:: GREG NICOTERO INTERVIEW PART 2::
BY Slick Matecheck
05/09/05

In part one of our interview with Greg Nicotero, we discussed Sin City and Land Of The Dead and sang the praises of one Simon Pegg, co-writer and star of the amazing Shaun Of The Dead. In part two of our interview, we pick up where we left off and also discuss an abundance of personal film set footage, hair styles and swimming with sharks.

GN: I was sort of the one that laid the ground work for their (Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg) cameos in Land Of The Dead. And I'll tell you, the night they were on set was...they were geeking out so much that it made me happy. Again, it instills that sort of, "Right, that's why we're doing this." It was fun, it was a lot of fun.

FG: You were a big reason why I got so excited about Shaun Of The Dead because I'm a huge fan of yours and I tend to follow you a lot. And every interview I was reading with you, you were, "Oh, Shaun Of The Dead, my favorite film of the year!" And I thought, "This is gonna be phenomenal."

GN: Because I told interviewers, "You can't interview me unless you plug Shaun Of The Dead." Literally, because I wanted the word to get out about that film. Not that my word means that much, but it was important to me that people see the movie because I think it's a great film and I think that those guys have a hell of a career ahead of them.

FG: Yeah, they do.

GN: All of them, Nick Frost (Ed in Shaun Of The Dead), all of the actors in that movie.

FG: I know that you, and I assume you do this on most, if not all of the films you've worked on, tape footage of your own. I know that on The Gore, The Merrier (a making of featurette on the Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn DVD), that's your footage. Would you ever think about maybe releasing some of that footage?

GN: Well, it's tricky. I can tell you why. I'd love to because I have...even The Gore, The Merrier...I have six hours of footage. Land Of The Dead I probably have three hours of footage. Sin City I have two hours of footage of us fucking around in the trailers and blowing smoke out of Benicio's slit throat. I just don't know the legal ramifications of how that works. It's not just a bunch of guys goofing off in the shop. You're dealing with actors and you're dealing with who owns the rights to the images and that kind of stuff. So, you know what? I really don't know. I would love to be able to release some of that stuff. And we've certainly been approached about it. There have been people who have come to us and said, "We'd love to dig through them." I mean, I burned most of my footage onto DVDs and I have like twenty DVDs full of just everything from Horror Show and Deep Star Six all the way up through Phantoms and The Green Mile. Dances With Wolves, I have footage of me and Kevin Costner on set when I was a little tyke. I don't know, I think it would end up being a lot more of a legal hassle to get permission, because you'd have to go to all those people that are in those clips and you'd have to get permission or pay them. And I think ultimately that would be cost prohibitive. I don't know, I'm not an attorney, I don't know how that would work, but the nice thing about it is then they take that footage...for the DVD for Cursed, I gave them all of the footage that I shot on set of us shooting the werewolf and that'll all be on the DVD. It certainly shows up, it just shows up in a much more truncated version than what I have laying around in my house. Which is three hours on set of Ghosts Of Mars and In The Mouth Of Madness, you know, with John Carpenter and all those guys.

FG: See, and I live for that stuff. I love to see that stuff, so whenever you can get it on a DVD, do it. (laughs)

GN: I tell you, I think it would be fun because it would be neat to trace the history of the company. They did a DVD of Halloween 5, but nobody ever called us about footage. You know what's sad about that? I have all this great footage of Donald Pleasence shooting the gags and it's something fans would love to see. But it's not on the DVD. Even on like Friday The 13th 9: Jason Goes To Hell there was a whole alternate ending that was shot where we built all these forced perspective miniatures with these creatures coming out of the ground and grabbing Jason and pulling him into the ground. All this really, really elaborate and interesting stuff...not even in the movie. And then it's not even on the DVD. We sent them some footage and said, "Hey, you guys want to put this on the DVD?" And they went, "Ehhh, no thanks." I think sometimes they don't realize that that's the stuff the fans want.

FG: The geeks want that! I need that.

GN: Yeah. I'm waiting for them to do a special edition of Kill Bill where they cut both movies together into one film. And then there's a huge double-disc of all the making of. Because all the test stuff that we did here where we were slicing off my assistant's forehead for Lucy Liu's death and all that footage is...it would be great to just do a semester at a film school and just show all that stuff and say, "This is how it works." And go through the entire process.

