Interview: Brandon Salisbury (George A. Romero's Resident Evil)
Writer-director Brandon Salisbury covers two huge topics in his new documentary George A. Romero’s Resident Evil: the early Resident Evil video games and the George A. Romero Resident Evil feature that was never made. In fact, there was so much material that the first cut ran around 2 hours and 40 minutes.
“Well, it because we had a lot more material but we also covered a lot more about George. It was decided how much do should we cover of George’s life and his films. We started slimming things down because we really wanted to get to Resident Evil. But we wanted to make sure that we were letting people know that don't necessarily know everything about George Romero like here's like the most important stuff about him like who he was as a person, his films, and really setting that up so that if you didn't know anything about it, you still understood who he was. Same thing with the video game, because there was going to be plenty of people that are fans of George Romero that have heard of Resident Evil but may not understand at the time just how big that first Resident Evil game was where it basically made the PlayStation the most successful gaming platform at that time in 1990s,” Brandon said.
Brandon’s film makes a deliberate choice to use footage from the chunky low-res original PlayStation 1 versions of the first few Resident Evil games instead of the slicker remakes. “We could have used footage from the remakes to make it more visually appealing to the audience, but at the same time that wasn't the game that George played. We really wanted to show that time period so you understand the mindset of where he was at and where video gaming was at the time.”
Although Romero wrote a feature script for Resident Evil he planned for direct, Constantin Films decided to go in a different direction. Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil flick came out a few years later with a decidedly more action focus. Brandon surmises Romero never watched the live-action Resident Evil features that eventually came out. “'I’m going to go out on a limb here because I don't know for sure, but I don't think he ever did. I don't want to say necessarily that it was out of frustration or anger that he just didn't want to see it. I would imagine he didn't see a lot of other zombie related media just because, you know, he had his way of doing things. He was actually offered to direct episodes of The Walking Dead and declined to do them. He looked at it as he didn't want to work in anyone else's sandbox at that point. Maybe that was because of some of the bad experiences that he's had over the decades because he was offered a lot of things from War of the Worlds to The Mummy to quite a few Stephen King projects including The Stand and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.”
One of the cooler pieces of trivia George A. Romero’s Resident Evil reveals is there was a much longer version of the live-action commercial Romero shot for Bio-Hazard 2, the Japanese title for Resident Evil 2. He’s working hard on finding the footage. “We're talking about stuff that's from, 25 years ago that people had on a VHS tape, and then it gets thrown into storage. Now people are trying to find it, so we're hoping it'll surface. I don't know exactly what all entails that will be on the VHS tape, but, you know, 30 minutes of anything that Romero shoots… If you're a Romero fan, it's a gold mine!”
George A. Romero’s Resident Evil is now available on digital and on demand platforms.