AMC Blogs has the latest interview with makeup movie guru Greg Nicotero on all things The Walking Dead. Yesterday I mentioned his work and thoughts on the brutal Horse VS Zombies scene but now we’ll go more in depth on how the effects have been upgraded significantly from his early days working under Tom Savini on Dawn and Day of the Dead to present day Atlanta on set.
On headshots then and now:
“Well in the '70s they just put squibs on extras' heads and detonated them. Then you got to the point where if you had to use explosive squibs it could only be on a stunt person. But for The Walking Dead, we're going for a very specific physical type: Every zombie that we see is really tall and really thin and really gaunt looking,” said Nicotero,
“One of the story points is that these characters have been dead for so long that they're starving, and will eat virtually anything. They'll eat a horse, they'll eat a rat. So we built this self-contained head-hit rig that runs off compressed air. You fill a tube with blood, and then you use a foot pump to get a really great blood spray. You can clip it on to anybody that you want, and then all of a sudden you have instantaneous head wound,” Nicotero explained.
Even though Nicotero has worked on a ton of horror films throughout the years with his effects team KNB EFX, Nicotero ended up winning an Academy Award for his team’s makeup work on the
Chronicles of Narnia. He went on to talk about what drew him to the television project.
Howard Berger and Greg Nicotero – owners of KNB EFX “I've been best friends with Frank Darabont since before he directed
The Shawshank Redemption, and we share a similar interest and nostalgic devotion to George Romero and
Night of the Living Dead,” he said.
“We started talking about this project probably three or four years ago, when Frank was talking about wanting to do something different with zombies, and what we could do to make these guys look fresh and original. And from then on, it's just been like, Hey man! We get to create zombies!” said Nicotero.
As for his work on
The Walking Dead, Nicotero wanted to really excel in showing how far he can take the undead, “We used the graphic novel certainly as inspiration. We've always tried to push the envelope,” he said.
“One conversation that Frank and I had at the beginning of our prep was, How far do I take them... We want to be able to show the degradation of these zombies over time. So some zombie make-ups are a little more fresh-looking, some are a little more decomposed looking,” said Nicotero,
He wrapped up the interview saying,
“This is the first time we've ever actually gone through and hand-picked the actual zombies that will be featured. It's one thing to glue prosthetics on somebody's face, but if you have somebody who's got a lot of character and they just have a really great structure to their face, it's great. We'll go to dinner and a waitress will go by, and we're like, "Man, she'd be a great zombie."
The Walking Dead is set to hit AMC this October for it’s 6 episode debut season. But if you want to check out Nicotero’s other upcoming stuff – wait for the new Predators flick.