Cinematographer Larkin Seiple Was Ready For A Break — Then ‘Weapons' Came Along

Forbes

5 days ago

***WARNING! The following contains major spoilers for the film!***
Cinematographer Larkin Seiple had just finished shooting Wolfs for director Jon Watts, and was fully prepared to take a hiatus from the hustle and bustle of Hollywood.
Before taking that R&R, however, he received the script for one of the hottest titles making its way around town: Weapons.
The sophomore horror effort from writer-director Zach Cregger (Barbarian) sparked a heated bidding war among the major studios, ultimately landing an eight-figure sum at Warner Bros.' New Line Cinema under the auspices of Vertigo Entertainment and BoulderLight Pictures (the latter currently enjoys a first-look deal with New Line).
Saying yes to Zach Cregger's Weapons
"I was going to take a break from making movies, but I'd heard about Weapons because it was in the trades and was like, 'I'll take a crack at it,'' Larkin remembers over a Zoom call. 'It's a two-hour movie, and I think I probably read it in 80 minutes. I was just transfixed, hypnotized by it. I met Zach for coffee the very next day and we got along great. We saw the movie the same way."
Cregger (a founding member of the Whitest Kids U' Know comedy group) offered him the director of photography job on the spot. 'I was kind of shook because I was going to have to move across the country and leave my family for five months,' notes Seiple. "It was a very trippy experience, but I was like, 'I don't think I'm going to be able to shoot something like this ever again.' So I just went with it and said yes.'
There was, perhaps, no better choice for the project than Seiple, who served as cinematographer on Everything Everywhere All at Once. Similar to the Daniels' Oscar-winning multiverse saga, Weapons 'was very complicated to make.'
What is Weapons about?
More ambitious, yet just as mysteriously titled as Barbarian, Weapons takes the form of a contemporary 'Pied Piper' story, in which 17 children from the same class suddenly leave their homes in the middle of the night and never come back. By the time morning arrives in the sleepy hamlet of Maybrook, Pennsylvania only one student, Alexy Lilly (Cary Christopher) remains.
The inexplicable mystery launches a multi-perspective narrative centered around the kids' ostracized schoolteacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), grieving father Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), school principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong), local police officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), heroin addict James (Austin Abrams), and more.
'There's definitely a malicious nature to it,' Seiple says. 'There's a knowingness that floats with the camera and tells the audience that something is [amiss].'
As Cregger revealed to Entertainment Weekly this past spring, the overlapping yarns were inspired by Paul Thomas Anderson's 3-hour cinematic tapestry, Magnolia (1999). 'We watched the opening to talk about the energy of it,' the cinematographer confirms. 'It was never directly to lift a specific shot, as much as it was about how he wanted it to feel breakneck with all this information you are seeing. He wanted it to be playful."
Seiple wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment, adding: 'There's so much information that is explained or expressed or seen. I naturally started connecting with, 'How can we simplify these things and make these seem kinetic?''
While Weapons does not contain a downpour of amphibians in the third act, the movie's denouement is no less wildly insane as Magnolia's, effectively cementing Cregger as the audacious new face of horror in the vein of Stephen King (and indeed, his second feature contains notes of IT and Needful Things).
Shooting the best horror movie of 2025
"Overall, we really just went from our gut, which is my preferred way of doing it,' admits Seiple. 'The longer I've shot, the less I like to be referential, because I think you're not going to find anything new by doing that … All you can hope for is getting a script that's so compelling, you naturally start to visualize it. It's the movies where the script isn't good and you start having to add visuals to make it better. We were really just getting out of the way and letting the story do its thing.'
For about a month or two before principal photography kicked off in Atlanta, Seiple and Cregger began to shot-list the movie via Zoom. 'There's no storyboarding at that point, because it's all conceptual,' explains the former. 'You're just talking about the rhythm. I would pitch an idea, he would love it, and then he would top it. That's the best part about Zach. He's really collaborative, but can also take anything you give him and will find a way to make it better or more interesting."
Because they'd be shooting most of the film's nonlinear structure out of sequence, the crew needed to visit every Atlanta-based location and decide on specific frames ahead of time. 'We did a very long and arduous process of photo-boarding the entire film … because we knew we didn't have time to figure it out on the day,' Seiple adds. 'There was no, 'Let's go and see what happens.' It's like, 'No, we need to know exactly' … When you have to relight, rethink, and re-block six to eight times in the 10 to 12 hours you have, it gets a little zany. So we had to go in being bulletproof."
The overall challenge was compounded by the fact that underage actors can only work so long on a film set, meaning the introductory sequence of the kids running out their homes (a core tenet of the film and its marketing campaign) became a taxing endeavour. After shooting for 12 hours straight during daylight hours, Seiple and Cregger would take a crew of around 10 people to get the necessary nighttime shots of the children before the youngsters were required by law to stop working at 12:30 in the morning.
'We did that for four or five days, and it kind of burned us out,' shares the director of photography. 'It's the middle of summer and 95 [degrees with] full humidity in Atlanta. It gets dark at nine and you're working until midnight, maybe 12:30. You're desperately trying to get four, maybe five sequences shot before you have to call it.'
From a certain point-of-view
