{"id":130063,"date":"2025-08-08T21:36:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T21:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/130063\/"},"modified":"2025-08-08T21:36:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T21:36:08","slug":"zach-cregger-breaks-down-movies-personal-final-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/130063\/","title":{"rendered":"Zach Cregger Breaks Down Movie’s Personal Final Act"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn 2022, filmmaker Zach Cregger<\/a>\u2019s Barbarian left a big impression.<\/p>\n

\n\tAudience, still just venturing back to the theaters following the pandemic, were rewarded with the kind of shocking, has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed moviegoing experience that Nicole Kidman monologues are made of. (\u201cSuffice it to say that anyone willing to go along for the perverse ride will be thoroughly satisfied,\u201d readd The Hollywood Reporter\u2019s 2022 review.) <\/p>\n

\n\tPositive word-of-mouth and strong theatrical staying power carried the movie to a $40 million domestic haul on a sub-$5 million budget, becoming one of the biggest success stories of the post-pandemic box office, the kind of runaway success story that quarterly earnings reports are made of.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy the time Cregger was going out with his follow-up, Weapons<\/a>, Hollywood was champing at the bit. The script, set in a small town where 17 kids from the same elementary school classroom mysteriously disappear from their homes in the middle of the night, set off a bidding war that New Line eventually won.<\/p>\n

\n\tPrior to Barbarian, Cregger was best known for the popular sketch comedy group The Whitest Kids U\u2019 Know and as a journeyman comedy actor with credits across network television series. With Weapons, which has earned rave reviews ahead of its Aug. 8 release, he solidifies his spot as one of Hollywood\u2019s most in-demand filmmakers.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhere did the idea for Weapons come from?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI was in post on Barbarian, and my best friend died in an accident that was really hard to understand. [Writing] was just like an emotional reaction to that. I was spared, because of my emotional pain, of writing from a place of ambition. I was writing from a place of catharsis. Writing where the process is the reward. Not to write a movie, not to write my next project, but to write because I needed to get this venom out. I started typing; I had no idea what the story was going to be. I literally went line by line. This is a true story. What is it? This teacher came to school and none of the kids were there. Okay, why? Yeah, they all ran away the night before. Okay, where\u2019d they go? Nobody knows. Stephen King has that amazing metaphor where he\u2019s like, \u201cYou need to be a paleontologist, and you\u2019re unearthing the dinosaur one bone at a time, but you don\u2019t know what the dinosaur is.\u201d That\u2019s a beautiful way to create for me. Remove result from the process and just be discovery.<\/p>\n

\n\tDid you know writing it that you wanted it to be your follow-up to Barbarian?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI think pretty early on, I was like, this is cool and if I\u2019m able to land the plane, this could be it. You can\u2019t help it. You have that little demon on your shoulder being like, \u201cThis could be a movie!\u201d You just have to let that be a good thing and also try and ignore it.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did it ultimately end up at a studio?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tRoy [Lee] and I hatched a plan where we would distribute it to all of the studios at the exact same time, through this program called Ember shot. It is a very secure software where you can only read [a screenplay] through the app. We told everybody: \u201cWe\u2019re going to give you this script at 8 a.m. on Monday.\u201d We gave it to all the studios, and at 9:30, [Warners co-chief] Mike De Luca called me and was like, \u201cI have to make this movie with you.\u201d It happened very fast, and by that afternoon, it was done. It was a half-a-day of craziness. It was exciting that day, don\u2019t get me wrong, but the stress didn\u2019t shed until a week later, and then I was like, \u201cWow, I\u2019m going to make this movie. And I\u2019ll have the resources to make the movie!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHow long did you have from it landing at Warners to beginning production?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tThat was two years, maybe. I cast it all up and then the strike happened, and then I ended up losing my entire cast because of scheduling issues. That was just a goddamn nightmare. On the other side of the strike, I had to recast the whole movie. If I had my druthers, this movie would have come out over a year ago, but we just had to keep waiting. Every movie is a roller coaster to commencement, I\u2019m not unique in that way, but it was frustrating.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou\u2019re looking for people that are excellent at what they do, but are able to kind of exist in the same tonal space. Everyone has to have a little bit of comedy chops, but be primarily a dramatic actor. Normally, I feel like you built from the top down. You get your star, and then you start building around the star. With this, l\u2019m making seven different movies, and everyone gets to be the star of their little movie, but still they all have to fit to get together.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did you decide on the structure where you are working through the story\u00a0 in chapters from each character\u2019s perspective?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tOne of my favorite books is A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It\u2019s a weird episodic thing that kind of jumps perspectives a lot. I was thinking what a fun way to orbit a central mystery, but tell it in this segmented way and let everyone kind of get closer and closer to solving it. In Barbarian, I jump perspectives, but it\u2019s very disorienting intentionally. It\u2019s very much like you kind of feel the movie abandoned you. You\u2019re like, \u201cIs it broken? What are we doing here?\u201d I don\u2019t know what it is about me, but I just like stories that are chopped. I wanted to make sure that every time we jumped perspective in this movie that we knew already who we were landing with, so it was never disorienting.<\/p>\n

