Greg Nicotero - The Walking Dead

Full transcript: Greg Nicotero on London Real

4:32 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Greg Nicotero, the special makeup effects creator, television director, and producer. For the last eight years, you’ve served as the producing director and FX designer on the hit television series, The Walking Dead. Your career in the film industry spans 35 years with your first work in special effects makeup on George Romero’s 1985 film, Day of the Dead.

4:53 After that, you formed your own special makeup effects studio, which has worked for over 400 film and television projects and won four Primetime Emmy Awards. You’ve collaborated with directors such as Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino, and your credits include movies Pulp Fiction, Boogie Nights, Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2, Sin City, and Breaking Bad. Greg, welcome to London Real. Thanks.

5:15 Brian Rose: You’re chuckling a bit.

5:16 Greg Nicotero: Wow. It’s just, when you hear it that way, it’s, I’m intimidated. Thanks. It’s been amazing. I love what I do. I’m fortunate.

5:27 Brian Rose: What’s it like when you come to London? And when you think about film and television from a British perspective, what comes to your mind?

5:38 Greg Nicotero: Well, I’ve always been, I want to be transported when I watch a film. My parents were massive movie buffs, still are massive movie buffs. So they took me to the theater.

5:51 When 2001 came out 50 years ago, when Planet of the Apes and The Exorcist, all these movies in the late 60s, early 70s, those seminal films, all the James Bond movies, my parents embraced that. We went to the theater as a whole family. So I always felt that I sort of adopted this sort of big picture storytelling scenario. And we’ve been talking about 2001 a lot lately because it’s the 50th anniversary. And I just rewatched the movie lately.

6:25 And I just love the storytelling aspect that European cinema has. I love that they think outside of the box. They’re not writing material for an audience. And I think that’s really what’s very different and very important is that the material that they produce, that they direct, that they develop comes from a place of passion. The filmmakers are super passionate about it.

6:50 And I tend to gravitate towards that kind of stuff. So I’ve had a great opportunity to work with some amazing folks in my career, you know, guys that I admired growing up, you know, John Carpenter. And it was all genre stuff, you know, is where I really kind of got my interest in George Romero and John Landis and Wes Craven and a lot of these kind of ground-making filmmakers that put movies out there that were at that point taboo. And I, Living Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you know, Last House on the Left, movies that put material or subject matter or effects in front of you for the first time, where you were seeing particularly gory effects, or you were watching movies that had these vague, nebulous endings and left it for you to think about and for you to ponder what this meant.

7:51 And, you know, the one thing that I can really say is after the years that I’ve been doing it, I still learn something new every single day as a producer, as a director. And I still love it. I still love it. It’s still exciting to go on a movie set and see these technicians and these people collectively building these visuals and watching actors.

8:20 And it really is, to me, the most freeing art form.

8:24 Brian Rose: You said ultimately it’s about passion. Is it about trying to bottle that passion and transport it onto the screen so you can then download it into someone’s brain?

8:35 Greg Nicotero: I don’t know if you can bottle it. I think what you do is you give people glimpses of what it is that you absolutely love. You know, we’ll talk about Guillermo del Toro. You know, I mean, not a lot of people know that he started as a makeup effects guy. So you can tell now, knowing that in my head, you watch his movies and you can see that he embraces the fantastic and he takes people on these journeys. And you know, I love the shape of water as a fairy tale.

9:08 You know, nobody really, you don’t think about it when you hear the logline about it. You’re not going to think about what genre it could potentially land in. But for me, it opens with that beautiful underwater shot and you know that it’s a fairy tale and it’s a fable and you’re getting a glimpse into his interpretation of that world, just like the Devil’s Backbone and just like Pan’s Labyrinth, other movies that are his that are fables. And it’s that passion to tell that story and to download that material. I think it just comes out of those filmmakers. You know, I mean, knowing Guillermo as well as I do, and I’ve known him for a long time, he’s always wanted to do his version of Creature from the Black Lagoon. I mean, I had dinner with him in George Romero probably in 1995 or 1996 and he was talking about wanting to do his take on Creature from the Black Lagoon. And you know, when you listen to his acceptance speeches, he talks about the love of monsters and he talks about the idea that there is this potential dark side around everyone and he embraces it and he buries himself in it in a unique way. And I think a lot of filmmakers, Martin McDonough and people that have a passion for telling these these heartfelt stories, it comes out on the screen.

10:38 Brian Rose: I remember hearing Brad Easton Ellis say that film is a director’s medium, television is more of a writer’s medium. And he said in a film, you know, that director can really bring you into this weird, strange world by all the choices they make. Whereas with television, it’s harder to do that. Do you agree?

10:59 Greg Nicotero: Yeah, well, television is a producer-writer medium because in many instances, you’re a director for hire. You’re brought in to direct one chapter of an ongoing story. So in many instances, you’re facilitating one particular chapter. So you are somewhat limited in coming in and landing and wanting to redefine either the look of the show or the story because it’s already a slot in the puzzle. You know what I mean?

11:28 On The Walking Dead, because I’m a producing director, I’ve directed 25 episodes of the show so far. I have a different scenario because I’m involved in the overall storytelling arc as well as coming in and directing, you know, some of the bigger episodes, the season premieres and the season finales. So I think from a, and everyone keeps saying, when are you gonna direct a movie? What are you waiting for? I’m like, well, I’m a little busy on this show. It’s been been a juggernaut for eight years coming on nine. And I’m still really invested in that show. I’m excited to see where it goes. I’m excited to see what we can bring to it season after season.

