To follow up Weapons, his surprise critical and commercial success that won an Oscar for Amy Madigan, Zach Cregger went back to one of his favorite hobbies: zombie killing. Appearing at the “Directors on Directing” panel at San Diego’s Comic-Con International on Thursday, Cregger shared new details on his forthcoming Resident Evil movie, including why he decided to adapt a video game franchise with a long cinematic life. He also came loaded with footage, screening a jump-scare scene featuring reluctant hero (and Weapons victim) Austin Abrams, a crashed police car, and a reanimated corpse that just won’t stay dead, and also unleashing a new trailer.
Here are the highlights.
On why he wanted to do a Resident Evil movie
Zach Cregger: I really wanted to make this movie because I’ve been a Resident Evil fan for a really, really long time. I love Resident Evil 2, I’ve played the hell out of 4 many times, and I think 7 through 9 are absolutely fantastic. I still play them. So I went to Constantin Film, who had the rights, and I said, “Listen, I have an idea for Resident Evil — and bear in mind, I haven’t seen the movies. I still have yet to see a Resident Evil movie, if that’s OK. I’m only really concerned with the games.”
I told them, “Please don’t be upset with me, but what I see in the advertisements for the movies is not what I love about the games. What I love about the games is the survival-horror aspect—the slow, creeping dread. I like the idea of one person moving on their feet from point A to point B, having to enter a gauntlet and go deeper and deeper into hell. I like starting with a pistol and having to keep track of how many bullets you have — maybe you graduate to a shotgun, then a machine gun — and the world just seems hell-bent on destroying you. You feel like you don’t have enough resources to survive, but you’ve got to figure out how to make it through. It feels like there’s a movie there that I have yet to see, and I want it so bad. So please let me make it.” And they said yes.
What I didn’t do is take a story from the games and turn it into a movie, because I’m not going to do it better than the games do. I’m not going to tell Leon’s story better than the games tell Leon’s story. It would be a losing endeavor to redo something that was already done so excellently. For me, the way to pay a love letter to these games is to make a story that feels like the experience I get when I play them. That’s my mission statement. And I think we have the trailer — brand spanking new. No one has seen this yet, so let’s play it.
How the plot structure differs from his previous films
Cregger: In the trailer, you see he hits this woman, and that’s the first domino. My other movies are kind of narratively folded back on themselves — they have little gimmicks or tricks. I wanted to see if I could tell a straightforward story that was almost in real time. About five or six minutes in, he hits that woman with his car, and from there I wanted to see if I could just put my foot all the way down on the gas pedal and not let up until the end of the movie. That was the challenge — can I be completely unrelenting? You guys will tell me if that’s the case.
The most difficult scene to shoot
(aka the scene that almost killed Abrams)
Cregger: The most difficult scene for me was a sequence where Austin is walking down a street — it’s a little bit in the trailer — and he looks up. There are tall buildings on either side. He sees a zombie on top of a building. The zombie jumps at him, explodes on a bus stop, and dies. He’s like, “What was that about?” and keeps walking. Then he hears another one—there’s a bunch of zombies up there—and he starts running, and they’re looking at him. They all start jumping, and as he’s running, they’re detonating all around him. It’s this really long gauntlet of him leaping over cars and bodies exploding.
I didn’t want to do it with VFX. I’m not afraid to use them, but I wanted to do as many practical detonations as possible, because that was going to make it look tangible and real. So we had a set of cranes, and we strung up 150-pound human sacks loaded with liquid blood, dressed the street with snow, and got the timing right. All these things had to happen together. Austin had to run at a consistent speed, and we had a camera truck follow him really close — if he tripped, they would have run him over. We had to time the dropping of these bodies, which are six stories up, so that’s a long drop, and they’re 150 pounds, landing next to him and exploding. We had to make sure they didn’t coat the camera — which they did on many takes — or kill my star.
One of them dropped too soon, and it’s in the movie. It goes about an inch from his head. If he’d been an inch to the right, he definitely would have died. I think it paid off — it’s awesome. I’d do it 20 more times. We did end up supplementing some of the explosions with VFX, but doing it practically, getting the real physics, made it so much better. It was dangerous, it took days, and it took a ton of rehearsal and planning, but I think it paid off. I’m really proud.
Resident Evil is due in theaters on Sept. 18.
