Top 75 George A. Romero Quotes

My film collection is all oldies.

I expect a zombie to show up on ‘Sesame Street’ soon, teaching kids to count.

If one horror film hits, everyone says, ‘Let’s go make a horror film.’ It’s the genre that never dies.

When you are working with low budgets and you have a gunshot with a squib and it goes wrong – the gun flash does not synchronize with the squib or whatever – it takes half an hour or 40 minutes to clean it all up and reset it. It’s much easier to use a computer to paint in the flash and splatter.

I really liked the helicopter pilot in ‘Dawn of the Dead’, when he gets bitten and comes out of the elevator. That guy was amazing. He did this incredible walk that we didn’t even know about until we started shooting.

I like guys who are understandable and good guys who are flawed.

I vote in the Academy, so I get all the screeners. I’m so often disappointed by all the material and especially by what wins. I find myself never voting for the winner.

At the time we did ‘Night,’ I was a director of television commercials. Some of them cost a lot more than our whole movie. They were very slick, sophisticated… we wanted the opposite look for ‘Night.’ We wanted it to look like a newsreel.

The horror films that I’ve made have been satirical in one way or another or political, and I really think that’s the purpose of horror. I don’t see that happening very often.

I didn’t much care for the ‘Dawn’ remake. It was a well-made action movie but really wasn’t anything like my ‘Dawn Of The Dead.’

Neighbors are frightening enough when they’re alive.

Most of my stuff was sort of of-the-time. ‘The Crazies’ was, basically, we were angry about Vietnam, and it had a reason for being.

My zombies will never take over the world because I need the humans. The humans are the ones I dislike the most, and they’re where the trouble really lies.

The most realistic blood I’ve seen is when Marlon Brando gets beat up in On The Waterfront.

Comic books and radio were my escape. I even remember 3-D comic books where you put on the red-and-green glasses and Mighty Mouse would punch you in the face. It was the literature of the day for kids my age who were too bored with listening to ‘Peter and the Wolf’ on the record player.

I sit around listening to classical music. I don’t play video games. I love to go to dinner, go on picnics, travel.

I want ‘Dawn’ to play like a cowboys and Indians movie.

As great as Ed is, the wisdom out here is that he can’t carry a movie. They’ll pay him $3 million to be the second banana in Julia Roberts things. But they won’t put up $3 million for an Ed Harris movie.

I’ve seen so many young filmmakers – even professional filmmakers who get a Hollywood deal – they don’t quite know where to begin, where to end, and they’ll waste a lot of time making this perfect shot, an establishing shot, and then there’s no time left to shoot the dialogue.

The very fact that you thought of it means that, somewhere in your mind, it’s believable to you. All you have to do is convince your audience that it’s possible.

Zombies cannot run.

I saw ‘Dracula,’ ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘The Wolf Man,’ ‘The Invisible Man.’ I saw all those guys on the big screen at RKO in the Bronx. I just always loved that stuff. I loved other stuff, too. That’s the thing. That wasn’t all I wanted to be.

Anybody who tunes into Rush Limabaugh already knows what he’s going to say and is already inclined to agree. So it winds up creating tribes.

If you look to the few films that have been really successful, ‘Insidious,’ ‘Paranormal Activity,’ it’s all basically the old monsters.

I won’t say I’m uncompromising, but I won’t compromise just for the hell of it.

Somehow I’ve been able to keep standing and stay in my little corner and do my little stuff and I’m not particularly affected by trends or I’m not dying to make a 3D movie or anything like that. I’m just sort of happy to still be around.

I’m a Turner Classic Movies guy. That’s it. I’d much rather sit here and watch an oldie than anything new.

People say you’re trapped in this genre. You’re a horror guy. I say wait a minute – I’m able to say exactly what I think. I’m able to talk about, comment about, take snapshots of what’s going on at the time. I don’t feel trapped. I feel like this is my way of being able to express myself.

‘The Thing from Another World’ was the first movie that really scared me. But the one that made me want to make movies was ‘The Tales of Hoffman.’ That’s my favorite film of all time. It’s a fantasy film. It’s an opera. I never get tired of it.

Some directors work from day to day. I work from moment to moment.

I like to use horror as allegory.

I do think of my films as morality plays, even though my reputation is, you know, splatter films and like that. But I think of them as very moral.

I’m basically a fairly traditional filmmaker.

As a filmmaker you get typecast just as much as an actor does, so I’m trapped in a genre that I love, but I’m trapped in it!

I wanted ‘Night of the Living Dead’ to look naturalistic, but we weren’t able to do it because we were shooting with a blimped 35mm camera, which is automatically static.

‘Day of the Dead’ remains my favourite zombie film of mine.

I really believe that you could do horror very inexpensively. I don’t think it has anything to do with the effects, the effects are not the most important parts.

My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines.

I sympathize with the zombies and am not even sure they are villains. To me they are this earth-changing thing. God or the devil changed the rules, and dead people are not staying dead.

Because of ‘World War Z’ and ‘The Walking Dead,’ I can’t pitch a modest little zombie film which is meant to be sociopolitical.

I grew up on the old EC comic books before the Comics Code in North American and with all sort of good-natured fun. I never had nightmares I think because all of the old horror stuff that I was exposed to was well meaning in a certain sense.

There aren’t that many monsters. It’s very hard to create a new monster.

I grew up in New York City. And I lived in the Bronx in a place called Parkchester.

A zombie film is not fun without a bunch of stupid people running around and observing how they fail to handle the situation.

When I was old enough to go to movies alone, I got to see ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Dracula’ on the big screen. I just fell in love with them.

I did ‘Land of the Dead,’ which was the biggest zombie film I had ever made. I don’t think it needed to be that big. That money went largely to the cast. They were great, but I don’t think that money needed to be spent.

I love ‘Shaun of the Dead.’

I always have CNN on. That’s where I get my ideas.

In 2007, ‘Diary of the Dead’ all of a sudden made money. I was blindsided by that.

If I fail, the film industry writes me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart.

The grotesque has never really affected or frightened me. I guess it’s real-life stuff that frightens me much more.

With CG, I can do more and be sillier. In ‘Diary,’ there’s a scene where they hit a guy with acid, and the camera is never off him, and you see it gradually eat through his skull and get all the way through his brain. That’s fun, too.

I will never make a film where zombies are threatening to take over the planet.

There are very few horror films that I think are worth their salt.

Movies are about escape.

There is something about the sameness people like. And what I’ve tried to do with all the zombie films is purposely make them different. That may be part of why it takes so long for people to see what it’s intended to be.

Zombies to me don’t represent anything in particular. They are a global disaster that people don’t know how to deal with.

I grew up on EC comic books and ‘Tales From the Crypt,’ which were all loaded with humor, bad jokes, and puns. I can have that kind of fun and make these comic book movies but, at the same time, talk about things I want to talk about – whether it’s consumerism or the Bush administration or war.

Zombies are always moving fast in video games. It makes sense if you think about it. Those games are all about hand-eye coordination and how quickly can you get them before they get you.

When you’re shooting super-low-budget – we had 20 days to shoot ‘Diary,’ and a little over $2 – time is money.

As movie monsters go, zombies are the most human. They were human at one time. So we are confronted with ourselves in a way, which is much more frightening and disturbing.

I keep a little notebook of things that I can do to the zombies that might be silly and fun.

A lot of my friends are people who do horror films: Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Stephen King.

The hardest thing when you’re making a zombie movie is, ‘How am I going to kill these zombies? I need a clever way to knock these guys off.’