12:13 And so yeah, in regards to that, I think television definitely is not a director’s medium, but you now have a lot of directors that are moving into television and developing their own stuff so that they can be involved in something that’s more than just a short form piece. You know, again, referencing Walking Dead, if we would have had to tell that story in two hours, you would have never been able to learn who these characters were and care about them as much. But we’re now 116 hours roughly into this story. So from a storytelling standpoint, it’s a dream.

12:52 You can continue to refine these characters and resolve them and have some die and have some new ones come in. It evolves. It’s an organic entity that you’re not married to. Here’s our 90 minute window or our 120 minute window. And I think that’s one of the reasons, you know, a lot of people talk about, oh, we’re in the golden age of television right now. Well, you know, with shows like Breaking Bad, they have been able to redefine television. And you know, I’m kind of obsessed with a lot of stuff. You know, I mean, I love Black Mirror. Can’t get enough. Really, just can’t get enough of that show. But, you know, Homeland and there’s some great stuff out there.

13:39 And the fact that you can check in with these people week after week instead of it just being a movie, I just think really allows for a different kind of viewing experience. And now, of course, people can either watch them on the network or wait a week and download it or binge watch stuff when material goes to Netflix or some streaming services. So, even watching television has changed in the last eight years since we started Walking Dead. It’s now changed because I know a lot of people are like, oh, I just want to wait till it’s all done. And then I’m going to watch it all together like Game of Thrones. I have people saying, I’m just going to wait. Why would you wait? It’s so good. You’re missing out. You’re missing out on some fun.

14:21 Brian Rose: What’s a kid from Pittsburgh doing in the movie business? You weren’t supposed to do this.

14:26 Greg Nicotero: No, I was supposed to be a doctor. My dad’s a kidney specialist. And when I was very young, they said, listen, you’re going to be the doctor of the family. So you’re going to take over my practice.

14:37 And I was like, okay, sure. It makes sense. But, you know, I would stay up late on Saturday nights and watch a television show called Chiller Theater. And it was a local television host. And he would show monster movies every Saturday night. And my younger brother, Brian, and I would stay up. And we would watch horror movies on Saturday nights. And I had a sketch pad with me. So I was drawing all the time. And that was really kind of, you know, my parents got me hooked going to the movies. But then being able to, and I’ll never forget, in July was classic horror month. So they would show Frankenstein, the Wolfman Dracula, all the classics.

15:16 So it became a fascination of mine. And more specifically, how they do that aspect of, how do you turn a guy into a werewolf? How do you make the creature from Black Lagoon? How do you make these things?

15:28 Brian Rose: So you were getting lost in the movie, but you were also analyzing it.

15:32 Greg Nicotero: Well, I think it was one of my ways of rationalizing the fact that I was terrified. You know, if you’re afraid of a monster, what’s the best thing to do? You deconstruct it so it’s not scary anymore. I’ll just have makeup. I’ll just have a guy with fangs. I’ll just have fangs. Oh, it’s a guy with bolts, you know, whatever. I became fascinated with that aspect of it. And lo and behold, in only the way the universe can provide, it turns out that George Romero, who directed My Living Dead, lived probably 40 minutes from where I grew up.

16:06 And I realized at that time that his special effects makeup artist named Tom Savini, who ultimately would become my boss, their mission was you don’t have to live in New York or Hollywood to make movies with the advent of independent cinema and the success that it brought with, like I was saying earlier, Night Living Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Last House on the Left, and even a little bit later, Friday the 13th. There were guys who could raise money from investors that were investing in a shopping mall and make a little movie. And then a lot of times those little movies became massive blockbuster hits. Dawn of the Dead was made for a million bucks and grossed $80 million. I don’t think anybody really thought we’re going to make a blockbuster. I think they wanted to just tell their little independent horror movie stories.

16:59 And I was fortunate enough to become friends with George Romero and then his special effects artist, Tom Savini. So it was really just this kind of weird, like things lined up. And even after my first job offer, you know, they were getting ready to do a movie called Creepshow. And George had offered me a job and said, hey, you want to come work on Creepshow? First of all, why is he offering me? I don’t know anything about the movie business. I don’t know anything about anything. But back then it’s like, well, you start as a production assistant and you work at the production office and you stand on set and you yell action and cut and you usher the actors to and from their trailers.

17:45 Brian Rose: He liked you.

17:45 Greg Nicotero: Well, I think he saw something in me. And, you know, a lot of these filmmakers, they all kind of work the same way.

17:53 They have a family of people around them that they like and they trust and they admire. And I found myself as part of that family.

18:01 Brian Rose: Tell me about the horror genre. You were almost a doctor. What’s going on in the brain? We got like the amygdala back here and then the frontal cortex. And is horror confusing the two and is it going back and forth?

18:14 Greg Nicotero: No, no, no. I’ll tell you, I think initially it’s two things. Number one, it’s our inherent fear of death and our way of rationalizing it. And there’s a couple of things. It’s like going on a roller coaster. It’s thrilling and terrifying. But then when you get off the roller coaster, there’s that endorphin rush and that adrenaline rush that makes you feel alive.

