Folks, it's showtime. People say, good money to see this movie.
When they go out to a theater.
They want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the protection booth. Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Don it off.
Coming to get you, Barbara.
Yeah, they're dead.
They're all messed up.
Georgia's films literally change the face of horror as we know.
It didn't hide the fact that the games were inspired directly by George Romero's films. At that time, there was nothing more I wanted than a live action Resident Evil. Think George, make it Resident Evil. And then suddenly the plug.
Was pulled on this. Having him involved would have had the potential for him to leave a blue print. How did we not get this? And you can, Chelle you the misgivings about every project someone else.
This film just feels so much more hor so much more my life, and so much more name I.
Think George really took things to the next level on that.
This guy knew Resident Evil.
He would not sell his soul just to get a film done.
I think that they're buying your.
The Resident Evil series exists because of him.
He'll never be for time Rememory Iron.
When there's no more mom in Hell, I'll see you when Pittsburg.
George a Romero's Resident Evil.
Everyone's trying to die.
Hey, folks, Welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking with Brandon Salisbury. He is the director and co writer of the new documentary George A Romero's Resident Evil. It's a little bit of a mouthful, but it's a pretty fun documentary talking about the project that never became realized. All about George A Romero's Resident Evil. All about George A Romero's Resident Evil. It's right there in the title.
Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed this interview. Can you tell me a little bit of your history as far as filmmaking and what got you interested in horror overall?
I am a United States Marine veteran. I served in Iraq, did twelve years total in the service, including the Army National Guard. I got into horror when I was really young. My mother loved horror films, so she had a stack of VHS tapes. My father wasn't so much interested in horror. He was a John Wayne Cleanness foot kind of got so my mother and I really bonded over horror films. I learned how to operate a VHS tape by myself, but I popped in and ended up being Knight a
Living Dead and it scared a head at him. It must have been five or six, and it scared me off of other zombie films until I played the Resident Evil games. When Resident Evil two came out in ninety eight, and then when George was attached to direct, I went back and was like, I had to watch more of
his films. And then it was around that time, just getting in the early days of the Internet and reading interviews with George Romiro, that I got into this fascination with his career and his approach to filmmaking, and that led me to wanting to get it pursue filmmaking because of film and after my military career was done. You know, it took a few years, but then I just decided, you know, I need to go for this. It doesn't matter how old I am. I'm just going to go for it.
Tell me a little bit about those early days of your filmmaking. What kind of stuff were you making?
This is the hysterical thing. The documentary is the only thing. It's the first thing that I filmed. I didn't make any home movies. I did not make any shorts. There was nothing before this. So the first thing that I did was something that I had a license for with Capcom, to make this documentary about George Romero and Resident Evils.
That's amazing. So you just swung for the fences right on out.
It wasn't meant to be this. I originally was looking at it as something that would be like long term and I would be making shorts. But it was something that once we started working on it, it took off beyond anything we could ever foresee. And next thing you know, we were deep in production on this very big project.
Now he's saying, we I don't imagine that's the royal wee. Can you tell me who else you worked with on us?
When I first decided that I wanted to make this sense a documentary, I reached out to Robbie McGregor, who's been connected to the Resident Evil community for decades. He even operated a bunch of Resident Evil fan sites back in the late nineties early two thousands, So he had written a in depth article about twelve years ago that was about the production of the first movie from its conception back in ninety six when Constantine Film got the rights all the way up to the release, and he
tried to cover each era of the production. And I had even helped him uncover a few bits and peace that I remembered and uncovered it and sent it to him, so I'm actually credited in the article. So I immediately reached out to him and said, listen, your article is
already a good baseline. Would you want to write this with me and focus on George And he immediately was like yes, So that's what we did, and then you know, we eventually brought one other people to help us, including Tom Robinault, who was the cinematographer and he was amazing. So there's a lot of names attached to it, and it's really kind of a who's who of the Resident Evil fan community with some of the big platforms. We have Andy Cox from Biohazard to Classified it was over
in the UK. We have JJ Truelock of Residents of Evil and his team helped out. Some of them were doing second unit for us, some of them were working within trying to get us in connection with people. Joel Welsh, who is a member of the community, did a lot of additional research and he was I'm rarely responsible for getting us in touch with Kenny Chee while the writer
of Resident Evil Won. So it was really neat to work with all these people that I've seen their work before, I've watched them on YouTube, and then now we were all working together to try and bring this story to life.
It's fascinating because this documentary shows me a world I've never seen before, you know, and I feel that all good documentaries do that. No of the Resident Evil game sounds like you are a huge fan and all these people that you've talked to, big fans and creators and played a part in it, I had no idea. So to be able to pull back that curtain is really commendable and to take me into that world and show me why are so many people into this and how has it affected them.
That was one of the goals, was to establish the importance of not only who George Romiro is, but also the video game and why the video game is so important and how it was and then ultimately why the movie would have been so important. With both of them combined together, and then obviously the fallout and how it
slots into George's legacy. It's very much fifty fifty. It's half about george legacy and half about Resident Evil, the games, the commercial, the movie, so that it's a balancing act to kind of give the best of both worlds and also explain it in a way that if you don't know anything about either or just one or the other, that you can not get lost with the story that we're telling.
Well, it sounds like so much of the making of this was about connections and who can get you a fu and just getting those little pieces and putting them all together. I mean, did you make a master list of here's all the people you want to talk to at the beginning or did it just kind of grow organically a little bit of both.
