2005 Made In Atlantis (LOTD) - Interviews 1992-2007 - File Catalog

SIMON BAKER Well Mark just flatters me. You just do what you can to make a living. If you put labels on yourself, then you're shooting yourself in the foot, aren't you? If you accept labels being put on you then you might as well be holding the gun. So what are you going to do? I'm just going to shrug it off. Laugh it off...

SIMON BAKER I wasn't really familiar with the genre before I took the job. If it wasn't for my manager who was persistent and grew up loving the genre, he sort of said, please meet George Romero, just meet him. So I met George, and he was just one of the nicest guys I've met in Hollywood. I looked him up on the Internet and there's a lot of information. There are a lot of people that are very impressed with George and have put him up on a pedestal. I walked in and there's this guy that's really warm and lovely, self-effacing, and is the type that is going to make a movie and have some fun. I was drawn to that because he was very real. From that moment of meeting him and enjoying who he was in Hollywood sort of come-and-meet-the-director-and-the-producer way, I walked out of the room saying, he's really a nice guy. His wife was also there, and Mark was there, and I've worked with Mark before. We sort of shared some experiences, so I had a bit of a laugh and I enjoyed the meeting, which is rare. Then I went home and started to do a bit of research and then more and more research.

Yes, I found George's films interesting, both politically and just for what they were. I liked the contradiction, in a sense, that the film can be perceived on a political level, but they're just zombie movies. So they can work on two different, or many different levels. That was interesting to me. I guess, maybe that's why I'm an actor, maybe that's why I like a lot of things. I like things that are somewhat different. I didn't necessarily do it purely for political reasons, but I was drawn to that nature. I think that can be exciting in cinema and in film. Maybe that's why George has such a following because he does do that. He does a lot of way out crazy sort of stuff within his movies as well. Not many people can get away with it. Not many genres can get away with what he does in his films.

SIMON BAKER Well zombies. They do crazy stuff. It's pretty wacky some of the gags they do. It took me a couple of days of watching this stuff go on. All of us were running around and getting all excited about the first zombies that we were shooting in the film. Grown, educated men and women running around, getting excited about zombies. I laughed and laughed and laughed for the first few days, and then I found myself really getting into it in a really honest, pure, innocent, child-like level. Like, this is fun, let's see what happens here. We have been shooting a bit with the splinter unit, which they also call the splatter unit as well. It's a separate unit, and they do a lot of the zombie gags. George runs in between the two. They primarily set up largely for the special effects, gore, and blood stuff. It's a great place to hang out.

SIMON BAKER It's interesting because George hasn't made a George Romero zombie movie for about 20 years or so. I was in high school. A lot's happened socially and within the media since then. In 1985 we were still probably using overhead projectors in class. Look at all this stuff now. A lot's happened and there are a lot more different things that make us paranoid that we can reflect on now. Things are constantly changing day by day. The speed in which our lifestyle moves today is frightening. My five year old uses email. It's pretty scary. That's how advanced we have become. I remember only six years ago or maybe more, fumbling my way onto it. That's how quick everything's changed.

On a world scale with the different social issues that are going on - segregation of different countries, fundamentalism, the way power and politics evolves, and control of the media. Everything's just shifted in a real way and there's a lot of innocence being lost. A lot of these big money spending corporations, whether they are political parties or financial corporations, all still prey on our sort of innocence as individuals with and through the media. Do we want to believe something's right or something's wrong, or the truth?

I think George had a lot of material for this movie to play around with. The good thing about George is that he doesn't set out and go, I'm going to make this subversive commentary about society. I think he's very much free form with his story and it just flows. George was telling me on Night of the Living Dead, that he had no political intentions by casting a black man as the main character. It just happened and when the film finished shooting, it suddenly became very relevant. He didn't know that at the time and there are a lot of people that would go, I'm a genius, and I knew something was going to happen.

We were shooting this film in the middle of the U.S. election. We would run back and forth to the little tiny monitor that had results as they were happening. Since I was away from my family, I spent a lot of my down time watching the news coverage, reading the newspapers and soaking up all this information. It was just everywhere. Both the parties had advertising campaigns and the way they manipulate the media and try to get you to feel this way or that way, or jump on this side or that side. They won't allow you to ever be in the middle. All this became very relevant to me while we were shooting the movie. That's why I liked it, that's why I'm excited.