FG: Yeah, that'd be one hell of a film school. You'd have to bring it to Tampa though, so I could go.

GN: Well, you know, Full Sail (a multimedia production training school) has asked me to come down to Orlando to do a presentation and I just have never been able to find the right time to come down. Because they keep saying, "Oh, we'll fly you down." I'd love to. We do some college lectures here and there, but unless it's a film school that really is about movies, that knows who you are and it's well done...I've done some where there's 400 people in the audience and you're showing them clips from movies and stuff that they've never seen before. That's really exciting. To me, the most exciting thing is to get phone calls from people who say, "I just saw Sin City..." The weekend the movie opened there was like ten messages on the machine here from people going, "Whoa, I just saw Sin City man, woo-hoo! You guys rock!" and then they just hang up. They were so excited about the movie and that's really nice. And I'll be really anxious as this year progresses because I think this is going to be KNB's banner year in terms of visibility. We have so many movies coming out and so much great work came out of the company, mainly due to the terrific crew that we had last year, and continue to have.

FG: Well then I'll have to call and leave a message after every one of these films comes out. God, you'd be like, "Why is this bitch calling again?"

GN: No I won't, I'll probably laugh.

FG: (laughing) You would, wouldn't you? You're so awesome Greg, you don't even know it. You must be the funnest dad in the world, too.

GN: Well, I like to think so. My son's two and a half...

FG: And that's Deven, right?

GN: Yeah. And watching Deven run around the shop, he's not afraid. You know what he's afraid of? He's afraid of flies. He can see the guy in the werewolf suit from Cursed and walk up and pet it. He'll be afraid of the most ridiculous...a butterfly will come in and he'll have a meltdown, but he can see the creatures from The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe or a zombie and he'll just kind of go, "Uh, whatever."

FG: That's funny because my niece was four the first time she saw Army Of Darkness and she loved it and to this day, still loves it.

GN: Well, Army Of Darkness is a really harmless movie. There's nothing malicious, there's nothing gory, there's nothing horrible about it. It's just a fun movie. I mean, Evil Dead II's a little more intense.

FG: Yeah, she won't see that one for some time. She still loves the part where he (main character Ash) pulls out of the book and his face is all stretched out.

GN: I remember we were doing The Faculty and when Robert would come to LA, he would crash at my house and we'd stay up all night and watch movies and paint model kits and stuff. I guess he didn't know that I had worked on Evil Dead II...

FG: I remember you saying that on The Gore, The Merrier.

GN: ...yeah, yeah!

FG: He was like, "You worked on that?!"

GN: He was like, "You worked on Evil Dead II?" I said, "Yeah, I've got six hours of footage." And we put it on and watched all six hours that night. He was like, "Oh my God, we've got to make a movie like this!" He still loves that kind of stuff. He loves John Carpenter movies. He loves Jaws. Last September, right before we went up to do Land Of The Dead, we did a film with Robert called The Adventures Of Shark Boy & Lava Girl. It's a 3D kids' movie. The opening of the movie has some great white sharks swimming around, so Robert's like, "Hey, let's go dive with great white sharks! We used to joke around, when we were on set for From Dusk Til Dawn, about diving with great white sharks before we were 40. And now you're 42." And I kind of went, "Yeah great, that's really funny." We literally did it. We got in a boat, we went off the coast of Mexico and swam down to cages and sat in cages and watched 12 or 14 foot great white sharks swim around.

Courtesy of Savini.com A young goremaster in training

FG: Did you have any Brodie or Hooper moments in there?

GN: It was unbelievable. It really was. It was such a surreal experience that sometimes I don't think it really happened. People look at me and go, "You went in a cage with great white sharks?" And I say, "Yeah, sure." They look at me like I went to the moon.

FG: Well, it's not something a lot of people do. Or would have the cojones to do.

GN: Because it was such an odd, surreal experience, it was pretty funny. I actually wrote up a little diary and I attached a bunch of pictures and I emailed it to a bunch of my friends right when I got back. A couple of my friends were like, "Great, I was going to go scuba diving, now I'm not going to go!" And I said, "Well hey, don't go scuba diving when there's great whites." But it was really amazing, and Robert is such a generous guy. He called and he goes, "Listen, I've been wanting to get you something special for your 40th birthday and I know it was two years ago but, this is my gift to you for your birthday."

