We recently spoke with Night of the Living Dead: Origins director Zebediah de Soto about his 3-D animated, re-envisioning of George A. Romero's classic is targeted for a late 2010 or early 2011 release. One would be quick to assume the film's "American Anime" style would lend itself to a broader PG-13 audience. Not so fast.
"The producers of the film, Simon West and Jib Polhemus, asked, 'it’s animated so are we going to go for a PG-13 rating?'. And I was like, no, I want to push that R rating", said de Soto. "Preferably I’d like to get an NC-17 rating."
"They were like, 'its going to be very difficult to sell this,' De Soto continued. "I said, we can scale this back and have a nice, bloody directors cut. But I really want to push the R rating. I want to really deliver on the effects and gore. Everyone remembers Tom Savini’s makeup. I mean, Day of the Dead… a shovel going through a zombies head? For me, I want to put this on a really epic scale. I want New York City. Cars. Glass. Tons of things to explode. Military helicopters crashing. Buildings coming down. Fires. It’s the perfect recipe for mayhem."
De Soto went on to add, "The original Day of the Dead got what, an X rating? Why can’t we push that envelope now?"
In 1990, the MPAA replaced the X rating with NC-17 for non-pornographic films.
Adding mayhem and gore to the Night of the Living Dead story involved moving the location to New York City. De Soto explained, "I wanted to have a larger body count. I wanted to see an epic zombie movie. Like if you ever read any Max Brooks book like World War Z, we have never seen that. We’ve read about it in fan fictions and the like but we’ve never had the chance to see it on the big screen. That is something I really wanted to do."
"One of the coolest things about Resident Evil one… I don’t know if everybody is a fan or not a fan… but at the very end of the movie when Milla Jovovich reaches the surface, you know, when she comes out of the hospital, the camera just keeps pulling back to this bird’s eye view of the city and you see this destruction.. it’s like fuck, man, I really wish I could have seen that part of the movie."
Check back later this week for more of Hug A Zombie's exclusive interview with de Soto.