18:37 And I always felt that horror movies, when you have that immediate scare where your heart starts beating and everything is going haywire, the idea that you’re sitting in a movie theater and you’re safe has a very unique cathartic effect on the brain, in my opinion. I think also part of it is the biggest unknown in the universe is what happens after we die, what happens at the moment that we die. No one can ever answer that question, no matter how hard they try.

19:10 So the idea of even something as simple as seeing how one person dies in a movie, your brain’s like, okay, well, that was a painless death or that was, hopefully I won’t go that horribly. Or there’s so many different aspects to it. So the idea that we can be thrilled and elated almost simultaneously in horror, I think is one of the things that excited me. I remember sitting in the movie theater and you get that hot flash, that hot wave that runs over your body when you see something that scares you. And being able to be, for me personally, a part of that, being able to be one of those people that designs those moments and is responsible for those moments of someone else. I’ve had people walk up to me on the street and go, man, you just scared the hell out of me, that particular thing. I’m like, really?

20:10 So I really think that’s what the fascination with horror is and genre material, because it really takes you to a different place. And it’s oddly celebrated. They have conventions, or what I was doing in the car on the way over here, I was looking up on my phone, the filming locations for American Werewolf in London. Because I was like, oh, I wonder what tube station they use for the great shot of the werewolf stocking. You see that.

20:40 I mean, people go to actual filming locations where they shot Jaws, where they shot the Exorcist. They’ll go and they’ll stand there. It somehow grounds them and makes them a part of that experience. That doesn’t happen with westerns. It doesn’t happen with musicals.

20:59 There’s something about horror movies that draws people to that material, that appeals to the sometimes forbidden darker side of them. And it allows them to maybe exercise some demons, or maybe allows them to come to grips with their own mortality.

21:16 Brian Rose: And how do you go from horror then to the special makeup effects? Because they’re not the same thing, but then they’re related.

21:25 Greg Nicotero: Well, they’re related because again, it’s deconstructing horror. The physical being and then it’s transformation into death.

21:33 Yes. And then for me to analyze it, when we did Day of the Dead, which was my first job with George Romero, we had a book that was called The Medical Legal Investigation of Death. And it was a forensic handbook pathology encyclopedia. And each chapter was like blunt force trauma. And we would look at this book for reference when we were creating zombies.

22:01 They were real people. There was one that was like airplane crash victims. And all they showed was a ruler and a hunk of meat next to it. And you’re like, that was a part of a body. And you start realizing, and I think again, for me, my medical background to begin with and understanding the way the human body works, art effects with my company had really sort of came from this understanding that I had of what the layers were, the realism of it. Like if you took the skin off, there’s skin and then there’s muscle and then there’s ligaments and there’s blood vessels and there’s bone. So when we build dummies for movies, we recreate that. Okay, well, here’s a resin bone and then here’s some silicone muscles.

22:53 And then we put some tubing in there and then we put a skin over top of it. So when you watch The Walking Dead and a zombie bites into an arm, your mind is seeing all those other levels of material that we put in there. And your brain oddly and miraculously puts it together and tells you if there’s blood shooting out, it must be real. They don’t think about, oh, there’s five guys off to the side of the blood. And even though I’m not a doctor and I don’t have biology degree, I still know it’s real somehow. Your brain translates the information.

23:25 Brian Rose: Which keeps me in the moment.

23:26 Greg Nicotero: Yeah, without a doubt. There’s a great story. We were shooting season one of The Walking Dead. There was an actress named Emma Bell and there’s a scene where she gets bit in the arm by a zombie. It was like in the fourth episode, I think. And I was like, you know what, it’s television. We don’t have a lot of time. We really got to get in one take. I’ll be the zombie. So they put me in makeup and we rehearsed it a bunch of times. So she had a prosthetic on and then there was some fake muscle and then there was a blood piece that was rigged to bleed.

23:58 So we set it up. The director was there. And I said, okay, so in action, you open the door to the RV. I’m going to be there. I’m going to grab, as soon as you see blood, start screaming.

24:10 And I said to the director, if you don’t say cut, I’m going to go in for another bite. We had rigged it so I could bite multiple times. Camera’s rolling. Director says action. She walks out. She opens the RV. I come around the corner. I bite, tear off this big, giant chunk of meat, blood spring. I don’t hear anything. Dead silence. But I was like, well, I got to keep going.

24:35 I go in and I bite again. I go in and I bite again. It’s not, it’s been like 10 seconds. And then all of a sudden I heard the most blood curdling shriek I had ever heard. So then we say cut. There’s blood pouring out. I look up at her and she was like, I was in shock.

24:52 She said, in my mind, I looked over, I saw you there. I knew you were coming. You bit me. And I saw blood shooting out of my arm and I froze. I didn’t know what to do. My brain all of a sudden was like, you’re bleeding. Something’s happening to you that shouldn’t be happening.

25:06 Even though there was a guy behind her pumping blood, I was there with my zombie makeup on. Her brain processed the entire situation differently. And when she did scream, it was horrific. But I remember thinking, like, well, I was doing like, why is she not screaming? And then when we were done and she was like, I was frozen in fear. I was so terrified.

25:30 Brian Rose: And is that that kind of dance with that amygdala? Because again, so you’re playing back and forth between this, some call it the lizard brain and then the monkey brain. And going back to those prehistoric days where we would react. And like you said, she knew it was fake. She knew, but it didn’t matter. Her brain overrode whatever her conscious mind was telling her.