FG: Oh, that's cool! That's very cool.

GN: Wow, what a trip...

FG: I want you to almost die for your 40th birthday!

GN: I want to feed you to huge animals with thousands of huge, sharp teeth. It was really fun.

FG: It must've been terrifying sometimes, though, was it?

GN: Here was the gag. The gag was that it was a 24-hour boat trip, then we get there in the morning. So we left Sunday morning, we got there Monday morning, throw anchor, they stuck chum in the water, they lower the cages. And when the sharks show up, you have to get your scuba gear on and swim down to get into the cage. So when you jump in the water, you have to look around and make sure there's no sharks, and then swim down.

FG: With all this chum around...

GN: Yeah, of course. So, we had two camera guys with us and a couple of Robert's other friends, an editor and an actor, so there was like eight of us. So Robert was the first one to go down. And he comes up after an hour and he's like, "Okay, who's next? Greg, you want to go?" And I was just thinking to myself...

FG: (laughing) No.

GN: I didn't know what to do. Like that moment where you go, "Am I really going to do this?" And I went, "Okay, sure," without even thinking. And the funniest part of it was you get all your scuba gear on and you jump in the water and there's a safety diver that swims down with you, which you hope if the sharks are going to eat anybody they'll eat the safety diver and you'll be fine. And I jump in the water and the moment I hit the water I start hyperventilating, like I start breathing really heavy and in my head I'm going, "I must be fucking nuts." And the guy looks at me like, "Are you okay?" And I just sort of signal to him like, "Give me a second." The guy turns his head and turns back and I'm gone. He looks down under water and I was already in the cage. It was a 20-foot swim and the guy said to me later, "I never saw somebody swim so fast in my life." He literally looks at me, he's like, "You okay?" "Yeah, I'm fine." He turns away, he turns back, gone! Looks down, I'm already in the cage. There was not even a moment of, "What should I do?" And then when you get to the cage, you have to take your regulator out and grab a regulator from inside the cage so that you're not emptying your air tank. And then you just sit there and watch sharks swim around you for as long as you want. And then when you're ready to leave, you put your regulator back in your mouth, you look around to make sure you're not going to swim up into the belly of a big shark, and you swim back up to the boat and get on the boat and have a heart attack.

FG: Yeah, the after-the-fact heart attack.

GN: It was an unbelievable experience.

FG: Now also, one thing I was wondering was, what prompted you to chop your hair off?

GN: Oh!

FG: The famous blonde locks!

GN: And there's a shot...did you see Cursed?

FG: No, not yet.

GN: There's a shot of me in Cursed where I still have my long hair. I have kind of a walk-through in the background in the opening of the movie. I had a great time on Cursed. I'm so sad that the movie didn't get the release that Wes (Craven, director of Cursed) wanted and just got tinkered and tampered with so much because it was a great experience. I was on set every single day with Wes and it really gave me the opportunity to get to spend time with him and get to know him pretty well and I had a great time. He's such a fascinating, intelligent man. And his first assistant director's name is Nick Mastandrea. Nick is from Pittsburgh, who I've know since Day Of The Dead. Nick used to be George Romero's key grip. So in Dawn Of The Dead, when Ken Foree gets his big new gun, and they lock the door and he goes, "Okay, we're going to lock this place up and we're going on a hunt." You see the one zombie with the crosshairs across his head and boom! And his forehead blows off?

FG: Yeah!

GN: That's Nick Mastandrea. So I've known Nick for years and it just gets to the point where he would say, "When are you going to get a haircut?" On Cursed, it just got to the point where the girls, all the girls in the AD staff would say, "We're calling Queer Eye For The Straight Guy on you! You just need to cut your hair." You know, truthfully, I was ready to cut my hair a long time ago but my wife likes it, so my wife's like, "No, I don't want you to cut your hair! You've got to leave it alone." So finally, my wife came to visit set one day and the AD girls attacked her and said, "Your husband needs to cut his hair." And she said, "Okay." So they came to me and said, "All right, you're allowed to cut your hair, your wife said it's fine." And I said, "Oh, I'm allowed?!" I didn't realize it was a question of that, I just knew that she preferred it. So that weekend I went to a haircutting place and they wrapped it up in a ponytail, which was a 14 inch braided ponytail and they went snip! And it sounded like spaghetti breaking. You know, when you have a handful of spaghetti and you go krrrrrccchhhh?

