ARMY OF THE DEAD
Zack Snyder’s only film in the past five years was taken over by another director, to ignominious effect. But zombie epic Army Of The Dead, his return to the genre that kicked off his whole career, couldn’t be more him
Justice League restored, Zack Snyder turns his attentions to killing as many zombies as he can. Empire was there every step of the way.
“EVERYTHING DIES, BABY, that’s a fact. But maybe everything that dies, someday comes back.”
Bruce Springsteen — New Jersey’s favourite son, chronicler of Americana, The Boss — wrote and sang those words in 1982, as part of one of his greatest songs, ‘Atlantic City’. It’s doubtful that as he wrote them he was thinking about zombies, but with Springsteen you can’t rule anything out.
Whatever the truth of the situation, those words occur to Empire on an endless loop on this chilly/sunny October day, where we’ve found ourselves in the actual Atlantic City, surrounded by zombies. Maybe everything that dies, someday comes back, and then some.
Specifically, we’re on the casino floor of the Showboat Hotel (the 13th-best hotel in Atlantic City, according to Tripadvisor). It’s been out of action since 2014, but today it’s been restored to most of its former glory for Army Of The Dead, a post-apocalyptic zombie movie set in Las Vegas. There are blackjack tables and roulette wheels and fruit machines — or slots, as they say over here — as far as the eye can see. And, given that the room is roughly the size of Birmingham, the eye can see quite a bit.
Except, many of the slots aren’t real — some are wooden, others are cardboard, brought in to bolster the background ranks. And, since the events of today’s scene take place roughly six years after the advent of the zombie apocalypse, the gaming tables and chairs are covered with a fine layer of dust. Plus corpses. In fact, there are skeletal rubber corpses all over the place; people who had a very unlucky day when the zombies came calling. And, speaking of zombies, there they are, lined up against a wall, waiting patiently for their moment.
The lights in the hall are off. Naturally, as there’s supposed to be no power. But Empire is drawn to a light source towards the front of the hall. There, we find a group of actors, most of whom have huge muscles and even huger guns, running through their moves for an upcoming take. In the centre of the storm, meanwhile, camera in one hand and an irrepressible grin on his face, is Zack Snyder. Back on a movie set. Back in his element. Back where he started.
SNYDER HAS BECOME synonymous with superheroes and Spartans and the kind of big-screen bombast only possible with a couple of hundred million dollars and a penchant for pulverisation. But he started fairly small, all the way back in 2004, with his take on George A. Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead, a project that on paper should have gone the way of hundreds of horror remakes, but which had real punch and visual vim. And it turns out that, even as he was smashing Batman and Superman into each other like giant-sized action figures, the undead were still
on his mind. “Zombies are a perfect sort of mirror,” Snyder says, over lunch in a giant tent stationed just outside the casino. “They’re like a blank canvas. And for this movie, from the start, we really leaned in hard to having the zombies be socially relevant in a lot of ways.”
By 2018, it seemed certain that, after a bruising experience on Justice League which ended with him ceding control and credit to another director, Joss Whedon, the age of heroes had come to an end for him. He wanted to roar back with a film that would be fully his vision. And so dusted off an idea he’d had for a while, taking it to Scott Stuber, who had been an executive on Dawn Of The Dead and was now Head Of Original Films at Netflix. Snyder pitched a mouthwatering, how-hasn’t-that-been-done? premise that would see him return to zombies, but mix an all-out action horror flick with a heist movie, and a team-on-a-mission film for good measure. “And a reluctant-gunfighter movie,” he laughs. “What if you just took every trope and bashed them on top of each other? For me, it’s super-self-aware, and it really keeps me interested.”
The result of this genre-jenga is Army Of The Dead, in which Dave Bautista’s team of badass zombie-killers — including Ana de la Reguera, Theo Rossi, Tig Notaro (who was drafted in after filming wrapped to replace comedian Chris D’elia, after sexual misconduct allegations, shooting all her scenes alone), Omari Hardwick and Raúl Castillo — are reunited for one last job.