25:50 Greg Nicotero: And the beauty of the way directors and the way writers are able to craft these things. You can tell when something strikes the nerve, you know, like, I think Spielberg basically became famous for his movies because he tapped into those primal archival fears. Jaws, it was being eaten alive. You know, poltergeist, it was the fear of the toy clown under the bed that comes to life. You know, you tap into those primal fears and you’re tapping into something that, number one, is universally relatable. It doesn’t matter what country you live in. It doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, whatever. There are the fear of the unknown. And I think that’s when you’re able to capture that in this perfect storm of horror or fantasy fiction or movies, then you’re right on.

26:54 Brian Rose: I just watched the Spielberg doc, or at least the first part of it. It’s great. Yeah, it’s amazing. I didn’t realize what was going on behind the scenes on Jaws. I didn’t know how stressful it was, how he was writing it every day.

27:05 Brian Rose: But I’m surprised that you find that film so fascinating because the effects aren’t human.

27:11 Greg Nicotero: Don’t say that. Okay, I’m sorry. No, no, no. Or are they?

27:15 Greg Nicotero: Well, listen, I can tell you the moment. I can tell you the moment. We were standing in the lobby of the movie theater. Oh, cool. And you guys have, I was, let me see, 70 for 12.

27:27 Okay. You guys have front of house cards. We call them lobby cards. They’re little 8×10 or 11×14 photos from the movie. And I stood there and I looked at it. There was one particular lobby card that had a guy in the shark cage with a shark going by, and the shark was massive.

27:46 And my parents had gone to see the movie the night before. So they took us, 12-year-old, my brother was 11. And my mom, in two instances, covered my eyes because she thought it was too gruesome when Quint was getting eaten was one of them. And there was another moment. But I went home, had nightmares, but I was fascinated with like, how did they make the shark?

28:12 How did they build the shark? It was probably something that scared me so much that I needed to know about it. And then about a week later, there was a Time Magazine, had an article called Summer of the Shark. And it was a big painting of the shark on the cover. And they had pictures of the mechanical shark in the magazine. And I thought, oh, wait a minute. Like, that’s a job.

28:33 Like, there’s a job. There’s a bunch of dudes, smoking cigarettes. You know, I hooked that tube over there. And Drake had to figure out how to build, how to build this shark. So, aside from the movie, which I think I saw in the theater 11 or 12 times that summer, and was terrified to go in the ocean, much like everybody else, I was, I was fascinated with how they built it and how they did it. And it was just a culmination of like me, honestly, watching, you know, like Lost in Space and Star Trek and Land of the Giants when I was a kid, younger. And then between Jaws and then Dawn of the Dead, I realized that that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to build, I wanted to build things that would scare the crap out of people. I don’t know why.

29:21 Brian Rose: And it’s true, you have plenty of Jaws memorabilia.

29:24 Greg Nicotero: I do.

29:25 Brian Rose: Supposedly gigabytes of digital pictures. They say Greg Nicotero is obsessed with recreating everything he loved as a kid on a one-to-one scale.

29:34 Greg Nicotero: Yes.

29:34 Brian Rose: Is that fair?

29:35 Greg Nicotero: Yes. I have a full-size head of the shark. As a matter of fact, Joe Alves, who’s the production designer, he was a production designer on Close Encounters and Escape from New York. And he lives 20 minutes from my studio in Los Angeles. So he comes to visit every once in a while. They’re doing an exhibit at Catalina Island this spring of all of Joe’s artwork from Jaws. And I have a good collection of some original blueprints and sketches.

30:01 So Joe said, you got to call Greg Nicotero. He’s got some cool stuff. So lo and behold, Joe’s writing a book about the making of Jaws. And he asked me to write The Forward. And everything that I’ve been talking to you about, it sort of all came out. Like I was remembering this moment and how do you, where do you even start that job? I mean, they had never, they had never done anything like that. And Spielberg, to his credit and also probably his dismay, insisted that they shoot it on location, not in a tank, because he wanted it to be real.

30:35 He wanted it to be real. If it wasn’t real and he didn’t believe it, he knew the audience would never believe it. And then of course, you know, it’s like the perfect storm of what could go wrong, did go wrong. But I have ultimately really become fascinated with the movie. And the funniest thing, of course, is I’m friends with a lot of the people that worked on the movie.

30:59 I worked with Spielberg the first time I met him. I had a script from Jaws in a little leather binding thing because I, you know, collected some scripts of some of my favorite movies. And I took it to set with me. And we worked on Amistad. And the makeup artist friend of mine, who I was working with, when I saw me over there talking to Stephen and ran over and grabbed the book out of my bag and came over and went, hey, Steve, you should check out Greg’s Jaws book.

31:27 And he opened it and he started looking through and he went, oh, this is the rewrite that I did before we started shooting. And then my friend Bill was like, hey, would you sign it? Like, I didn’t have to do any of the heavy lifting. Thank God. And he, and Stephen signed it and he said, a way easier read than a shoot. And we talked about the movie that day on set. And it was one of those days that I went home. I felt like I had been struck by lightning. Everything about me was electrified, just having worked with him and having been inspired by him. And it was an amazing night. It was an amazing experience. And the funniest story about it was, this is, there’s a scene takes place in a storm and the boat was built in this giant gimbal. So the boat’s rocking back and forth. And it’s at the moment where the slaves revolt on the ship and they kill, they kill their captors. And at one shot, there was a sail and Stephen said, hey, go up there. I want you to spray some blood. They’re going to come up and they’re going to stab through the sail and cut it. And I want you to shoot blood through it. I said, okay, great. So I have my little blood tank. I climb up the ladder and I’m on the boat. And this is before we’re rolling. So the boat’s not shifting.