FG: It sounded like that?!

GN: That's how thick it was.

FG: Oh my God!

GN: Then they put it in an envelope and they sent it to Locks For Love.

FG: I was wondering if you did that with your hair.

GN: There's some young girl...I think she's in Florida actually...that got all the hair to make a wig for her because she's sick. So then I have to go back to set (of Cursed), and they're shooting the scene with Christina Ricci and Judy Greer, the big final confrontation where these two are right about to go at each other. And I walk on set and they look over and they went, "Hold the roll!" And Wes grabs me, puts me in front of the camera, says, "Roll camera!" and shot a couple frames of footage of me with my new haircut and then said, "Get the fuck out of here!" All of a sudden everyone went, "Oh...my...God...you actually cut your hair off!" Now I'm used to it. Like I said, there's one shot in Cursed where you see me pushing a coffin in the background, in the Hall Of Horrors, Chamber Of Horrors, and it's sort of the last documentation of my long hair.

FG: (laughing) Last documentation of the long-haired Nicotero.

GN: And then of course if I don't cut it everyone goes, "You growing your hair back?" That's the first question. Because after Land Of The Dead...it was such a grueling shoot, eight and a half weeks of all nights outside in Canada in the winter. And cutting my hair wasn't important. So I got home and everyone said, "Hey, you growing your hair back?" No, I spent so much of my life not worrying about cutting it that it's not a priority.

FG: Do you ever have spare time? I'm curious, what kind of music do you listen to? I'm a huge music fan.

GN: I used to be a big music fan and I used to play guitar. I don't have any spare time, unfortunately. It's funny because every once in a while I'll dig through my CDs and I'll pull an old Skynyrd like "Street Survivors" or Metallica or Stevie Ray Vaughan. Those would be like the three...I'm really good friends with Kirk Hammett (lead guitarist of Metallica) and we've been friends...

FG: (completely geeking out) You are not! Are you really?!

GN: I am.

FG: (still geeking out) I love Kirk! He's a huge horror geek.

GN: He is a huge horror geek. I met them right before "...And Justice For All" came out.

FG: God, that's a long time ago.

GN: It was funny because I saw them when we were shooting Land Of The Dead, I saw Metallica up in Toronto and got to meet Rob,  the new bass player, who's an amazing guy.

FG: I love Rob Trujillo. Phenomenal.

GN: Such a good guy. One of the nicest guys you'll ever meet. I was really blown away. He's a good guy and he's got a new kid and everything so we spent a lot of time talking about wives and kids and being away from your family whether you're touring or you're shooting a movie. But it was interesting because Kirk and I were talking and I met him in 1988, so I said, "Dude, we've been friends for 16 years!" We were both sort of blown away by the fact that we've known each other for almost half of our lives. We spent a couple nights hanging out, goofing off and it was great. He's the kind of person that you can not talk to for six months or eight months because they're over touring Europe, then you'll get a phone call and when you see them it's like no time has passed.

FG: I always count those as true friends. You can go ten years without talking, you pick right back up.

GN: You pick right back up and and it was funny because it was the beginning of October when we hung out. It was just funny because at 2:00 in the morning we looked at each other and we're like, "Wow, this is fucking great!"

FG: And he hasn't aged either, really. It's kind of weird. Must be something in the San Francisco water.

GN: No, he doesn't. I hate that.

FG: You haven't aged really either though, Greg.

GN: Ahh, you'd be surprised. Only mentally.

FG: I can't thank you enough Greg!

GN: Oh, it's my pleasure!

FG: No, it's my pleasure. You made a dream come true for this fangirl geek...

GN: Awww...

FG: ...no, you really did, you really did. And I thank you.

GN: Well, thank you!

FG: You're welcome!

CHECK OUT WOLFMAN PRODUCTIONS WHO PRODUCE A PROGRAM HEADLINED BY KNB EFX WHERE THEY DISCUSS THE EFX INDUSTRY AND WHAT THEY DO.