\n\t[The following question contains spoilers for Weapons.]<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tYou have talked in interview about this being a personal film and how your family\u2019s history with alcoholism informed the story. How did that work its way into the story?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tThe final chapter of this movie with Alex and the parents, that\u2019s autobiographical. I\u2019m an alcoholic. I\u2019m sober 10 years; my father died of cirrhosis. Living in a house with an alcoholic parent, the inversion of the family dynamic that happens. The idea that this foreign entity comes into your home, and it changes your parent, and you have to deal with this new behavioral pattern that you don\u2019t understand and don\u2019t have the equipment to deal with. But I don\u2019t care if any of this stuff comes through, the alcoholic metaphor is not important to me. I hope people have fun, honestly. It\u2019s not really my business what people make of the movie. I have nothing to say about it, because the movies should speak for itself, and if I have to comment on what people should get from it, then I\u2019ve failed as a filmmaker.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat do you make of the current moment in horror filmmaking?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tIt seems like horror is one of the few outlets for real creativity right now on a big scale. I can\u2019t really think of another one. Without horror, you go to the theater and you get people in tights for $200 million and there\u2019s not a lot of room for risk in those movies. And no shade, I\u2019m all for entertainment, entertaining. But, it\u2019s a shame that there\u2019s not a lot of room for anything else. I love horror, my creative tuning fork resonates strong with horror, so I\u2019m lucky in that regard. I dearly wish that we could have cool, edgy weird comedies back in the movie theaters. Or dramatic fare for adults in the theater. I feel like there\u2019s not a lot of movies for grown-ups anymore.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith that in mind, how do you choose your projects? You have done two original films and are now in prep on a Resident Evil movie.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s an original screenplay, by the way. It\u2019s a weird story. I wrote it and I love the story. It has nothing to do with any of the other Resident Evil movies. If I do my job, it will feel fresh and edgy and weird.<\/p>\n

\n\tI guess we don\u2019t have words in entertainment to describe an original idea that is still associated, if in name only, with IP.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI have Resident Evil, and then I have a sci-fi movie right after that that\u2019s original. And then I have another finished script that I want to do after that. It actually takes place in the DC Universe, but it\u2019s a totally original and it\u2019s not a superhero movie. I wrote that before I wrote Barbarian. Then I have another one that I\u2019m working on that feels like Night Crawler. But all of those are original. My agents don\u2019t even send me scripts, because I\u2019m not going to direct other scripts. I\u2019m in a very fortunate position to be able to write a movie and have a good shot at getting a movie made why would I not do it if I like to write? The other thing is everything in this business changes on a dime. On the other side of Resident Evil, I may not be able to make anything. You just never know. You can\u2019t plan ahead. So, me talking about I want to do this movie and that movie and this movie \u2014 I sound like an idiot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2022, filmmaker Zach Cregger\u2019s Barbarian left a big impression. Audience, still just venturing back to the theaters…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":130064,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[171,67,132,68,9826,9827],"class_list":{"0":"post-130063","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-united-states","10":"tag-unitedstates","11":"tag-us","12":"tag-weapons","13":"tag-zach-cregger"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114995305765907556","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}