The Walking Dead Interview: Gale Anne Hurd
The Hollywood Reporter was able to grab some details from Gale Anne Hurd, producer of The Walking Dead, Q&A at the NATPE confab about why The Walking Dead is able to be a success.
“Given the fears in the world today, a zombie apocalypse series was less scary than, say, the financial meltdown or a disease outbreak,” she half-joked to an audience of sci-fi fans and business execs in Miami on Tuesday. And zombies can be fun,” Hurd said.
She also gives us a minor bit of information on the zombies themselves “We even now have a zombie college which trains folks to walk the walk.” With how many undead are in many of the scenes of the show this was something they absolutely had to get down. Fortunately they also learned a few things to help with the show in preproduction: “We learned how bad zombie makeup looked in HD so we opted to shoot in super 16.” Imagine how horrible some of the zombies would have looked in HD? That’s something that will rarely be able to be pulled off properly.
“Also,” Hurd opined, “I think the idea of the undead exists across cultures and all these problems are on everyone’s minds. The show essentially examines how humans will survive such a disaster and what is the right thing for humans to do in such a situation.”
The best part though was talking about marketing and advertising in the show with it’s gratuitous use of violence and gore (for a TV series.) “AMC never gave us a note to tone anything down. An airline even approached us about product placement — but we just couldn’t make that work with our plot!”