Thanks to the numerous points-of-views, the visual language of Weapons 'shifts and changes,' with each character getting their own special treatment. 'To me, the camera language is trying to elevate emotion in the scene,' Seiple says. 'There was always the conversation of, 'How do we make this scene feel what the character's feeling?''
Justine, for instance, always feels like she's being stalked because the community suspects her of abducting the children, though they have no concrete proof. 'The camera is constantly moving around her, looking around her," reveals the cinematographer. 'She isn't as centered as often."
As a result, 'you're kind of paranoid with her."
Meanwhile, Archer Graff is 'kind of like a heat seeking missile' due to his life-consuming obsession to find out what happened to his son, Matthew (Luke Speakman).
'We were a lot more dead on him,' notes Seiple.
Officer Morgan, on the other hand, 'is someone who's trying so hard and just makes the worst mistakes' by violating his sobriety, committing adultery, and assaulting an individual in custody. 'A lot of it was cutting off Alden, or trying to make him feel a little bit more awkward or sad,' Seiple says. 'His character is someone who is down on their luck and makes it worse [for themselves]. It was about a lot more profile shots. He's not the hero, you're seeing him from other people's vantages. It's not a visual theme we wanted people to pick up on. It was just something you talk about and hopefully, it makes its way in there. We never necessarily forced scenes to do it, but his chapter was really just bearing witness to his terrible decisions."
Lastly, there's James, whose scenes are "more frenetic, because he's someone that's kind of spiraling and going into a frenzy," Seiple continues. 'We wanted the camera to feel more playful and spastic, if you will. We changed lenses for Austin's chapter because his felt so different from everyone else's. He's an outsider from the chaos that's happened. And so, we wanted it to feel slightly ajar, more open if that makes sense. We went spherical for that while the rest of the movie is anamorphic.'
Witchy woman
The true nature of the story is eventually revealed in the chapter focusing on Principal Marcus Miller, who finds himself the unwitting weapon of Alex's spell-casting Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), forced to murder his own husband, Terry (Clayton Farris).
'Originally, Marcus was supposed to strangle his husband to death. We were just playing around and I was like, 'What if he just smashes him with his head?'' Seiple recalls. 'We talked about changing it and at one point, it was a oner where you just see him smash it all the way in — more to create a real sense of terror and understand that that Marcus is a monster. Less to be gory and more to be like, 'Oh, these things do the most blunt version of whatever their mission is. They're not thinking about what they're doing.' And [for] that, our special effects makeup team, brought in three different molds of Terry's head. So we would shoot and swap it out; and our operator would whip pan back and forth. It was a long day in that house.'
Marcus then goes after Justine, relentlessly chasing her around a gas station convenience store in a sequence that required Seiple to call on the talents of Los Angeles-based camera operator, Conner O'Brien, who pulled it off through 'a combination of roller skates, Segway, and dolly," explains the DP. 'It was a challenging sequence, but it was pretty fun. Also, everyone was hiding in the aisles, just out of frame, which reminded me of an indie film where everyone is just making it work.'
In the final chapter focused on Alex, we learn that the children were magically summoned by Gladys, a decrepit witch desperately trying to stave off death by feeding off the life forces of other people. Seiple credits much of the sinister aura that emanates from the Lilly home to production designer Thomas Hammock.
'We were quickly able to mold it in a house that could start out as warm and loving — and then fall apart. What goes from a warm afternoon starts to feel tobacco-stained and sickly,' says the cinematographer. 'It was really fun to design, because we were able to slowly build up the softness or darkness around the set. Then we were also able to rip the paper off the wall and bring in sunlight. It's really Tom's thing. My job was to find with Zach the angles that made you feel nervous.'
And finally, we come to the grand finale, when Alex triumphantly turns Glady's own magic against her by sicking his catatonic classmates to hunt the wicked sorceress down and literally tear her limb from limb.
The hilariously surreal visual of 17 children stampeding through suburbia like a pack of angry elephants required some clever cinematic trickery.
'We found stunt people that were roughly the size of the kids. So they would run through, breaking and smashing,' Seiple shares. 'Then we would do another path where we cleaned up all the glass and all the breakable stuff so the kids could run through safely. And using a repeatable camera head, we were able to blend them all in post to make it one shot. So what feels simple becomes very complicated, especially the last shot where we're chasing Gladys through the house; having to go through a screen door, a glass door, and then jump out a window. It was really tricky and narrow. On the first take, our boom operator, Marty — who actually plays the lawnmower man — caught his ankle real bad and fell out the window. It was kind of cumbersome. And also, because we were moving throughout the different spaces, we had signal issues. It got to a point where we had to let the operator, Connor, go and do it [by himself]."
Zach Cregger, a natural born filmmaker
With the film opening to an impressive debut of $70 million at the global box, it seems Cregger has another horror hit on his hands, which bodes extremely very well for his Resident Evil adaptation and a potential Weapons sequel.
'Zach is a natural born director,' Seiple concludes. 'He's just alive and because of that, everyone else gets more excited to work and you end up working harder. I guess the best way to put it, is he's someone that needs to make movies — and you can feel that.'
Rocking a near-perfect score of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, Weapons is now playing in theaters everywhere. Click here for tickets!