32:41 And they tell me where I can hide. So I won’t be seen in the shot. And I duck down and I’m right behind this big giant sail. And I look behind me and there’s a 3000 gallon dump tank because of course it’s raining in the scene. So they roll cameras and then the boat starts moving and then they turn the rain on. So then it starts raining. And then they say, and action. And all these actors come and they grab a guy and they throw him up against the sail and the one guy cuts through the sail. And at the exact same moment, they trigger the 3000 gallon dump tank. So I just got, I was like the drowned rat in all the cartoons.

33:23 And I’m spraying, like I didn’t care how much water was on me. I was going to spray that blood like I was told. And they all cut. I climbed down off the ladder. Oh my God, that shot was amazing. It looked great. And Steven turns and looks at me and I’m literally like, what, what? Like the drown. And he just looked at me and laughed. He’s like, you’re all right.

33:41 I’m like, I’m good. How did it look? I didn’t care. I just wanted it to look cool. So then I got in the car and it was 11 o’clock, 12 o’clock. And then I called my parents and I was like, I just, I just worked with Steven Spielberg. I just had, and I could remember like it was yesterday. It was such a great experience and someone that inspired me so, so much to be able to be just a small part. And then we went on and worked on a minority report, a couple other movies together. So, you know, it’s the, the opportunities that I’ve had, you know, I always look at my career and I figure I’ve come, I’ve come to these crossroads and I’ve been fortunate that I’ve always taken the correct path. You know, there were, there were a lot of instances when I could have worked on one movie versus another movie. And like working with Sam Raimi, I chose Sam Raimi over working on another film and that was Evil Dead 2. And then kind of led me off into my career with Sam and the movies that I’ve done with him for so long.

34:46 Brian Rose: Right. Talk to me about when you got the first call for The Walking Dead. What did you think and did you have any idea it was going to grow to be such a global phenomenon?

34:58 Greg Nicotero: Okay. So the Frank Darabant, who is one of the most brilliant filmmakers of our generation, also happened to be a very, very dear friend of mine. I consulted on, on Shawshank Redemption.

35:12 He had called and said, hey, I need to age. Some people are shooting in a prison in Ohio. Can you recommend someone to do some aging? And it was for, it was for the lead actor. So then all of his movies since then, we had done The Effects, Green Mile, The Mist, Majestic, all these other movies that we had, that he had done, we worked together on. And we were really, really good friends. So I directed Second Unit for him on a couple of films. And he said, hey, I have the rights to The Walking Dead. Now I was one of the people that saw the comic book in the comic book shop, the first issue, and grabbed it. I remember I was shooting a movie with Robert Rodriguez and I grabbed two off the shelf and I flipped through and I was like, oh, the zombies look great.

35:58 Like I was looking at the zombies, of course. And I went back to the studio where I was shooting with Robert. I said, dude, you gotta check this out. It’s like, it’s like a zombie comic book. What the hell, who the hell ever heard of that? And then Frank later says, okay, I have the rights to do it as a TV show. And I knew Frank had always wanted to do something in the zombie genre because he was a big fan of Night Living Dead. We had even gone to dinner once. I had a script that I was interested in directing and I wanted to see if he wanted to produce it with me.

36:30 And it was a zombie story. And he had said, you know, the biggest problem with zombie material is, you know, you need an ensemble cast and you really need more than just two hours to tell this story. He had been looking for something actively. So when he got the rights, and I remember reading the first script, which I loved, but of course because I’d been sort of weaned on a very steady diet of zombie movies and zombie material, I was kind of like, yeah, but who’s going to watch it? Like, I know I would watch it, but will other people watch it? Is it going to, are people going to be enamored with the genre like I am? I failed to take one significant thing into account, which is Frank’s ability to put together this amazing ensemble cast of characters that are 100% relatable. And that’s what his signature is. You look at all of his movies, puts these amazing actors together in this perfect ensemble piece. So Andy Lincoln, John Bernthal, Melissa McBride, Sarah Callies, Norman Reedus, when you watch the first season of that show, there’s something that every single person can identify with. And when you are able to put yourself into another character’s shoes, then the filmmakers have succeeded. And Frank excelled at creating memorable characters, whether despicable like Merle or not, they were fascinating. And Michael Rooker really helped, you know, Jeff, oh my God, Jeffrey, oh my God, I can’t believe I just forgot his last name. I played Dale.

38:27 I’ll come back to it. It’ll come back to it. Jeffrey DeMond. He just really created something special. And you know, it’s funny because the opening scene of the little girl in the gas station, I kind of said, Frank, he did this already. There’s an opening little girl in the Dawn of the Dead remake. They’ve kind of done this. So I was sort of looking at it like, okay, if you take those two scenes, you could say, okay, we start with this little zombie girl and then walking dead, we start with a little zombie girl. And I just remember really kind of pushing back at him a little about that, going, are you sure you want to open with this? Because, you know, it might be good to maybe not open with the little girl because people were going to compare. Well, I was wrong, of course. Not only did people not compare, but people didn’t care, because they didn’t care because it wasn’t about the opening scene. It wasn’t about the little girl zombie. It was about Rick. It was about his struggle to find his family in this fantastic world. And that was what it was about.

