Greg Nicotero is easily one of the hardest working people in the horror industry today. On top of wearing multiple hats on The Walking Dead TV series, the work of Greg Nicotero and KNB EFX is regularly seen in feature films and TV series each year and one of their latest projects is the From Dusk Till Dawn TV series.
This week’s episode gives us our first really good look at the vampires and I thought it would be a great chance to catch up with Greg Nicotero to hear what he had to say about re-visiting this world nearly twenty years after the release of the original From Dusk Till Dawn.
“This was the first time that we’ve ever gone back. We did the original ‘Dust Till Dawn’ in ‘95. Nineteen years later, having the chance to go back and revisit the creature work that we did was really amazing.
In the original movie, Robert had begun to lay the groundwork for the Aztec/Mayan undercurrent, but he wanted the opportunity to layer that in a little more. It’s really exciting to take material like that and climb into the depths of it and fine tune the makeup effects.”
Since the world of makeup effects have evolved so much over the past decade, especially on TV thanks in part to The Walking Dead, I was asked about how his work on the popular zombie show helped on From Dusk Till Dawn:
“The Walking Dead was a fantastic proving ground for me, because, generally speaking, KNB had done mostly movies. In features, you have two to six months to build creatures, but in TV, it’s completely different. On The Walking Dead, I get an advance look at the scripts and stories because of my role and I can craft the makeup effects early on. If I hadn’t done that, From Dusk Till Dawn would have been a much more challenging project. Robert [Rodriguez] was very specific in looking for a snake-motif, which he introduced with Salma [Hayek] in the first movie.
It was a situation where we did some concept art and immediately did test makeup. Being a fan of the genre, I want to put things on the screen and on TV that people haven’t seen before. I wanted to put stuff on that I hadn’t seen before, so that’s where we first started. It worked out great.”
Greg Nicotero has done a fantastic job as a director in the recent seasons of The Walking Dead and he revealed that he did have a hand in the filming of From Dusk Till Dawn’s seventh episode:
“I directed a lot of the gags in Episode 7. Robert offered that episode to me to direct, but the schedule didn’t work out, so I said I’d shoot second unit on it and I ended up shooting for three days. Robert shot a lot of the things with DJ [Cotrona] and the hero makeups, and I shot a lot of the gags. He told me to just have fun and shoot a bunch of cool stuff, so I did get a chance to direct and I had a great time.”
For those of you who have been looking to see a great showcase of Greg Nicotero and KNB’s work on From Dusk Till Dawn, tune in to the El Rey Network tomorrow at 9pm PT/ET. To give you a taste of what's to come, here's a new look at Eiza González as Santánico Pandemonium:
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