I think we ended up with something like fifty different people that we wanted to interview, and unfortunately a majority
either didn't respond, they declined, or they were unavailable. And unfortunately, once you start production on something like this and encur debt, you are either going to just live with that debt and not make it, or you're going to ultimately finish something and deliver it, So we felt very proud of what we were able to do, even lacking particular involvement from certain people, and it was unfortunate, but it happens.
But we still feel that there's an amazing cast of personalities that are able to tell their pieces and connect the dots and fill in some blanks and finally show this story and some of the revelations that come out of it.
When did you start to really work on this? What was the timeline for this?
Twenty nineteen is when I got the idea to do it, and that's when I contacted Robbie McGregor, and it was bybu worary of twenty twenty that we decided, like, yeah, this it's going to be a bigger story than what we thought. The pandemic hit, so we were trying to get into the George A. Rameiro Archives in Pittsburgh to actually read all the screenplays, and we didn't get to
do that for like eighteen months. So we spent eighteen months just continually doing more research, finding old articles that have kind of been lost or just not really heavily discussed. And then the fall of twenty twenty is when I connected with Sues Romero, George's widow, asked for blessings because I didn't want to do this project without her understanding my intent, the kind of story we want to tell, to let her know that we are admirers of George
Ramiro's work, and then it just kind of progressed. There was some false starts because it was rough trying to get some financing, because documentaries can be hard to finance, especially working on trying to acquire licenses. We got a license in early twenty twenty two from Capcom, and then again there was more just trying to find financing. We did announce it near the end of summer twenty twenty two,
which actually allowed us. It finally brought a lot of like traction to us, where finally we had a sales agent who was linking us up with some people that could get us money. And then by the beginning of twenty twenty three we started filming. And then it took about eight months to get everything filmed, because you know, you might film a bunch of stuff and then had to wait two months for an interview, and then you'd film a bunch of stuff and go. We had everything
locked together. Then my daughter was born, and then the cinematographer's son was born, so we had some downtime there, and then we finally delivered the cut, the lawyers got involved, we kind of had to go do some reshooting, and then we finally got everything legally cleared in April of last year, and then they started their process of working on getting it ready for release, and it ended up being this month few days ago that we finally released it.
There were many times where we thought it was never going to get finished. It was very challenging, and you know, it was very demanding, very much a struggle. So the fact that we were able to complete it, put it together and actually enticed someone to buy it and get it out there for everyone, it was like, Wow, we are very proud of ourselves for what we managed to accomplish.
Because doing something of this scale, trying to deal with the complexities of George Ramiro's legacy and dealing with a six billion dollar corporation in Japan who owns the rights to the video games, plus we're dealing with different people's ips to try and tell Georgie's story. It was very challenging.
So a lot of people have actually said that they're really amazed at how much the documentary talks about, because it's a much bigger story than just George wrote a script and then he didn't make the movie.
How many folks did you end up talking to for this? There are fourteen in the documentary.
And we filmed twenty two. So there's some stuff that's on the cutting room floor. So after we put everything together and then we had to cut it within a certain timeslot, we had to keep it under a certain run time, certain things were left on the cutting room floor to try and focus it a little bit more.
And I know you talked about just how you have been involved in this world of both Romeiro and Resident Evil for so long, But were there any things that surprised you while you're going through this and learning more about the project.
I think one of the biggest surprises was just being able to read through Georgia's scripts and seeing the small little things that have changed, and then finding out that there was concept art done, and getting to see the concept art, and then finally getting to read the Alan McElroy drafts, which was one of those mythical things that not too many people knew about or even knew the contents of McRoy was the writer before George Romero, so being able to kind of start connecting the dots and
how everything was sort of put together, that was the biggest surprises.
Now.
I know obviously with documentaries the editing is so crucial to bring this all together to really craft the story. Can you tell me a little bit about the editing process, and also did you run it past like friends or did you have like a test audience that you would send different cuts to.
We ran a lot of it through the producers, and all the editing was done by Tom Robineal and then I kind of supervised it to make sure like my vision was there, but we would sit there for hours getting everything cut together. We did show it to a few friends, and then we did have a private test audience that sort of went through when we see people's reactions and then some people crying at the end of it, that it was like, Okay, I think we're onto something here.
But a few of George's friends actually got to see it as it was being put together, and they were complimenting the visions, saying like, we understand what you're trying to do.
What's in store for the documentary? Now are you going to take to conventions because I imagine that that's where George's people are. That's something that the distributor will have to decide on. The next step is trying to get all the special features done up or the.
Physical release later this year, and then we'll see where the future holds for it.
So are you going to then move on to George Romero's the stand?
I don't necessarily have any plans to do more Lost Media projects. I'm actually currently attached to do the adaptation of Fate the Unholy Trinity, which is a horror video game, and I have another documentary in the work that is an announced yet and we're kind of keeping it under wraps, so that one we're hoping to actually film later in the year.
Well it's great, So first movie, and you actually still want to do a second movie?
Yes, I am committed. They do say that filmmakers are not right in the head because it is a torturous process, but then at the you're done, you want to do another. So how about you?
Where can people keep up with you and your work online?
I am on Facebook, Easy to find me, It's my real name, Brandon Salisbury, and I'm also on Twitter. It's at mister midnight al m R M I D and I T E and then O W L so mister midnight.
L Brandon, thank you so much for your time. This is great talking with you today. It was great talking to you too.
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