Zack Snyder: ‘I’ve always wanted to make a religious film – and a pornographic film’

“When you see most monsters in the cold light of day,” Zack Snyder grins, “that’s when you remember you’re just watching a movie. A clear shot of them just standing there lets the audience off the hook – it’s the moment your brain allows you to relax, and think everything’s going to be fine. That’s why so many directors go out of their way to avoid it.” But zombies, he explains, are very different.

“There’s something narcissistic in it,” he says, on a Zoom call from his living room – a serene, softly lit space styled with Danish midcentury furniture. “When you show humans a mirror, even a monstrous one, we can’t look away. That’s why in zombie movies, the zombies can be right there in broad daylight, from the very start. I think that dynamic’s kind of cool, and I think it’s why zombies endure. It’s the only kind of monster movie in which the monsters are us.”

If anyone would be familiar with the finer points of zombie psychology, it’s Snyder, 55, whose filmmaking career began with an excavation and defibrillation of a horror genre that had long been left to rot. Alongside Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, it was Snyder’s sleek, kinetic 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead that brought zombies shuffling back to cinemas en masse. He was a director of television commercials at the time, and had been passed the Dawn script – written by James Gunn, who would go on to make the Guardians of the Galaxy films for Marvel – just before he flew to New Zealand to shoot a deodorant ad.

It was a fruitful trip all round: while there, he met his future wife and producing partner Deborah, who had hired him to make the ad in the first place, and also decided to plough on with this (at the time) deeply unfashionable project. “I mentioned it to Deborah during our budding romance, and she was like, ’Is this what you really want to do? You’re a pretty successful commercial director, and you’re going to chuck all that in the toilet to go and make a zombie movie?’ But It struck me as cool precisely because zombies weren’t popular. It was like remaking Planet of the Apes.”

Now Snyder’s career has gorily lurched full circle. This weekend sees the release on Netflix of his tremendous Army of the Dead: not a sequel to his 2004 Dawn, but its ravenous, genre-chomping cousin, set in a near-future America in which Las Vegas has become overrun with braindead ghouls. In a twist that now feels horribly resonant, the film gets the initial, all-guns-blazing carnage out of the way in its opening minutes, and begins in earnest at the point at which the zombie apocalypse has become something to which society at large has been forced to acclimatise.

“You can’t miss the new relevance,” he says. “I mean, our movie has scenes where people have temperature guns pointed at them to check they’re not infected. There are quarantine procedures, things like that.” Would he change anything if he were writing the script now, as opposed to pre-Covid? “I might use some of the iconography that we’ve become used to seeing around getting tested or vaccinated,” he says. “But honestly, the thing I like about the way it is now is you still have to superimpose what’s been happening onto the film, rather than having the film superimpose it onto you. We’re not trying to titillate or goad you with parallels. In a weird way, it feels more honest.”

He reflects on the moment in March 2020 when he shut down his production company, The Stone Quarry. “We were all like, ‘See you in a couple of weeks!’” he recalls. “But did any of us actually believe that was all it was going to be? I remember thinking, ‘What’s going to change in that time that would allow us to no longer be in this situation? A sudden mass quarantine which everyone sticks to super-intensely, and quickly beats the virus into submission? Because if zombie films have told us one thing about human behaviour…” he mimes hiding a bite on his forearm, and chuckles.

Snyder is an eager conversationalist, and far happier to chat away to a film critic than you might imagine, considering the decade the man has just weathered. After the success of his 2013 Superman reboot, Man of Steel, Snyder was held up by Warner Bros as the visionary filmmaker who would lead their stable of DC Comics characters – Batman, Wonder Woman, and so on – into a new, mythologically inclined golden age. But his next project, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, was hampered by multiple rewrites and brutal trims, and was largely derided on release – while its follow-up, Justice League, sunk into chaos as the studio tried to wrestle the film in a more Marvel-like direction, even as it was being shot.

After 11 tumultuous months, Snyder was replaced as director by Joss Whedon, who presided over extensive reshoots; the result, released at the end of 2017, delighted neither critics nor fans. And this professional turmoil was compounded by unimaginable personal tragedy, when in May 2017, Snyder’s 20-year-old daughter Autumn died by suicide. The recently completed director’s cut of Justice League, which restored Snyder’s original vision for the film, was dedicated to Autumn, while the climactic scene in Army of the Dead is a heartfelt final conversation between a father and daughter: Scott, Dave Bautista’s fast food chef turned mercenary, and Kate, played by the 24-year-old British actress Ella Purnell.

