to Bernie Wrightson." "This is the look that we really wanted to have in the film." "This is the back view of Tar-Man." "Tar-Man was a real interesting problem in that we wanted to present, basically, a skeleton whose flesh is turned into this tar-like substance and is dripping off the bones." "Well, how do you do that convincingly with a man in a suit?" "It's obviously going to be much bulkier than a skeleton." "So there was a couple of solutions to that." "For one, whenever I do man-in-suit creatures or monsters," "I always insist that you never hire a stuntman for that, you always hire an actor, because the actor is going to bring an extra-special bit of life to that costume or that suit." "He's going to think of things, because of his craft, that a stuntman would never think of." "Stuntmen's job is to think of action." "So we got this fabulous actor, Allan Trautman, to be in the suit, and Allan was incredibly thin, incredibly thin." "And so what I did is I designed this in such a way so that the bones were actually layered on the outside of Allan's body, and then we built up the flesh, or the dripping flesh," "on top of that" "So the illusion was that this was the skeleton." "Allan could move in a way..." "It looked as though his bones weren't connected, weren't held together by anything." "He'd use incredible, incredible movements." "He really brought that sui t to life." "I have a box in my closet, and whenever I want an idea, I go and I pull one out." "Stay away from my closet." "That's my box." "If ever I'm stuck for ideas, I also have an instant solution." "It's different from Dan's." "I take a shower." "People tell me that it's the release of ions in the shower, that they stimulat e creativity." "But if I'm ever stuck on a problem or having to come up with a visual solution or something is bothering me..." "Or I write, too." "If I've hit the wall with a scene that I'm writing," "I take a shower and, instantly, boom, I get the solution." "It just comes to m e in the shower." "It might be just the fact that showers are relaxing and that's all I needed, was just to relax." "But it never fails." "You want to know, seriously, a real technique that I use for getting ideas?" "If I'm in the middle of a project, in the middle of writing something, thinking something up, and feel a little creatively stalled and I want to turn on the juice," "I lie down, close my eyes and try to go to sleep." "And immediately, something like a fountain begins to just squirt pertinent ideas up, and usually, within about five minutes," "I sit up and I begin putting these ideas down." "When the picture was first completed, I was very frustrated." "I saw everything that I'd wanted and didn't get." "That's, frankly, about all I could see for months after the film was finished." "And, as time passes and the immediacy of the struggle fades," "I become more and more pleased with it and proud of it." "The passion that both Dan and I brought to the film," "I think, helped to give the fil m its cult status." "The fact that we took our jobs really seriously and that even though we were making a film that was funny, we based everything we did on reality." "I think that helped to give the film some longevity as well." "It's very hard to plan one's life and career more than one step." "You try, but then life happens to you." "And so you pretty much have to seize what's there or let it pass, one way or the other." "And I haven't been very successful in designing a life and having it turn out that way." "I did it, but it didn' t turn out that way, except that I did get to work in movies." "That much happened." "But the details were from God and the devil."