In 2022, filmmaker Zach Cregger’s Barbarian left a big impression.
Audience, 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. (“Suffice it to say that anyone willing to go along for the perverse ride will be thoroughly satisfied,” readd The Hollywood Reporter’s 2022 review.)
Positive 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.
By the time Cregger was going out with his follow-up, Weapons, 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.
Prior to Barbarian, Cregger was best known for the popular sketch comedy group The Whitest Kids U’ 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’s most in-demand filmmakers.
Where did the idea for Weapons come from?
I 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’d they go? Nobody knows. Stephen King has that amazing metaphor where he’s like, “You need to be a paleontologist, and you’re unearthing the dinosaur one bone at a time, but you don’t know what the dinosaur is.” That’s a beautiful way to create for me. Remove result from the process and just be discovery.
Did you know writing it that you wanted it to be your follow-up to Barbarian?
I think pretty early on, I was like, this is cool and if I’m able to land the plane, this could be it. You can’t help it. You have that little demon on your shoulder being like, “This could be a movie!” You just have to let that be a good thing and also try and ignore it.
How did it ultimately end up at a studio?
Roy [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: “We’re going to give you this script at 8 a.m. on Monday.” We gave it to all the studios, and at 9:30, [Warners co-chief] Mike De Luca called me and was like, “I have to make this movie with you.” 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’t get me wrong, but the stress didn’t shed until a week later, and then I was like, “Wow, I’m going to make this movie. And I’ll have the resources to make the movie!”
How long did you have from it landing at Warners to beginning production?
That 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’m not unique in that way, but it was frustrating.
You’re 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’m 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.
How did you decide on the structure where you are working through the story in chapters from each character’s perspective?
One of my favorite books is A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It’s 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’s very disorienting intentionally. It’s very much like you kind of feel the movie abandoned you. You’re like, “Is it broken? What are we doing here?” I don’t 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.
[The following question contains spoilers for Weapons.]
You have talked in interview about this being a personal film and how your family’s history with alcoholism informed the story. How did that work its way into the story?
The final chapter of this movie with Alex and the parents, that’s autobiographical. I’m an alcoholic. I’m 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’t understand and don’t have the equipment to deal with. But I don’t care if any of this stuff comes through, the alcoholic metaphor is not important to me. I hope people have fun, honestly. It’s 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’ve failed as a filmmaker.
What do you make of the current moment in horror filmmaking?
It seems like horror is one of the few outlets for real creativity right now on a big scale. I can’t really think of another one. Without horror, you go to the theater and you get people in tights for $200 million and there’s not a lot of room for risk in those movies. And no shade, I’m all for entertainment, entertaining. But, it’s a shame that there’s not a lot of room for anything else. I love horror, my creative tuning fork resonates strong with horror, so I’m 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’s not a lot of movies for grown-ups anymore.
With 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.
That’s an original screenplay, by the way. It’s 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.
I guess we don’t have words in entertainment to describe an original idea that is still associated, if in name only, with IP.
I have Resident Evil, and then I have a sci-fi movie right after that that’s 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’s a totally original and it’s not a superhero movie. I wrote that before I wrote Barbarian. Then I have another one that I’m working on that feels like Night Crawler. But all of those are original. My agents don’t even send me scripts, because I’m not going to direct other scripts. I’m 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’t plan ahead. So, me talking about I want to do this movie and that movie and this movie — I sound like an idiot.
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