How Zach Cregger Turned a Personal Tragedy Into the Terrifying ‘Weapons'

Yahoo

2 days ago

Zach Cregger has a look of horror on his face. He has said something he should not have said.
When the writer-director first penned what would become Barbarian, his 2022 Airbnb-set horror movie that turned into a word-of-mouth phenomenon, he was coming off years of work as an actor for hire and a stay in 'director jail,' after making what he termed 'a complete and unmitigated failure.' (That would be the 2009 road-movie comedy Miss March.) 'I had nothing to lose, really,' Cregger says, over Zoom from an apartment in Prague. 'It was: 'I'm just gonna have fun.' That's it. Writing Barbarian, to me, it was [like] a kid coloring with crayons. And then Weapons… '
More from Rolling Stone
'Freakier Friday': Get in Loser, We're Going to the Lohanaissance
'Weapons' Takes Aim at Your Nervous System - and Fires
One of Most Disturbing NYC Thrillers of the 1980s Has Been AWOL - Until Now
He pauses. 'Weapons was like me vomiting.' Another pause. It's clear Cregger feels like he's just confessed to a venal sin. Dear god, why did he just tell a journalist this? Then the filmmaker behind one of the most anticipated releases of the summer smiles, and his eyes light up. 'And who doesn't want to get a babysitter and go to the movie theater and spend 120 bucks to watch someone vomit?'
Cregger is joking, at least about moviegoers rushing multiplexes to see someone metaphorically puke their guts out onscreen. But given the excitement the follow-up script to his sleeper hit generated when it was being shopped around, and the increasingly breathless anticipation around the movie's release on Aug. 8, the sketch-comedian turned filmmaker understands the stakes are higher now.
A multi-narrative story starring Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan, and Euphoria's Austin Abrams, Weapons begins with 17 children who wake in the middle of the night, run out of their houses, and mysteriously disappear without a trace. The story becomes increasingly unhinged as the locals try to figure out what happened. It's the sort of ambitious, go-for-broke genre film that suggests Cregger has officially earned the honor of being the Next Big Thing in horror.
The hype-generating new film came out of a serious low point in Cregger's life. 'I was working on postproduction on Barbarian when my best friend died very suddenly in a really awful accident,' he says. Cregger is referring to Trevor Moore. The two met at the School of Visual Arts in New York after Cregger had transferred there from Temple University, where he'd been studying film. A mutual friend introduced them, and Cregger and Moore would become co-founders of the sketch group The Whitest Kids U'Know. The troupe's TV show ran for five seasons on Fuse and IFC; Moore, a co-director on Miss March, 'was the engine of the show, and the group.'
In an effort to deal with his grief, Cregger begin 'a blitz of writing, over about two weeks or so… I just started, sentence one: 'This is a true story. Half of my hometown, all of these kids bailed.' You know, I'm writing this cold open, and I don't know where the kids went. I'm just like, 'OK, let's go. Let's see if I can solve this. What happened? Who were they? What was left behind? What does it feel like?''
What it felt like, he eventually realized, was channeling a palpable sense of loss that allowed him to process what he was going through in the most outrageous ways possible. But the moment Cregger says this, he once again stops himself. 'Look, like the rest of the world, I don't want to watch another horror movie about grief. That whole horror-as-a-metaphor-for-grief is so fucking played out. I shouldn't even be talking about this, but I can't help myself. I don't care if anybody gets any of that when they watch it. I want them to have fun. If the story rips, none of that matters.
'But I wanted to do something honest,' he continues, 'and I found that as I kept writing, and the more I identified with all of the people I was writing about, the more this became something like an honest diary of my inner shit. It's funny, I was talking to Ari Aster about this, and was like, 'I don't know about the personal stuff.' And he was like, 'The personal stuff is what makes this work. Don't be ashamed of it!' Hearing him say that… it's part of the DNA of Weapons. The town is dealing with a loss. And so was I. It was the biggest direct hit I'd ever taken.'
After Cregger had about 70 pages and had sketched out Weapons' main characters — the teacher who had all 17 of the missing kids in her class; her one student who didn't run away; a father searching for his M.I.A. son; a drug-addicted drifter who finds himself in the wrong place and the wrong time — he decamped to his manager's house, located deep in the woods on the East Coast. Cregger knew the ending, and he had diagrammed out various plot points in charts. Then, he said, it was time to figure how to tell the story he wanted to tell.
'There was still this urgency to it,' Cregger says, admitting that the need for an emotional purge took some of the pressure off of following up a hit. 'The only silver lining of this whole terrible year was that I was, once again, writing from a pure place. I was like, 'Right, so the best version of this movie is if I can do it in these chapters where I stay loyal to the forced perspective,' you know — to stay hyper-subjective.'
