Magg ie The Walking Dad
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In Maggie, Schwarzenegger plays it straight as Wade, a tight- lipped farmer who’s forced to care for his zombie- infected daughter. “Arnold’s known for his action and initially you think this script wouldn’t fit him,” director Henry Hobson tells Red Alert, “but there’s a side of Arnold here that I don’t think has ever been seen before. He came to meetings with a really strong sense of character and what he wanted to do and it blew me away. There are no catchphrases, it’s purely about him being a father,” he adds. “It’s a very different performance for him.”
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running out. You can tell that something has happened that’s had a knock- on effect. There’s a depression and decline in the world and by shooting it in a way that highlights the beauty despite all the death, I think, makes it more tragic,” he adds. “The film captures a really interesting cinematic landscape that’s very different. That was the intention.” Abigail Breslin plays Maggie, the titular teen on the turn. Having fallen victim to the virus, she’s rescued by dad and returned home to wait out her deadly transformation. “Maggie is a story about a girl whose incurable disease manifests itself in this deathly way,” says Hobson. “Wade’s on a journey to find his daughter and bring her home but he hasn’t thought about what that means for everybody else in the town. There was this naturalistic energy to what Abigail was able to bring to
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sci- fact! the screen. There’s a great moment where she mocks Arnold’s accent. She saw that relationship building and gave it more humanity.” “You only very briefly glimpse the wider world and then you’re immediately taken to the smallest possible environment, which is an isolated rural area,” says Hobson of Arnie, Abigail and the dying world. “Unlike other zombie projects, intimacy is something that perhaps hasn’t been played on because people are still in awe of either the look or speed of the zombies, or the gore and violence,” he says. “The zombie genre has the opportunity to do very personal stories and I wanted to make sure this world felt intimate and personal.”
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The zombie genre has been many places in recent years and with Maggie, Hobson hopes to take it to new and thoughtful levels. “It’s a powerful story and I wanted to give it that extra depth,” says Hobson. “The way I looked at it was through a cinematic lens that shows the tearfulness of the emotional drama. Being able to take the well- trodden path of zombie movies and do something new with it felt interesting. There are tissues and tears and moments of gore, and a cinematic beauty to it as well.”
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