An on-set interview with The Crazies director
ShockTillYouDrop.com: What parts of the original film did you feel needed to be changed or modernized?
Breck Eisner: Obviously, any time you do a remake or a re-imagining, which this is definitely more of a re-imagining than a remake, you want to have target aspects of the movie that they didn’t have access to when they first made it. My kind of theory on remaking movies, or re-imagining movies, is there should be something that they weren’t able to do the first time around that you can do differently so that it’s not just redoing Psycho or redoing a perfect film. It’s redoing something that had limitations originally. And so, one of the big limitations for Romero was obviously budget and I think he had 200 grand or 275 grand to make the entire movie. You can see that we’re obviously spending more money than that. It’s not a big budget movie, but we have better assets so that we can represent the government as the scale of the force that it needs to be in a movie like this in a way that is oppressive and realistic for us.
Shock: Romero played the narrative from both points of view of the outbreak that happens in this small town. There’s the small band of people on the run, then you’ve got the military. But I understand the latter is portrayed differently here.
Eisner: Yeah, there’s no military point of view on this at all. In the original script by [Scott] Kosar, it was actually mostly military and it was more of an action movie. When I came on the movie my first thought was I wanted to get rid of the point of view of the military ’cause any time you go into the point of military, it goes away from horror and it goes to action and Bourne Identity kind of tension and not horror tension. So, to me it was much more interesting being in the point of view of our townsfolk and with the suppressive, nameless, faceless force, i.e. the military, in biocontainment suits wandering around and being the force that’s putting them through the terror. That as well as the other infected crazies that are roaming the town.
Shock: Are you carrying over similar themes?
Eisner: There’s a bunch of commentary that we’re hoping to make. For me there’s this sense of Ogden Marsh, which is where our heroes live, as this idyllic place, but we’re not painting it in a perfect landscape. The idea is that the characters are natural and real, but underneath there are these kind of competing agendas and these human qualities that don’t…a lot of times in small towns people say, “Oh, it’s perfect. Its small town America, everything’s ideal and it’s the ’50s and everything back then was so easy.” But that’s not the reality and that’s not the reality of a small town and that’s certainly not the reality that you can paint any kind of complex portrait of a persona. So the idea for me was of this disease, when you get infected it unlocks kind of these deep, latent qualities in people and it brings them to the forefront and you get rid of the control of that. There’s a character, for example, of these hunters who we meet. Our heroes end up following the plot point. But those hunters will come back in the movie in a way that they are now affected by the infection and it doesn’t change them completely, it’s clearly not a zombie movie. It doesn’t turn them into people with all single agendas, “Brains, brains,” or whatever the agenda a zombie happens to be in – whatever movie that you maintain your identity to a degree, or your drive, or your persona. It just becomes extremely heightened and extremely focused to a point of almost absurdity. And that was the idea I was playing with and we’ve been playing with in terms of what the effects of the infection are.
Shock: That’s the virus, but how about the social commentary?
Eisner: In terms of social commentary, it’s certainly social commentary. This project definitely began under the regime of George Bush and, definitely, there is a social commentary to the feeling of the use of military, and the use of the military as a machine, and how the machine operates and the ends justifying the means of the military, and the idea â we’re very careful to play in this â the idea of the military as a machine versus the individuals in the military themselves. I think there’s a clean delineation between the soldier who’s ordered to do something and the mechanism of the military used to accomplish an ends. And definitely that concept is a strong message of the movie. It’s one of the reasons I really didn’t want to go to the government’s point of view. I didn’t want to see these people debate what they should do. I didn’t want to see their rationale one way or the other way. I want to see the effects of their decisions on the lives of this small town.
Shock: What makes this still resonate today? The ideas and narrative tricks between the time the first Crazies was made to now have been cannibalized for countless films. How are making it fresh?
Eisner: It’s a theme that’s tread on over and over again. That’s the reality and when horror’s its best it’s when dealing with reality. Your latent fears that are brought to the surface and things that you believe could happen – and that play into those fears. And so I think these are themes that are played over and over again. I think in terms of Romero and in terms of what themes we’re playing with, his original themes and how we’re changing them, one of the things I’m hoping to do is dive into those exact themes, update Romero in a post-Vietnam world, a recent post-Vietnam world in the original, and the idea of a country at war, and a country at not the most stable times, not the most economically viable times. I think we’re, as a country, in those periods right now. I mean, we’re obviously fighting two wars. The economy is crap right now and the populace feels this kind of general terror of, “Where are we going? Where is the country headed? And, what are we doing about it? What aren’t they doing about it?” So I think those themes are â the time we live in is kind of similar to when Romero was making the original. So it, it felt like it was the right time to make this movie for that reason.
Shock: There were not too many physical changes to those infected in the original. What are we going to see here?