Namely, slipping into Las Vegas, now a walled-off city containing hundreds of thousands of flesh-eating fiends, and making off with millions in cash from the vault of the Bly Casino, before the entire area is nuked to kingdom come. On, naturally, the Fourth Of July. “It’s very patriotic,” laughs Deborah Snyder, Zack’s wife and producer on every movie he’s made since Watchmen.
While the heist-movie element won’t exactly be Ocean’s Eleven, it’s not an afterthought. “There’s this whole mythology aspect to the safes,” explains Snyder. “The safe in the basement of the Bly Casino is the Holy Grail of safes. It’s unbreakable. But it just so happens that this guy they find is obsessed with that particular safe.” That would be Ludwig Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer), a German safecracker along for the ride, and totally out of his depth. Early word is that money isn’t the only thing he steals; he might just walk off with the movie, too. “He’s the guy who, when everyone is saying, ‘Be quiet,’ asks, ‘Why be quiet?’” laughs Schweighöfer. “Everyone was so focused, because it’s an action movie, but Zack was like, ‘Just go have fun.’ And I had fun.”
But it’s fair to say that Army Of The Dead will be, first and foremost, a zombie film. It may even, in its scope and scale and ambition, be the ultimate zombie movie. And the ultimate zombie film requires the ultimate zombies.
WHEN ARMY OF The Dead was first announced in early 2019, Snyder promised that “there are no handcuffs on me at all with this one”. It would, he said, “be the most kick-ass, self-aware… balls-to-the-wall zombie freak show that anyone has ever seen”.
Today, as Empire watches a scene in which Bautista’s Scott Ward and his team of hardbitten, hard-to-bite mercenaries make their way into the casino, it’s all very fun and gritty and cool. But there’s a distinct lack of balls-to-the-wall zombie freak show action. Deliberately so, in fact. The real mayhem has yet to start. “I love the craziness of the movie,” says Snyder, who is aware that in the decade-plus since he last worked with zombies “the genre has gone on a frickin’ rollercoaster ride”. Now the walking dead, and The Walking Dead, are everywhere. “Everyone’s educated. They’ve gone to zombie school. When we did a casting for the extras, everyone had a zombie walk. No-one asked, ‘What should I do?’ So, frankly, for the movie to cut through, I feel like the weirder is the better.”
How weird does Army get? Well, setting it in Vegas helps. “Vegas was just ripe for the picking,” says Deborah Snyder. So there’s a zombie Elvis. A zombie Liberace. There will be zombie
horses. And even a zombie tiger. “Zombie tigers, man — come on!” laughs Bautista, who may or may not have a scene with the Siegfried & Roy escapee. “How good is that?” But all of that craziness pales in comparison to the Alphas. “They’re an elevated version of a zombie,” says Wesley Coller, Snyder’s long-time producing partner. “There’s an animalistic interactivity between them.”
The idea of evolved zombies is nothing new — Romero did it, Dan O’bannon did it in The Return Of The Living Dead, and many others have followed suit since. Snyder, however, is not a director to ever do things by halves. Part of his M.O. on Army Of The Dead is full commitment to gonzo ideas, and accordingly his new breed of zombie has its own form of communication, its own rules, its own hierarchical structure. “I want the audience to get a chance at having sympathy,” he says. “Alphas have consciousness and they’re self-aware and they’re not like us. So I wanted to create this moral ambiguity about whether or not the humans that we love in the movie crossed a line. Was there a thing that they did to the Alphas, when the Alphas were minding their own business? And therefore, do the Alphas have the moral high ground? It muddies the water, in a good way.”
They will also make life considerably harder, and in many cases shorter, for Scott and his compadres. “They’re fucking zombie superheroes,” says Bautista. “The Alpha zombies are just complete badasses. The athleticism of some of these people [playing the Alphas], I’ve never had and will never have in my life.”
Yet, for all the fight scenes (and there will be many) and big explosions (ditto), the Alphas provide a pathway into the emotional centre of Army Of The Dead. At its core are key questions about humanity, connection, empathy, guilt and grief. And, in a way, it might just be Snyder’s most personal film to date.
“AFTER AUTUMN, I was a little bit numb,” says Snyder. “The ‘why?’ had gone out a teeny bit.”
