Remaking a lesser known film from an established master of the genre may be the best way to benefit from the association and imprint your own take on the film.
In the case of The Crazies director Breck Eisner found the social and political context from the 1973 George A. Romero original all too relevant for his 2010 update, and in this exclusive interview Eisner talks of his own influences and why he wanted to retell this particular horror story.
He also touches on the other projects in his future, Flash Gordon and Escape from New York. You can read our review of The Crazies here, and the Blu-ray and DVD is out today and comes highly recommended.
HeyUGuys
Thank you for speaking to us today Mr. Eisner, can I just ask you about the marketing for this film. It seemed to be sold as a zombie film, but the influences I saw in the film are more along the lines of The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, were they influences?
Breck Eisner
Yes, absolutely. For me, The Crazies was not a zombie film, and for Romero it was not a zombie film. There are elements of that type of movie, but my intent was to delineate it from a zombie film – first of all, they’re not undead and they don’t act in unison, and they have their own individual identities. For me a big influence was Carpenter’s The Thing, when I saw that movie as a kid it was terrifying, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers too. They both play with the idea of people you know and trust become a threat – that was a critical idea in The Crazies.
HeyUGuys
The Thing makes great use of the feeling of isolation, and your film continues in that vein – and like Carpenter’s film the set pieces get more extreme as the story unfolds – how difficult was it to keeping increasing the growing menace without losing focus on the reality of the situation?
Breck Eisner
It’s a real careful balance, the movie ultimately needs to be entertaining and exciting and thrilling and scary and you want to continually ramp up the threat and you want to accelerate the plot faster than it would evolve in the real world. You have to play the drama, contain the story, to keep the audience engaged, but at the same time everything we did was based in reality. The disease itself which we called Trixie, which we kept from Romero, and was based on real research. I had meetings with government agencies who would respond to a threat like that, so both the disease and the response to it were based in research and reality.
HeyUGuys
And that really comes across, I hope you didn’t put someone through a zombie infested car wash, that would be taking research a little too far.
Breck Eisner
I think the stuntmen in that scene may have felt that…but the car wash came about as I was never allowed to ride in the car wash as a kid and my friends were, so I was jealous of that so I felt like it was perfect.
HeyUGuys
I’m surprised it hasn’t been done before…
Breck Eisner
I know! I couldn’t believe it when we first put it in, we were like – OK, let’s put it in and then we’ll see what other movies have done with it and we can expand on it, but we couldn’t find any other movie that had used a car wash as a set piece. We were pretty lucky that hadn’t been done yet.
HeyUGuys
We’ve talked about The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, both are stories which have been remade over and over, what did you see in the Romero 1973 film that made you want to retell it?
Breck Eisner
Well, one of the things was the fact that Philip Kaufman had done Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Howard Hawks did the original Thing From Another World and Carpenter did a great version himself, and in both cases the newer versions improved on the original and that made me confident in the fact that if you pick wisely and remake the movie well then it can be memorable. They are two of my favourite horror films and they’re both remakes so when I approached Romero about a remake of The Crazies – he sanctioned it and that gave me great confidence also. I saw the movie as a kid and I remembered it and like the content of the movie but it suffered from the fact that Romero had a very limited budget, something like $250,000. Our budget was still not huge but it was enough for me to think we could expand the idea and I had an angle on the movie which was different, so I could stay true to his vision but put in my own angles. Some of it was kept – the social commentary of the original still held true today, so of those aspects helped.
HeyUGuys
Some of the criticism leveled at Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead was that much of the social commentary of Romero’s film was lost in translation and when I saw The Crazies I was struck by how far the shadow of 9/11 falls over the film.
Breck Eisner
Yes, that was a big factor – particularly the US government and the world’s response to 9/11. The desire to lash out and to open it up to war, and how the government uses the military for political means was definitely an important piece of the commentary in the movie. Hopefully The Crazies is a cautionary tale.
HeyUGuys
And that continues beyond the ending of the film, with our heroes, having survived only to be targeted by some sort of tracking satellite. That seemed to be the ultimate irony – that they were walking into an even bigger catastrophe, but others claimed it was setting up a sequel – there’s no sequel planned is there?
Breck Eisner
No, there’s no sequel. There’s never been a sequel. Conceptually the ending was always that the heroes were getting out and the audience was rooting for them to survive but we played with the audience a little in that once out of the contamination zone they were only spreading the contagion further to another population and that they were responsible for another oppressive response.
HeyUGuys
I wanted to ask you about your future projects, I know Flash Gordon is coming and in 3D, how far along with that are you?
Breck Eisner
We have a first draft of the script, and we’re going into another draft, which should take another couple of months and then we’ll get another writer but we’re still in the development of the script right now.
HeyUGuys
Any ideas on who would play the lead role?
Breck Eisner
It’s too early for that, we have to get the script done first.
HeyUGuys
Ok, but I’m assuming that you’re overlooking the 80s version of Flash Gordon.
Breck Eisner
Oh yes, not only are we overlooking that version but we optioned the underlying rights to the comics from the 30s through to the present day so we’re using the actual Alex Raymond comics as our source.
HeyUGuys
Are you looking to emulate the art and set design from that period too?
Breck Eisner
I’m sure we will have a throw to the Art Deco world, it’ll be an Avatar like world that we design, in technology and scope.
HeyUGuys
And it’ll be shot in 3D, not done in post…
Breck Eisner
Oh yes, definitely shot…I’ve been looking into demos of a 3D sound system, so be the time the film comes out hopefully they’ll be more theatres which can support that.
HeyUGuys
One last question, I know Escape from New York is still on the go, are you still talking to Timothy Olyphant about starring in that?
Breck Eisner
Yes, Escape from New York, we’re just getting started on the production draft, and we are working on that for the next month or two and from there we’ll start prepping. I think Olyphant would be great for Snake, there are a few actors, not many, but there are a few actors in town that could play the role. No decision has been made and really no communication about who will play Snake but obviously the movie can only happen if we get the right guy.
HeyUGuys
Thank you Mr. Eisner for your time.