Eisner: There’s a whole process we’ve gone through. There’s five stages of the Crazies. The first is before anything happens, the fifth is when you’re dead. The second stage is a performance-based craziness which is somebody you know acting differently, but not looking any differently at all. And then the next two stages are three and four – various levels of physical differences that happened. We did a lot of R&D with Rob Hall from Almost Human who did a lot of different tests and re-tests. The challenge for us was making them look interesting, making them look iconic, but not look like zombies, and not look so far over the top that you don’t believe that there could be a sickness that made this happen. And obviously I wanted to go far enough that there is an iconic quality to it and there’s something specific to look at. You’ll see when at the very latest stages of the disease, it’s pretty pronounced. We used a lot of references like Ebola, we used tetanus, we used a little bit of rabies, but not so much. There’s a couple other disease references. What was that disease called? Stevens-Johnson syndrome, we used a couple different references of diseases. We just went through these really horrific books of diseases and started pulling from the best. Then we [would accelerate it]. If we use Stevens-Johnson syndrome and we accelerate the period, instead of weeks it happened in over 12 hours. Rabies, it’s very rare now to find even images of humans that are infected by it, but there are a few where you can see that it tightens up all the musculature of the human. We’ve done stuff for the neck for that. So there definitely are different stages for each character. But by the end of the movie it’s quite pronounced.
Shock: Why does this take place in Iowa as opposed to, say, a big city?
Eisner: One of the concepts for me that I loved was the idea of nowhere to hide, yet you’re miles of open space. In terms of the look of the movie, I was looking first at Winnipeg and Kansas, but I wanted this idea that our heroes are not trapped in small boxes or small rooms, but they’re trapped in open spaces that go on for miles, and miles, and miles, and miles. But the fact is, it’s all just wheat or corn fields. There’s literally nowhere to hide even though you have 30 mile visibility all the way around, so you’re stuck walking down these roads completely vulnerable.
Shock: Can you tell us about the level of violence in this movie? Is it more suggested and introspective or is it just in your face, balls-out horror movie?
Eisner: It’s definitely not an in your face, balls-out horror movie, it’s not that. I mean, it’s horrific and it’s certainly graphic but to me I wanted a real quality to it. The people should feel real and the movie should feel real and when there’s death it’s real, we’re not shying away from that. We’re not shying away from blood when blood is appropriate. We’re not shying away from blood hits where there’s an entry wound or an exit wound, and we’re certainly not shying away from blood. It’s not a blood bath by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s visceral and it should be visceral and it should be horrific in that quality of it
Shock: R-rated?
Eisner: Yeah, oh yeah.
Shock: Some of the shocking elements from the original didn’t stem from the violence, but from what the characters – who were infected – did to each other. Did you have to kick that element up a bit for a modern audience?
Eisner: To me the way that I wanted to ratchet it up was to know the characters who are being horrible to other characters. What I love about John Carpenter’s
Shock: What’s been the most difficult for you shooting wise? Has it been the closer knit, “crazy” attack stuff? Or, has it been the wide scale military choreography that you have to pull together for these big scenes?
Eisner: I’ll let you know after today. [laughs] Today is our biggest military…we’ve had one fairly big military scene, but nothing like today. To me, I mean, the most difficult thing of the shoot is how ambitious we’re trying to be, how much we’re trying to get. There’s a lot of moving pieces, there’s a lot of scope to the movie that we want to get and we don’t have a lot of time to do it and we don’t have a lot of money to do it. So, schedule has been the most challenging whether it’s a small, intimate fight in a room which we’ve had, or the big set piece of a truck stop where we spent a week. Or, you know, at the car wash where we had a big set piece. I mean, they’re all challenging in their own ways, but most of it comes down to schedule, how much work we have to do and how little time.
Shock: Are there any cameos featuring the cast of the original?
Eisner: Lynn Lowry. Yeah, we’re shooting Lynn on Wednesday I think of next week. So she’s playing a little role which’ll be fun. That’s the only cameo.
Shock: You’ve mentioned the machinery of the military. How do you shut a town down in this technological world? Were you able to find any real world examples of how a military was able to attempt or establish a quarantine like the one in your film?
Eisner: Sure, some of it we’ve gone with what’s real and some of it we’ve made up on our own in order to make the story work. We met with the CDC, talked with the CDC about how they would do a containment like this if this happened. What diseases could cause this and what sort of accelerated diseases could be believable that could cause this? There are none exactly. And then we talked to military. The tenting that you’ll see out there is actually…we didn’t have money for a lot of that set, so we went around to the fire departments and asked if they could donate some. In all of the tents there are these crazy like, interlocking bio-containment tents that belong to like the Perry Fire Department which has a drill set up and is letting us use it. But a lot of it was based on what would really happen, what technology and pieces of equipment we would use. And then a lot of it was just made up. I mean, it’s a hard thing probably to contain a town in this day and age with all the communication. There’s a lot of jamming that would have to go on and a lot of containment. But, the stakes are pretty high in the movie and that’s what we’re playing with.
Source: Ryan Rotten, Managing Editor