39:37 Brian Rose: And what is it about zombies?

39:39 Greg Nicotero: Zombies are a reflection of us. They show us our dark side. They show us our weird tendencies.

39:46 Brian Rose: And zombies have evolved since you, since you originally.

39:50 Greg Nicotero: Well, listen, I mean, before 1968, zombies were Haitian voodoo only. There was the pop culture rules that we know as zombies were created by George Romero. They were written into a script. Shoot them in the head. You have to kill them. They come out of the ground, and they bite you, and you die from the bite, and you become one of them. People just assume. It’s not like literature. It’s not like, it’s not Frankenstein. It’s not Bram Stoker or Mary Shelley. This is stuff that has been, was created within the last 50 years, within our lifetime.

40:31 And I think, honestly, I will say Night Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead still is, Jaws and Dawn of the Dead kind of knock each other out as my favorite movie every once in a while. But the one thing that a lot of people don’t think about is it wasn’t until 1998, maybe 2000, when zombie games became first-person shooter games or zombie movies, zombie material. So with Resident Evil, with House of the Dead, you’re opening the zombie genre to a whole new world because you were able to put a plastic gun into somebody’s hand, and they were actually shooting zombies themselves. That changed the landscape of zombie movies forever.

41:16 Brian Rose: Interesting. And a lot of people… So gaming affects the film?

41:20 Greg Nicotero: Especially in this instance, because gaming started and then it was Resident Evil and House of the Dead, and then they did a Resident Evil movie, and then they did 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle, great movie. And then Shaun of the Dead, another great movie, one of my faves.

41:39 So the zombie genre really kind of was reawakened into modern pop culture with video games. And then George Romero did Land of the Dead, and then all of a sudden, zombie material was much more mainstream than it had ever been. I mean, let’s face it, zombie material prior to video games was not mainstream. And what The Walking Dead was able to do was able to put a genre that to that point was really relegated to people who were just hardcore fans in front of an entire new group of people.

42:19 Brian Rose: And what makes you the guy they go to when it comes to special makeup and effects? Because I love it. I know you love it. I love it. And your passion comes out on the screen. Again, like you said earlier, that’s what great filmmaking is, passion.

42:31 Greg Nicotero: Well, you know, I do have a very unique pedigree, because I feel like having grown up in Pittsburgh and having worked with George, you know, I always joke that there’s something in the water there that you drink and then you’re obsessed with zombies in Pittsburgh. But I think it’s because those movies affected me so much as a young man that I’m constantly, number one, I feel beholden to the genre. And I’m constantly trying to reinvent the look of zombies. And on The Walking Dead, we’ve had eight years to refine and develop the look. And I will tell you really honestly, one of the things that makes me the most proud is 99% of the zombie work on The Walking Dead is practical makeup effects.

43:24 There’s no CG involved with the walkers. It’s all makeup. And when you’re talking about a world where so much is done in computer and so much is done digitally, to really be able to embrace the practical art of special effects makeup, you know, to celebrate guys like Stan Winston and Rob Oteen and Rick Baker and Tom Savini, who’s my boss, and make my art form much more readily available to a new group of young people. Now, it’s affecting them the way it affected me. When I met my mentor for the first time, I was in, oh, you did these special effects for Dawn of the Dead. Like, oh, you blew the guy’s head up and the girl got bit in the shoulder. Now I have kids coming up to me saying, I want to do what you do because I saw the work you did on The Walking Dead.

44:11 So that’s the greatest compliment that I can ever get because I’m sort of completing this circle of where I got started and how I got started into it.

44:21 Brian Rose: If you took us to your studios and then took us to a day on set, what would we be surprised to see about, you know, what a lot of the work you do is to make that come real on those four seconds on the screen and the 10 seconds here.

44:35 Greg Nicotero: I’m a little fanatical about stuff. I mean, you know, listen, one of the most interesting moments for me, I was working on Land of the Dead with George Romero. There was a scene that we were shooting and there was a zombie and the zombie grabs this woman and bites her in the face and tears the big chunk of skin off. And George says, they roll camera, George says, action.

44:59 We put this prosthetic with blood tubes on the girl and as soon as the zombie comes and bites, she starts flailing her arms and she raised her arm right at the moment when the zombie pulled the skin off. And they said, cut, I was devastated. So I was like, oh, well, you didn’t see the bite. It got hidden. And then he said, well, listen, let me ask you a question. If somebody bit you on the arm, do you think you would keep your arms down if they bit you on the face?

45:28 How would you react? I said, probably not. I’d probably flail my arms around and scream and try to push the thing away. And he went, great. He said, I loved it because you know what, it looked real. And that was an epiphany. That was an aha moment for me because I realized at that moment, that was 2004, that the special effects and makeup effects intrinsic to the film have to push the story together. And they have to have a they have to have an amount of realism.

45:59 And he taught me that. He taught me that you know what, it’s not always about, and that’s what we’re, you know, as a makeup effects artist, that’s what you’re sort of trained. It is all about that. It’s about the gag. But in Walking Dead, I’ve been able to translate everything that I do into how it serves the story in terms of it being an intrinsic moment.

