Fear The Walking Dead's Greg Nicotero On The Differences Between The New Show and The Walking Dead

Tonight will see the premiere of Fear The Walking Dead, a companion series set in the world of [...]

Tonight will see the premiere of Fear The Walking Dead, a companion series set in the world of AMC's The Walking Dead and taking place in Los Angeles during the early days of the zombie outbreak.

While the showrunner is different and the location -- both in terms of story and production -- is different, some key players, including The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman and special effects guru/producer Greg Nicotero, have been carried over to provide continuity and consistency in the world of the shows.

Nicotero spoke with reporters, including ComicBook.com, during last month's Comic Con International: San Diego about the challenges and appeal of Fear The Walking Dead.

By the time The Walking Dead even launched, there had been a time lag and so the zombies you were working with had been decomposing from Day One. Now you're working with essentially just ambulatory dead bodies. How do you make that as visually interesting?

There are still opportunities, and you see it in the pilot where it's like, "I'd love to do something where there's an implement that's stabbed into somebody, that you can tell that in the middle of them being bitten or attacked that they were stabbed and then the person who stabbed them dies and leaves the knife." So you see that in Gloria, where in the first episode she has a knife embedded in her chest. It almost tells the story.

I think we did it really successfully in the first season of The Walking Dead, when Amy dies in Andrea's arms and resurrects, and there was something beautiful about her but there was the lifelessness in the eyes. So we kind of use that as our base for walkers. They're not even called walkers in the show, I forget what we call them..."infected."

Robert and I had a conversation about the word "zombie." He said, "that word doesn't exist in our universe. Those movies never were made, so that word doesn't exist and you'll never hear them called zombies." The challenge was just making sure that we have moments in the show where the walkers were not so much of a visual cue as much as a performance thing.

How involved are you with Fear The Walking Dead, since you still have to be on set in Georgia for The Walking Dead?

We shot the pilot in January when we were on hiatus, so that helped a lot because I was able to be involved with Dave [Erickson] and Robert [Kirkman] and Adam [Davidson], our director.

It was interesting because my nature as a makeup effects guy -- not as the producer or director but as the effects guy -- was that we did a lot of tests for the first girl, for Gloria, and I was just going a lot more extreme. Robert and Dave said, "No, look, man, this is a different facet of the world. This is a world where you're sitting in a room and somebody across the room could be infected. You can't make them look too dead because then people would be like 'That's not right.'" So we were constantly dialing back the makeup to just make them subtle enough.

So for the pilot, I was there...we actually reshot the last shot and amping up a few things at the end of the first episode because we still have a responsibility to our fans to give them some of that.

Sadly, I haven't been up in Vancouver. I sent some of my team that worked on The Walking Dead up to Vancouver so that there would be continuity amongst the two. The advantage is, we start shooting for Season Two in November, so I'll finish The Walking Dead, I'll be in a coma for a couple of days, then I'll go up there to Vancouver and really be in the trenches.

Are there technical challenges to keeping the look of the shows consistent in spite of different conditions, shooting in Vancouver versus Georgia?

Not really. The nice thing is, Maria Caso, who's our production designer on the pilot, is a really talented woman and the production design is very different. And again, we have Los Angeles as our backdrop. One of the great things about Los Angeles is that because it's such a melting pot to begin with, you really get an opportunity to exploit that and to really get a feeling for what society's like. When an earthquake happens, they tell you what you're supposed to do and you've got to have your earthquake kit ready, but when it happens...nothing's ready. And in the Northridge Earthquake, I went downstairs and flipped the lights on and all these things you're never supposed to do. I just did it, because you don't know in the middle of it.

That kind of attitude, I love the Hitchcock analogy that two characters sit at a table and there's a bomb underneath. They don't know that there's a bomb, but the audience does. That's what this whole show is about. This whole show is about the fact that the audience is watching and the audience knows more than the characters do.

It's so well-layered, and I couldn't be more excited about how different the shows are....It's so different, and it still has a little bit of the DNA, but it's just really exciting. Our characters, you know -- Rick Grimes is larger than life and they're all based on the comic books. The fact that Fear The Walking Dead could be anyone at this table...

You have an encyclopedic knowledge of horror films that has come in handy while working on The Walking Dead, but it seems like here you're going to be delving into 1940s and 1950s suspense films. Can you talk about that?

The movie that Adam and I talked about a lot when prepping was Phil Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The paranoia starts to build and these people are all of a sudden replaced...and even the camera angles change. The beginning is shot one way and then the angles start becoming a little more extreme and unsettling. We talked about that and I was like, man if we could make Fear The Walking Dead have the same feeling that Body Snatchers did, then we're golden.

So a little more '70s than '50s, but...!

And using the Internet as a tool, you know? There's a great moment even in the trailer where you see them watching news footage. For me I remember when there was the SARS outbreak, I was in Canada shooting and people had the masks on, or even the Ebola outbreak. It's forefront in the news for like a week and then all of a sudden Kim Kardashian does something and nobody cares about f--king Ebola anymore. You know, it's still there!

So imagine what would happen in Fear The Walking Dead; they see this person get shot on their iPad and then the next minute it's like, "Oh, guess what somebody else did?" And that goes away for a minute. But it's still happening. It's still actually churning underneath all of that.

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