I think you can go see this movie, as any of George's movies, if you like a fright, a scare, the notion of zombies being the rejects and the outsiders coming back. There are all these different levels. Depending on who and where you are in your life, you can sort of associate with that and identify with it. I got into identifying with those things that I'd talked about when I was shooting the movie. Not everyone will do that, and I think George set out to do that. If you're going to see the movie for a message, I don't think that's necessarily the front and foremost idea to the movie. I think the movie is about having fun, getting a bit of a scare, re-energizing the genre again, and people having a good time.

SIMON BAKER I liked that it was political, but it wasn't at the same time. It's not like we're making Wag the Dog here. It's a zombie movie, and we're having a bit of fun with that. We can play around with these other ideas and themes. Have a little nod to them here and there, and you can take away what you want from it as an audience. You can get into it as much as you want, and you can analyze it as much as you want. You can look at it as just a shallow zombie movie, or you can do whatever you want with it. That's fun to me.

I also liked the character. I really dug George's ideas for the character and my ideas of the character really gelled nicely. It's a heroic character, but it's not a guy that necessarily wants to be a heroic character. He is questioning the whole system. This is the system that we live in, and like all of us now, we are all just trying to get by. We're all just human beings trying to survive and make a living. We wear clothes, buy technology, and do all these things because that's the system that we live in. We pay tax, and we have to do this and have to do that. There are all these rules and guidelines.

You don't have to be completely anti, but sometimes you question, what is all of this about? Is this the best way I can live? Or could I just give up trying to make a living as an actor and go and live quite comfortably. I have great friends in Australia. Intelligent, articulate, wonderful people that just decided, you know what, I'll work in the fruit shop three days a week and put all of my life and my energy into raising my children and having a great quality of life. I don't need more, I don't need this, and I don't need that just because that's what our society tells us we have to have.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, every now and then we get to different points in our lives. We go, am I looking at the glass half full when really it's just half empty? You can have a different perspective on things at different times in your life. I think my character in the movie, Riley, is going through that when the movie starts. I think he is questioning, not so much the zombies, but focusing in on how we got to this point to these set of circumstances.

SIMON BAKER You've got to be fatalistic about it. You've just got to. I'm not mister fist-in-the-air type of guy. I'm a realist. I'm married, I've got three kids. I'm a flawed human being. I'm just trying to make a living and if I'm happy and enjoying what I'm doing, then that's great. If it gets to the point where I'm having a bad time, then I may change the course.

If things happen, they happen, and I've been doing this for most of my working life. I've done a lot of other different jobs, but I've been doing this for a living since I was 22 years old. I'm 35 now. I'm no spring chicken. I don't hold out these high hopes and these exciting ideas of being a big star. If it happens, it happens, but in the meantime I have to have a good time and I have to feel happy with myself, my work, and my family. I have to be a good parent. I'm going to enjoy what I do. I am a lot like Riley in a sense that you've got to question things. You can't just sort of go along and be part of the machine. I understand more how Hollywood works and all of this stuff. I'm old enough now where I don't sort of want to fight it, I just go along with it. To be honest I've got to though, just for my own integrity so that I can be true to myself.

SIMON BAKER No, Dennis is a pretty good-looking guy, an amazingly good-looking guy. If I could look as good as that guy at his age, I'd be pretty happy given his life. I have the utmost respect for Dennis, absolutely. But it's Dennis Hopper. Working with him I wasn't intimidated because I was in good hands. I think Dennis has probably experienced every different experience you could have on a film set. He's been on fucking more sets than I've probably had roast dinners.

John Leguizamo, though, every movie he's ever been in, whether the movie sucked or not, he is always good. I don't think you'll ever find anyone that won't say John Leguizamo's really fucking good. He's always ridiculously solid and good in everything he's done. Everyone you speak to within the business, they go John Leguizamo, he's great. People flip about him. He doesn't have any of that I'm-a-great-actor pretense. The night we met I asked if he wanted to go over anything. We spent a couple of hours talking about our families, reading the script, joking around and had a bit of a laugh. Instantly the ice was broken. He's loose, I like the way he works, he doesn't tie anything down, he is very open, and very playful to work with.

SIMON BAKER Asia's great. I think she's a fantastic girl. It doesn't become the guy-gets-the-girl and they embrace and kiss passionately. It's maybe sort of hinted at here and there. It's a bit of fun. The George A. Romero zombie movie has no limits as to what can happen and what can go on inside the film. You don't have these boundaries and these parameters a little romantic comedy has, or English romantic comedy, or a thriller. There is a bit of action, there's a bit of horror, there is a bit of a political satire, and there is a little bit of a love story. It's all these things.