George A. Romero Quotes

When I'm filming a kill scene [as a director], I just get happier and happier as we chop up body parts.

I'd be really interested in making a dramatic, low key 3D film.

I think in the old days, films really went for the shock, with the blood and guts, but movies are getting better. The writing and directing have improved a lot, because the audience demands it.

I am fortunate enough to have worked on, and continue to work on, evolutionary movies in all formats from just simple good story telling, which still matters most of all, to CG movies to tent-pole size 3D movies, and genre 3D movies like 'Piranha 3D.'

'Nightmare on Elm Street' really lends itself to using new technologies. CGI would be a great way to exploit and embrace the dream sequences.

We can do things that we never could before. Stop-motion lets you build tiny little worlds, and computers make that world even more believable.

In 'Beowulf,' director Robert Zemeckis uses a technique called 'motion capture' to conjure fantastical things, angles into action and sweeping vistas to stun your eyes and take your breath away. But what he hasn't mastered and what the technique can't do is this: emotion capture.

I grew up watching movies and being amazed at the animatronics you'd see in stuff like 'The Dark Crystal,' and all those kinds of movies. So, I'm always enthralled with how they can make it all work, behind the scenes, with the visual effects.

Comic-book pages are vertical, and movie screens are relentlessly horizontal. But it's all the same form. We use different tools, but we get the job done. I'm completely in love with CGI. It's great for conveying a cartoonist's sense of reality.

If you take my performance or my understanding of the role and my appreciation for story and then dress it in CGI, that I guess becomes an action film.

'King Kong,' especially the first two acts of it, is a really good example of the use of miniatures mixed with digital characters and how convincing it was.

My interest in filmmaking was always very much the visuals and images.

Unless you're making Marvel movies, I think CGI usually suffers, especially in mid-budget-range horror movies where you see CGI.

'Twelve' was a total indie drama character piece. It wasn't that it was more about the performance, but it was just a very different thing where, with horror, there's this whole added element of the visual and the technical and the choreography.

It's the most unrealistic thing you can do to shoot a close-up, and it's the most unrealistic place you can be as a performer. And yet actors grouse about having to do visual effect shots, but they love doing close-ups.

I wrote a 20-page document, before I was ever hired, on exactly how the visuals of 'Guardians of the Galaxy' would be approached, how we'd look at creating a new type of space epic. That's exactly what the movie is today - absolutely everybody has adhered to that original document.

Great stories and acting always win the day. If the story behind the scares is dramatic and the filmmaking is great, it works. If those things aren't great and the scares are secondary, it doesn't.

My love of visual sequences stems from live-action films like Sergio Leone westerns, Kurosawa, some '70s action films, Tex Avery, and my general love of animated movement.

I think when you make a genre or horror movie, you need a budget. When you skimp on blood and special effects and all that, it automatically looks cheesy. But a movie like 'The Room' is psychologically bad, which goes a lot deeper than just technically bad.

Sometimes I have little movies that I've made that I wish would be seen by a larger audience. I have a horror movie called 'Sensored' which I'm very creepy and disgusting in, and then I have a family drama called 'The Legends of Nethiah' which has a science-fiction B-story.

Working with CGI is more like doing theater where your sort of imagining things. I didn't experience it as restrictive.

You hear people say that there's too much CG in movies today, but CG is what allows me to take a green-painted wall in a studio and make it disappear, and then put 100 miles of landscape in. CG, in the right hands, can be a marvelous tool.

I love Fincher, as he has a great atmosphere and intensity. Also, I grew up watching Hitchcock movies, and there was something elegant in the way he plays with you and plays with the character and tricks you.

When we think about a great movie, I mean, what do we think about? We think about story, we think about character. And when the visual effects aren't perfect, we forgive it.

As a director, I start with the visual.