A veteran Director Zack Snyder and his producer wife Deborah have had their ups and downs working with a big studio such as Warner Brothers. He had made a string of DC Superhero films. WB also held the reins to his crazy-ass Zombie Apocalypse epic, “Army of The Dead,” but the studio heads weren’t giving the film their support. Then, thanks to the pandemic-prompted production freeze, Snyder met with Netflix which came to the rescue and greenlit this film. 

Given that Snyder had made his feature film debut re-imagining George Romero’s “Dawn of The Dead,” he knew how to make a pretty impressive zombie film. In Snyder’s unmistakable fashion, he came up with a new zombie film that re-fashioned the mythology while really camping it up. Set in Las Vegas, of all places, a mega zombie king is accidentally unleashed by the military and it wreaks havoc in America’s playland creating multiple zombies, a zombie queen and zombie tiger. 

Survivors who escape the zombie hordes that take over Las Vegas get placed in refugee camps which are getting bussed away from the devastation before Vegas will get nuked. Into this chaos comes Casino owner Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his associate Martin (Garret Dillahunt) who enlist former mercenary Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) and his crew to recover $200 million from his casino’s vault before the city is destroyed. They secretly enter the barricaded city and then all hell breaks loose.

Again, thanks to Netflix, the film was also shown on the big screen in the studio’s New York Paris Theater where Snyder and his wife conducted a post-screening Q&A.

Q: You have so many great characters in the film. Was there any moment on set during shooting, where you said, “Maybe we should let this [character] live.”

ZS: Because it’s a genre deconstruction, there’s really no chance anyone’s going to live. In a genre deconstruction, the only cool ending is when everybody dies. Maybe, I guess, except Kate. Kate does live. Apparently, the helicopter that’s landing has got a Red Cross on it, but I don’t know, what if there’s a CIA hitman on that helicopter who’s come to snuff her out because now she knows the secrets. Or maybe they’ve come to take her to Guantanamo. I don’t know, there’s a possibility…

Q: You shot this movie before the pandemic. Yet, t became so much more timely, you had so many political jokes, stuff about immigration and such… Are you surprised at how much it was relevant? It’s just like you made it yesterday.

SZ: At the time we didn’t plan the pandemic [laughs].

DS: Nobody knew what to do with the temperature guns [we had to use]. Where do you point them? It’s was like, every day we’re getting our temperature done.

ZS: Right. When Theo [Rossi who plays a vile camp security guard Burt Cummings] and I were shooting the scene [where he uses one], he was like, “I’ve never put a temperature gun on a head.” I got a temperature gun pointed at me every day since then. Before that it was like this weird thing that no one ever did it. Like I say, we weren’t you’re planning on that stuff, if we had that wouldn’t be cool…

Q: You have such great songs [in the film]. Did you have a list of song choices beforehand? Or, did they come to you when you’re making the movie? 

ZS: When I draw storyboards, I like to procrastinate. So I make a playlist because it also gives me something else to do. I must be a procrastinator. Everyone procrastinates a little bit — so if I have to draw storyboards which is arduous and time-consuming and a task that must get done, I therefore procrastinate. And you know what, to make these storyboards better, I come up with a song list that will inspire me to draw them. Then I spend a day listening to music. And it’s one day more I’m behind schedule [laughs]. 

Eventually I get maybe 40 songs together. And Deb would be like, “Are you drawing?” And I say, “I’m listening to music so I can draw.” That allows me to draw the things I need to do. 

DS: A lot of the songs made it [into the film]. Then we give them to the department heads. So our digital effects team, they all have this playlist which we’ve done it for past productions as well.

ZS: I made a CD and gave everyone one. I was trying to make a tape. That would have been cooler. But the CD, they were like, “Oh cool a CD.” And the CD is a collector’s item. That’s the scenario to get to [finding] the songs [for the film.]

DS: What does this really cost? Like way over budget. Then there’s a negotiation. Sometimes we try other things and we say, “We’ve got to fit that in. And then we have to ask the studio for more money [to get the rights.]

ZS: The only song we didn’t get in the movie was “Leaving Las Vegas” by Sheryl Crow. She didn’t even want to look at footage, she just said no.

I was originally up for the music video of “Leaving Las Vegas.” I had written a treatment. Maybe it still hurts cause I didn’t get the video. But anyway, the music video I wanted to make was about Las Vegas as a metaphor for a physical reality that we all experience and that leaving Las Vegas was there for death or a transplanted spirit world. 