In March 2017, Snyder’s daughter Autumn took her own life. She was just 20. Devastated by their loss, he and Deborah soon stepped away from post-production duties on Justice League, to mourn, to look after their other children, and to dedicate themselves to honouring Autumn’s memory by raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for The American Foundation For Suicide Prevention.
After around two years away (“We needed the time,” says Deborah Snyder. “It was the best thing for our family”), the time came for the Snyders to go back to work. And when they did, they knew that their priorities lay in a different direction. Snyder had been developing a movie called The Last Photograph, which would have starred Bautista. But that movie, which Bautista describes as “almost like a religious film disguised as an action film”, may have been too heavy-duty at that precise moment. Snyder was in the market for something lighter. “The notion of Army just seemed like a thing I could lose myself in, really easily, and in a fun way,” says the director. “‘Fun’ was almost like a swear word to me before.
If someone had said, ‘Movies gotta be fun,’ I’d wanna go nuts. If it’s provocative, that to me is fun, you know? But this movie can kind of do both.”
Army had been on his to-do list for about ten years, initially with a view to producing it for Matthijs van Heijningen Jr to direct, but it had never quite come together. Sitting down with co-writer Shay Hatten, Snyder attacked the story, looking for something to connect with, and care about. “I knew the story,” he says. “I knew what it was. I could care about it 100 per cent because it was a world that I had created. I was the authority on the canon of Army Of The Dead.”
At this point, it’s hard to say how much of himself and his personal situation Snyder put into the film’s DNA, but it might be telling that the film’s central relationship is between Bautista’s Scott and his estranged daughter, Kate (Ella Purnell), a volunteer worker who finds herself in the city on a rescue mission and bundled together with her dad. “Scott was there for a lot of people, but when his daughter really needed him, he wasn’t there for her,” explains Bautista. “So he’s really trying to redeem himself.” Purnell describes it as “the heart of the movie. The two of them together are really, really well-written. Real love, real loss and pain, and you don’t often get that in these sorts of action movies.”
WHEN EMPIRE CATCHES up with Snyder, it’s March 2021, and much has changed. It’s his birthday, for one thing (he’s turning 55). There’s been a pandemic, of course, which means we’re talking on Zoom. Snyder is using the 50mm lens that he shot Army Of The Dead on, so even his Zoom calls look like a Zack Snyder film. And, away from aesthetic concerns, the pandemic has thrown some of the elements of Army Of The Dead into even sharper relief. “Zombie movies are classically political,” he says. “There was a lot of stuff, like quarantine camps, [that] related to what was happening with some of the migrants in America, and Presidential policies, and different walls being built. We had no idea there would actually be a pandemic, and that the metaphors would become even more insane.”
Since we spoke on set, there has also been a rapprochement of sorts with Warner Bros., which led to the restoration, completion and release of his cut of Justice League in the middle of March. Whether he goes back to working with Warner Bros. remains to be seen, though. Because Army Of The Dead has given him a burst of Netflix juice, and he liked it. “It’s been one of the great experiences I’ve had,” he says. “Every movie I’ve made, I’ve come into some sort of clash. Why is it that there’s a director’s cut of almost every one? There’s a director’s cut of Guardians Of Ga’hoole, for God’s sake! But this was amazing. I didn’t know it could be like this.” Be under no illusions: when you see Army Of The Dead in June, that will be The Snyder Cut. “Absolutely,” he laughs. “And the nice thing about it was, we never had to arrive at it. It was just the way we made it.”
Netflix must be happy, too: it sees Army Of The Dead not as a one-off, but a launching pad for a new franchise. And, in a move that puts even the early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the shade, they’re already in post-production on a Europe-set prequel, which will focus on Dieter in his pre-zombie, safecracking days. “Dieter is very funny and interesting,” says Schweighöfer, who not only stars in the film, but is directing too. “We’re trying to make the best prequel ever.” Confident words, given that The Godfather Part II exists, but then, making a prequel, and an animated series, before the film that begat them all is even released, is a confident move. It’s not hard to see why Snyder, after years of pain, is smiling. “There may be a sequel,” he teases. “It’s super-exciting. A little Army Of The Dead universe is starting to grow out of this crazy notion.”
Zack Snyder is back. And back in his element.
ARMY OF THE DEAD IS ON NETFLIX FROM 21 MAY