To do that, Cregger began to separate the narrative into chapters that filled in the blanks slowly, one character's P.O.V. at a time. (He credits Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 movie Magnolia as the role model for how he wanted Weapons to play.) And he began to shake the fear of making it personal. He mentions that he strongly identifies with Garner's character, the teacher whose classroom is the only connection among all of the missing kids, and is an alcoholic; Cregger himself has dealt with the disease and has 10 years of sobriety under his belt. He understands the anguish felt by Brolin's character, a father who's attempting to wrap his head around his child being there one moment and inexplicably gone the next.
And in writing the section told from the perspective of Alex, the one third-grader who doesn't go missing, Cregger says he tapped directly into his own past. 'That is straight-up, like — I lived that chapter as a kid,' he admits. 'Again, I don't know if people need to know this going in, but… it's very much what it's like to have a parent who's an addict, and the child has to become the caretaker as this sort of foreign thing comes in, and…' The look of horror is back. 'I'll leave it at that.'
'He and I talked about that, yeah,' Brolin says, speaking a few weeks later in a separate interview. 'We're both sober, he talked about his alcoholic dad, I talked about my alcoholic mom. He found those spots in me that inspired me to want to tell the story even more. That was one of the things that struck me about Zach: He was really open about everything right away. From the very first meeting we had, he was willing to really talk about a lot of stuff that's deep in the film.
'What got me before that, though, was just the script,' Brolin adds. 'Look, I didn't know who Zach was, or anything about the bidding war' — more on that in a second — 'or that he'd made this other movie that people loved. I hadn't seen Barbarian at that point. I didn't even know this guy existed. And then to get this script that was so well-designed, so intricately crafted, so beautifully and smartly put together, then have this super-emotional meeting with the guy who was going to make this… I remember seeing The Matrix the week it came out, walking out of the theater, shaking my head like, 'What the fuck?' — and then turning around a buying a ticket and going to see it again immediately. Those kinds of movies don't come around a lot. And I remember meeting him and thinking, 'If this works, this could be one of those movies.''
Much like Cregger did with the script for Barbarian, he started assembling each section in a way that played fast and loose with chronology. Without giving anything away plot-wise, let's just say that what starts out as an elliptical mystery gets extremely crazy by the end. Once Cregger finished his final draft, he was ready to shop the script — and that's when the real craziness began.
Word had begun to spread that the guy who'd made Barbarian had a new screenplay that was equally wild, and twice as ambitious. The buzz around it was becoming more and more intense. Several people made extravagant offers, sight unseen. Once potential buyers were finally able to read what Cregger had come up with, an old-fashioned Hollywood bidding war erupted. When he'd been shopping Barbarian, Cregger recalls, the film was roundly rejected by every studio he pitched. This time, he had producers fighting over the chance to be in the Zach Cregger business, to the tune of a $38 million price tag.
'After the dust settled… it was an incredibly difficult, stressful day, for a lot of reasons I don't want to talk about,' he says, referring to the 24-hour period between the Weapons script going out and a deal being struck. 'But it ultimately was a wonderful thing, and it took me a couple of days to kind of even realize that it was real. It was wonderful and overwhelming.' Asked about the rumors that Jordan Peele ended up firing his management when Universal failed to procure the script on behalf of his production company Monkeypaw, Cregger declines to comment: 'Yeah, it's not my story to tell.' (Peele's reps also declined to comment.)
And though Weapons' production wasn't without a few hiccups — he lost most of his original cast when the 2023 strike happened; he had to recast the young actor he'd hired to play the remaining student after the original kid experienced a huge growth spurt — Cregger feels like he's ended up with exactly the movie he wanted to make. Early screenings were so positive that Warner Bros. moved the film's release up by six months. The reason Cregger was Zooming from Prague is that he's busy prepping the next Resident Evil film there, with the idea of bringing the franchise back to its video-game roots. ('If I fired up my PS5 right now and showed you the hour count that I put on Resident Evil 4, it would be embarrassing,' he says.) And he's already got another script in the works, 'a big, crazy thing I'm going to do after this that's, I think, the most complex script I've ever written.'
'David Bowie has this quote — I'm going to butcher it,' Cregger says. 'But it's basically the idea that creatively, you should always be wading out into deeper and deeper and deeper waters, and you should never really know if you're going to be able to swim or not. I definitely did that on Weapons. I may be doing that with the new one. But my job is to be honest. And to just to keep swimming.' Cregger exhales, then grins. There's nothing but happiness in his expression now.
Best of Rolling Stone
The 50 Best 'Saturday Night Live' Characters of All Time
Denzel Washington's Movies Ranked, From Worst to Best
70 Greatest Comedies of the 21st Century
Solve the daily Crossword