Q: This is your first Netflix film; how was it working with them?

DS: They have been such amazing partners, they gave us such freedom. It was a real partnership with them. And freedom also meant listening to what they had to say. It was a real partnership that we had with them. And if it wasn’t for them, the movie wouldn’t have been made. 

It was at Warner Brothers for years and we couldn’t figure it out. Then, when Zack wanted to do it, they didn’t give us the money we needed to actually make the movie. 

So we had a general meeting with Scott Stuber at Netflix, talking about a lot of ideas and we told him about the movie and he was like, “You want to do that?

ZS: A Zombie heist movie? No we weren’t joking about that — a Zombie movie in Vegas. But it’s also heist movie, after the zombie apocalypse. And no one [at Netflix] said no.

DS: Welcome to Netflix. What was also amazing is that when we came to them and said, “This movie starts like after the zombie apocalypse, and no one knows what happened. So we want to do an animated prequel.

And they were like, “Yeah, that was great.” And then we said, “You know what? [The German safecracker] Deiter is such a great character. What if we do a movie about his backstory?”

And they again said, “Yes.” What’s really unique here is that a lot of studios talk about creating franchises and these worlds, but they want to wait for it to be a sure bet. 

But with Netflix, they had enough faith to say, let’s do all these other things, which stand on their own.” Audiences don’t have to see them all, you can watch them independently, but they also are interconnected.” And they did them in a timely fashion — they’ll all come out within the next year. So that’s amazing.

ZS: I know it’s weird.

Q: Talking about weird… Since the zombie queen’s head [was severed from] her body, would she have lived had the head been re-attached?

ZS: We were always talking about what if you attached the zombie queen’s head to the the tiger’s [body]. That’s my way of thinking, but that’s cool too. What happened if there was a chance? Like in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” where say the tiger goes to sleep and then you lay the zombie queen head next to it and somehow tentacles come out and grab onto it. And then by the morning, it’s a zombie, it’s a tiger but with a zombie queen head. 

Q: How was it filming the disembodied head? Her head was still alive even though there was no body. She looked around…

ZS: You reminded me of [that old B&W movie with a disembodied head]. It fucked me up; I was [haunted] by it when I was six years old and it never got okay.

DS: It was complicated filming, and for some of the scenes, we actually had [the actor Athena] wears a green outfit and we just had her head. So she did the head thing when she was headless.

ZS: The dolly’s here… We used a Fisher Dolly which has a boom, and a camera goes on that. Turn this knob and then you can roll it out in any direction. You put the dance floor down — that’s sheets of plywood. It allows it to roll in any direction.

It’s not on a track. It’s just free-rolling. And then [the Zombie Queen] would sit where the camera goes. She had on a green suit and there was a line where her head was cut off at the neck, where it would be.  Below that it would be green.

The coyote, Nora, [Arnezeder who plays Lily who guided them into Las Vegas] would hold up her head and hair. Then Darren, our Dolly grip, would Dolly her around. And when she lifted it up, we’d boom her up, boom her down. 

It was so funny.  Also we had the animatronic head. for the wide shots where like the guy used radio control, would like watching it. 

Q: Where’s the head is now?

ZD: {To Deb] where’s that head? 

DS: I think in storage, in a warehouse.

Q: There were other problems you had with this film. Like replacing Chris D’Elia (who had come under fire for inappropriate behavior) with comic Tig Notaro — who had never done an action role before.

ZS: We kind of knew what we were getting into, but had no idea how hard it would be. It was suggested we use Tig. My brain just went, “Wait. Tig. Yes. That’s it.” [Then] I’m like, “Do you think she would do this, though?”

I had to do this incredibly technical experiment, re-creating every scene, shot for shot. My visual-effects supervisor, Marcus Taormina, did the work of taking Chris completely out of the movie so Tig could have freedom [to move] within the scenes.

Some of the trickiest shots were where she’s walking in the group — I had to match the [camera] pans, and it was difficult to get the perspective to match. It was a few months to get all the individual effects and make it seamless. Marcus was able to fudge it around and get it to work, and [her footage] went in surprisingly easily.

Q: Now that the film is out, it’s streaming on Netflix and whoa, is in a real movie theater.

DS: It’s good to be back in the theater, please come back here where humans are in the theaters and it’s sold out. 

Q: Final question. It’s hard to pick amongst your darlings but who’s your favorite character in the movie?

ZS: I don’t really have a favorite, but I will say that I liked everybody equally, Still, they all pretty much die.

Here’s the trailer.