46:21 And the zombie gags are written to fulfill some part of the story. They’re not just gags to do gags. But you know, I’m constantly running around on set, making sure that everything looks correct, you know, even in terms of applying blood. Here’s a perfect example. Let’s say you got bit in the cheek and blood would undoubtedly flow out and spray out. There’d be little droplets. And the first two seasons of Walking Dead, I talked with my makeup crew because we’re on the trailers doing makeup. And I said, no application of blood with a brush because it’s not organic. Like you can’t take paint, but you can’t take blood and paint it on because it’s going to look like it was applied as opposed to you have to make it look like it’s sprayed out. So we would get bits of fake blood in a cup and take a brush and mix it and spatter the droplets of blood because I wanted to convey violence in the zombie bites that we were doing. So when you see a zombie bite and you see spatters of blood, it looks like, oh, the blood must have shot out and then little droplets hit certain areas. And I’ve met people that are forensic pathologists and they’re like, how does it look so real? Like we deal with that on a daily basis and what you do on the show looks medically accurate.

47:48 Brian Rose: Yeah. And your hard work to make it real keeps my brain in the storyline, even subconsciously sometimes. Yes. And allows me to really relate to the

47:58 Characters and pull me into that story, right? So it’s a crucial component.

48:03 Greg Nicotero: I hope so.

48:04 Brian Rose: Is it true you run a zombie school?

48:07 Greg Nicotero: I do. I’m the Dean. I actually made a little fake.

48:10 I made fake diplomas after season two that Galian Hurd and Robert Kirkman signed. You know, when we did season one, clearly there wasn’t a lot of public awareness of zombie stuff. So we decided that we would do an audition, that we would audition our extras and we would walk them through what was expected. So I actually edited together a reel of movies, clips. So we did zombie school. I would show, it was like literally like a DMV traffic school or something. I would show them movie clips and then I would, how to walk, how to behave, and then we would do exercises and I would walk them through. If you had a room of 50 or 60 people, I’d say, okay guys, on action I just want everybody to mill about the room. And I would walk through and I would look at their different zombie walks and then I would give them direction and have them change something up. Because aside from them looking good, they have to be able to act.

49:15 Most of the time these extras are in scenes with Norman and Andy and Steven Young and they have to know how to perform with the actors. And a lot of them, you know, a lot of these extras were like, oh you know, they work at Subway during the day and then they come and be zombies. And some of them are amazing. Like they’ve worked at, you know, haunted house attractions at Halloween. So we do zombie school every single year. And every year I refine it a little bit more.

49:45 And from that we probably pull 12 to 15 superstars. And the beauty of the makeup is we can make them look almost completely different every single episode. So in a lot of the episodes there’s 10 or 15 people that are our go-to zombies and we bring them in. They’ve been in 20, 30, 40 episodes. You would never be able to recognize them because we make them look different.

50:11 Brian Rose: Okay. And how do you keep it fresh? How do you keep surprising them? Is it like comedy in a way where you’ve got to like find a new way? Or is it the way the actors react to the zombies?

50:24 Greg Nicotero: Well, you know, we do push ourselves to ground the zombie work in a certain reality.

50:30 You know, the beginning of this season there was a zombie we saw that had bleached skin and the clothing was bleached. And you discover, I think, in episode four that there were zombies that were exposed to chemical waste. And the chemical waste basically bleached their skin. And we came up with that device clearly in an opportunity to do something a little different with the zombies so that we weren’t seeing something that looked exactly the same all the time.

51:00 We’ll do some zombies covered in mold. We’ll do some zombies that are burned. We do want to change it up every once in a while just again so that we keep it fresh for our artists and people don’t get fatigued. I mean, I’ll be really honest. I don’t think people get sick of seeing zombies. I don’t think we need to try. We don’t need to try quite so hard to redefine zombies every season because it’s not really how they look, but it’s how much screen time they have and what they do. Like the zombies that actually did something horrific or memorable are the ones people remember.

51:39 So that’s something that we’re refining for this next season, which is, you know, it’s really about what if you have a zombie that jumps out and scares somebody and you’re on their face for a significant amount of time, people will remember that. If they come and go, it’s a little different.

51:58 Brian Rose: What’s the grossest effect you’ve ever done or the scariest or something maybe even disturbed you?

52:05 Greg Nicotero: Oh, ever or on walking?

52:06 Brian Rose: Yeah, ever.

52:07 Greg Nicotero: I did one gag it was years ago. It was based on a comic book, dark horse comic book called Dr. Giggles.

52:14 And it was this psychotic madman physician that was killing all these people. And there’s a flashback scene that we shot. We created this whole fake body of this woman. And the police come into this house and they walk in and they see the body on this table and the body starts to undulate and a scalpel comes up and cuts through the stomach and this little boy crawls out. And we had this little seven year old, eight year old boy that we covered him in blood and gore. And we had this big fake body that we bolted to the table and it was a little trap door underneath. And the little boy crawled out. And it was, it was the weirdest thing. When it was over, we all kind of looked at each other like, what’s happening? Oh my gosh. I mean, it looked really, it looked real and it just looked strange. And I always remember that particular moment. It was just like, all right, that was disturbing.

53:19 Brian Rose: Yeah, that is disturbing. What do you remember about working with Tarantino?

53:25 Greg Nicotero: Oh boy. Well, you know, Quentin, I’ve learned probably more from him as an artist than I’ve learned from anyone. He loves, he loves his actors.

