Howard J. Ford and John Ford are directing partners and brothers who have spent their professional careers making commercials. Their dream was always to one day make a zombie film. That day has arrived, and now we get to see the fruit of their labors with the release of "The Dead."
The film begins when the last evacuation flight out of war-torn Africa crashes off the coast. American Air Force engineer Lt. Brian Murphy emerges as the sole survivor in a land where the dead are returning to life and attacking the living. I had the opportunity to speak with the Ford brothers about the movie.
Was the shoot dangerous? What was the biggest challenge you dealt with?
John: The biggest challenge was staying alive. Honestly, it was staying alive from one day to the next. That was the first and foremost important challenge. Secondly was making the film. A lot of us went through poisoning, malaria, and tropical diseases.
Howard: I was mugged at knife-point on day one in the city out there. My driving license amongst all my money and everything else was taken from me in this mugging. The police tried to put me in jail for driving without a license. We were paying our way out all the time. We were robbed at gunpoint quite often. We just felt like days would go by [where] you couldn't get a shot in the can. This is after five weeks of waiting for your equipment to get out of the port in the first place. It was incredibly frustrating.
John: Sometimes we had to rip pages out of the script, reinvent scenes, and make some of it up as we went along due to those problems.
When did you start work on "The Dead" originally?
John: It's a late zombie movie from the old days. I started writing this in the mid-1980s. [I was] inspired by "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie," Romero's original "Dawn of the Dead," and all that sort of thing. I always wanted to make a zombie film right from the word go. I never seriously sat down to write the script until shortly before shooting it. I've been chipping away ideas over a few decades. It's been a hell of a long road for me. It's my passion and life project.
Howard: He would often mention it [when] we would be shooting a commercial. He would say, "We have to make that zombie movie." I felt the time hadn't been right until suddenly Africa came into the equation. It was like, "Wow. We can do it in Africa and do a zombie movie that has deeper meaning." [There could be] other multi-layers about the different cultures. [We could] take people on a journey across locations they won't see in other movies. No one has been stupid enough to go and do what we did [laughing].
John: We said, "Let's just drop everything. [We'll] close the production company doors. No more commercials. Let's go and make this film!"
For more articles by Eric Shirey, check out:
Blu-ray Review: 'The Dead' Rise Again in Africa
Blu-ray Review: Carmen Electra, Brooke Hogan Suffer '2-Headed Shark Attack'
'Kill List' Satisfies Critics, Moviegoers
Eric Shirey is the founder and former editor of Rondo Award nominated movie news websites MovieGeekFeed.com and TheSpectralRealm.com. His work has been featured on Yahoo!, DC Comics, StarWars.com, and other entertainment websites. Eric has interviewed and worked with actors like Harrison Ford, Brooke Shields, Gerard Butler, Brendan Fraser, Selena Gomez, and many more.
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