Zack Snyder’s all for a good time with lots of zombies
Zack Snyder loves zombie movies.
As director, producer, cinematographer, co-screenwriter and ‘story by’ originator of the $90 million “Army of the Dead,” he’s made the epic zombie movie to end all zombie movies.
It lands on Netflix Friday following big-screen bookings in over 300 theaters.
“The fun of the zombie genre is that the audience is ahead of you,” Zack, 55, said in a Zoom interview last week with his producer and wife Deborah Snyder.
“Like, you could ask a lot of people, ‘How do you kill zombies?’ ‘Shoot ’em in the head.’ ‘What if you get bit by a zombie, do you become a zombie?’ ‘Absolutely.’
“People know. So that’s the fun of it. In a lot of ways it’s like making a Western or something like that. There are certain things and those are the rules you have to do.
“Then,” he said with a big smile, “you have to deconstruct and subvert expectations. Right when you think it’s one way, you’ve got to take them that way.
“That’s the challenge but fun.”
“And,” Deborah added, “we did come up with our own rules.”
A zombie army has occupied and destroyed Las Vegas but, now contained, is targeted for nuclear annihilation.
Before that happens a mercenary squad led by David Bautista (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) helicopters in to steal $200 million from a notoriously safe safe stored underneath a casino called Götterdämmerung.
They encounter Snyder’s panther-like elite class of zombies, walking dead creatures with, yes!, feelings and the ability to reproduce. They are led by a fierce — and fiercely scary — Queen.
“Athena (Preample), an amazing stunt woman, plays the Queen,” Zack said. “She was a gymnast and a cheerleader, the kind of cheerleaders that they throw up in the air — the acrobatic ones.
“Just an amazing athlete. She literally would jump off that tank on those high heels — an eight-foot drop! — and not bat an eye.
“I couldn’t even jump off it in my sneakers without hanging and dropping like I was gonna break my legs,” he said, practically rolling his eyes. “She was ‘Crack!’ and I was like, ‘Geez Louise that’s insane.’”
“By the way,” Deborah noted, “for the hordes of zombies we had Zombie School where the stunt team, who already knew how to move like a zombie, would teach 200 extras. They didn’t have the training that the stunt people did, so we had to train them how to move and act like a zombie.”
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3waHLeU
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