53:35 He loves his actors. I think one of the most interesting stories I have is, I had just directed my first episode of Walking Dead and we wrapped and we started shooting Django. And I was on set with him and he wanted to talk about what my experience of directing was. So what do you, what was it like, like that was, he was so fascinated to hear my perception of what it was like for me to have directed after he had known me for so long. And I said, here’s the thing I learned. And it’s changed how I do special effects. And it had changed it forever. Prior to the point of me having directed, my job as a special effects makeup artist is to get as much information from the director so we can build a specific effect to his specifications. That’s our job. You know, you have meetings. Hey, where do you think you want the camera? The camera over here, camera over there. And then we’ll go off and build it. And then we go to set and we shoot it.

54:39 You know, you have certain directors like Sam Raimi who thinks he’s figured it all out. Sam, like on Army of Darkness, he storyboarded every single shot. So same with Robert Rodriguez when we did Sin City. Like, okay, this is the panel we’re shooting now. With Quentin, Quentin’s a much more organic, you know, he loves rehearsing with his actors. A scene may not even end up the way he had initially imagined it because the actors will bring something to it and it’ll change around. So what I realized after having directed was I said, you know, imagine you’re directing a movie, it’s November, and we’re shooting a scene in February or March or April. It’s very difficult to get a director to be able to commit to something that he’s going to shoot in four months because there are instances when these things change and these things evolve. And Quentin loves the filmmaking process and he really embraces it. So when we started building stuff for Django, I built what I thought I would need if I was directing a specific scene. Like, I knew Quentin and Quentin loved that even on Grindhouse. You know, we did Grindhouse. There was the one scene where Kurt Russell crashes his car into the car with the girls in it. And there’s this ballet, this beautiful slow motion ballet. And when we started shooting Quentin’s like, I have no idea how to do this. And I said, well, let me, I said, just give me some pictures of the girls in

56:11 The positions that you think they’re going to be in. And I went off and built all these bodies and then flew to Austin, took the bodies, tested everything. And when we shot the sequence, he was like, I could have never really thought about how to verbalize what I wanted because it was such an abstract idea. You know, he had written specific things in the script. The tire hits this one person. This girl’s leg tears off this, you know. But in terms of actually executing it, he didn’t really know where to start. Plus he was directing the other stuff.

56:49 So, I just kind of prototyped and mocked it all up and said, hey, what do you think of this? Same as on Inglourious Basterds when we did the scalping. I’m like, what do you think? So, when we get the set, he’s like, hey, that video that you shot, that video was great. Just do it that way. And so, he, so we have a really unique relationship because I feel, I feel like I have a good opportunity to realize things for him that we’ve been on the same page. I’ve talked to him about his new movie and he brought up that Grindhouse thing. He’s like, dude, I had no idea how to do that stuff. And you just showed up with all of it and it was amazing.

57:27 It’s amazing collaboration. So, I love how much he loves his art form. He’s a guy that, you know, if he could be on a movie set all the time, he would shoot, shoot, and shoot because he loves the process. You know, phones are illegal. Like, if you’re on set and there’s a trivia question that you want to know, you can’t look it up on your phone. You have to, when we were doing Glorious Basterds, we had a Three Stooges question. I had to call Sam Ramey from Berlin and leave him a message because we weren’t allowed to use our phones. We had to actually speak to somebody who knew the answer.

58:21 Brian Rose: Sounds like a perfect set. Greg, I always finish off with one question and I was wondering if you could answer it for me. You know, if I was to give you a magic phone and you could ring the 20-year-old Greg and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him after everything you know?

58:48 Greg Nicotero: And I just really encourage so many young people that I’ve met to follow their dreams because it just sort of landed near me and I could have just as easily went, ah, I should probably not, I could have been responsible and said, you know, I’m gonna finish school, I’m gonna go to pre-med, I’m gonna go do it. And there was a moment and I’ll give my folks a lot of credit because they never questioned my decision. They were just like, you know, he’s got a good head on his shoulders, he’s not an idiot. Let’s just see where it goes. I’m not an idiot, you know, contrary to popular belief.

59:29 Brian Rose: Greg, the whole video team has been buzzing just to see you today. So, you know, you’re a big deal in this whole industry. Thank you so much for these insights. It’s really nice to see what happens behind the scenes, all the best with the continued success of Walking Dead. And we’ll talk more about Jaws sometimes.

59:44 Greg Nicotero: Yeah, that’s great. Thank you very much.

59:46 Brian Rose: Thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

1:00:30 Unidentified speaker: Feel what you do. Feel it. If you’re not feeling it, it doesn’t matter.

1:00:37 Brian Rose: It’s Chris Eubank, Jr. How do you explain his prowess in the ring?

1:00:44 Unidentified speaker: Junior has that obsession, that genius, that magic. Genius is obsession, but it’s in one area.

1:00:52 Brian Rose: You studied the sweet science for so much of your life. How do you walk away from it? Do you miss it?

1:01:01 Unidentified speaker: You can’t walk away from it. I am it.

1:01:04 Unidentified speaker: And even when I dance, really unboxing, the credit belongs to the man who’s actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, the one who strives valiantly.

1:01:24 Brian Rose: What was the worst day of your life and how has it shaped you as a human being?

1:01:32 Unidentified speaker: When I fought Nigel Ben, I stood like this. It was to mask this. The risk must be taken.

1:01:42 Brian Rose: That’s why you are London realists. That’s why we’re here. We’re tired of sitting still, watching it happen, happening for others. Let’s do it.