Published: July 05, 2015| 03:30 PM

George A. Romero gained immediate fame from his first feature-length film, the 1968 zombie classic Night of the Living Dead. He came to Karlovy Vary, though, to present other films: his chilling metaphor for American society, The Crazies, and above all the famous adaptation of Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann from the 1950s.

“I first saw the film a year or so after it came out, when I was around twelve. I was taken by its beauty and fanciful elements. Back then, when you wanted to screen a film at home, you had to borrow a 16mm copy. In New York, this one was always available. But then a kid from Brooklyn suddenly showed up, and when he had the movie, I couldn’t get it, and vice versa. That kid was Martin Scorsese. He’s a big fan of Powell and Pressburger and gets most of the credit for the restoration of The Tales of Hoffmann. But I think there’s one aria missing from the current version, at least according to the old soundtrack, which I have,” Romero explained on Saturday at a Master Class, one of the traditional series of KVIFF Talks.

The American director also confided that thanks to The Tales of Hoffmann, he came to believe that he could make films himself. “If at that age I had seen something like Jurassic Park, with its flawless, expensive special effects, I might have given up. But here I could see that, even though they didn’t have a big budget, they still knew how to make interesting effects.”