I think you play fair, though, with the audience in this movie. There’s the scene where I thought the deranged father is going to find his wife and child in the closet, and storm right in, but he doesn’t and I think the whole thing plays even more terrifying because you don’t go for the easy scare.
Well, in that scene specifically, I staged it the way I did because I wanted the mother to stay in the closet for the remainder of the scene. It was a personal thing, I wanted to imply all the bad things that happen and play it off the father’s face rather than go for the more horrific. You can suggest a whole lot more than you actually wind up showing. We don’t need to see that. What I usually do is have a gut check moment: How far can you push it before it breaks? You can make the movie terrifying but then you can get to a place of overkill or lose your audience to a sense of anger over what you’ve shown them. The whole thing can turn to disgust with the movie.
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There are such striking images in this film. I’m thinking of that abandoned Main Street, and other sequences that could almost play out as a silent film. What images came to mind as you first read the script and started to mentally block everything out?
I was flooded with all these images. When we started talking about images, I pushed for anything that turned small town Americana upside down and smashed it on its head. That guy with the shotgun in right field. The mother in front of a spinning combine in the middle of the night. I think the audience loves you if you let them figure it out, and that’s what these images do, they let you start to look at all of this falling apart. It was something we did intentionally, we didn’t rush into the horror of the movie, but we let the viewer settle in, meet the town and the characters and the world they inhabit, and then we turn it sideways once they are vested in their existence.
Was it intimidating to start toying with something that George Romero created? There are some themes here that harken back to him, do you see paralleles between now and then?
With early Romero, there’s a certain level of distrust in the government inherent in his work – they are commentaries on society and the ills of society and the DNA of The Crazies is that post-Vietnam suspicion of the government.
I think the remake is true to that Romero spirit. When I was first approached about doing the movie, it was probably about four years ago, we were in the quagmire that became the Gulf War under the presidency of George W. Bush, many were really conflicted between having a love of country and having a real distrust of what’s happening in this war, that we shouldn’t be there. Politicians were using the military for a purpose that wasn’t necessarily clear and not good for the country. And the movie is a bit of a comment on that, on the politicians’ use of the military as a tool, to cover up actions, to take us down dangerous roads. And I think that has a clear link to the world of Romero.
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