“When you’re a filmmaker, you can only work from your own experience,” he reflects. “You can imagine the experiences of others, but your own is the only one that’s real. I dedicated Justice League to my daughter, because making movies is my job – if I’d been a furniture maker, I would want to honour her memory through the furniture I made. But once you do that, that influence doesn’t go away. Having gone through some sort of epoch, you’ve emerged on the other side forever changed. And for me, I think it manifests in those intimate moments. What I wanted that final conversation to contain is some kind of catharsis. Even in the insanity of that moment, however impossibly, I wanted there to be some healing between the two of them.”

In a much broader sense, Army of the Dead feels like a moment of reconciliation for Snyder – a chance to reacquaint himself with filmmaking as a physical act. For the first time in his career, he served as his own cinematographer – and, beaming, compares the experience to the various in-person trick shots he pulled off 17 years ago on Dawn, running backwards with the camera on his shoulder over plywood boards that assistants would whisk out of sight before they came into shot.

“I’d just grown weary of the distance between me and the camera over the years of making these giant superhero movies,” he says. “It becomes abstract – the camera is the last thing that anyone cares about. I’d always be asking, ‘Hey, can I operate on this shot?’ And they’d be like ‘You know what, maybe the next one. Go and sit down.’”

Yet his break from the green screen was briefer than anticipated. Shortly after filming on Army of the Dead concluded, one of the cast, Chris D’Elia, was accused of sexually harassing a number of underage girls. Using a series of techniques Snyder describes as “the most technical exercise in photography that you can possibly do,” an entirely new version of the character was performed in a bright lime studio space by the comedian Tig Notaro, with painstakingly matched lighting, dialogue timing and camera movements. The new footage was then stitched into the original seamlessly enough to be unnoticeable, which for Snyder is an obvious point of pride.

Snyder is something of a green screen pioneer, having used one to shoot every scene in his 2007 historical action epic 300, based on the Frank Miller comic about the Spartans’ last stand at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC. The film was crammed with the awestruck shots of impossibly buff and glistening male physiques that would soon become a Snyder trademark, and which have caused many critics over the years – including this one – to describe his aesthetic as fascist.

It’s worth clarifying that this word applies to Snyder in visual terms only: it’s about the way he photographs might and subjugation, and the human form as something sculptural and sublime, as opposed to any lingering desire his work leaves you with to invade Poland. But even so, it’s a potentially incendiary description, and understandably so. How does he feel about it?

“Well, the difference between 300 and, like, Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia is that those guys weren’t the underdogs,” he chuckles. He recalls it first coming up in an interview at the Berlin Film Festival: “And I was like, ‘That’s not a cool thing to say.’ But I guess in retrospect, it’s hard to find a way to describe that side of my work that doesn’t evoke that tradition.

“People have become uncomfortable with something that glorifies the human creature in such a heroic, viscerally physical way,” he goes on. “When 300 was released, people said it was too physically indulgent – that on some level it was like porn. But from a philosophical standpoint, I guess I’m really into that indulgence.”

In his teens, Snyder became a fan of bodybuilding; he also studied painting at London’s Heatherley School of Fine Art, where he fell for the work of Renaissance greats like Caravaggio and Michelangelo.

“That kind of appreciation of the human form is something I really warmed to,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to make a religious film and a pornographic film, and I’ve never really yet had the chance to do either. Maybe if I could combine the two…” he muses. “Or maybe 300 is that film, in some sense, a little bit. Or at least a primer for what that film could be.”

One project he’s been mulling for a few years is arguably more unexpected still. On an especially green-screen-heavy day on the Justice League shoot, he took Amy Adams aside and mentioned an idea he’d had for a film that he felt would suit her to a tee.

“It’s a kind of female version of The Wrestler, about a midwestern housewife who happens to have a pretty good body, and starts to do some bodybuilding competitions, and then falls down a rabbit hole of steroids and hormones,” he says. “It becomes a contest between fitness and family, and she loses her family because she’s spending all her money on diet supplements and drugs and trainers, and all of that stuff.” He thought of Adams for the role, he continues, “because it would be such a hugely hard job just training to the point at which it was believable. And you need someone like Amy who loves the craft to do it.” As of this moment, the script remains unwritten, though he says Adams was enthused by the idea.

Given he was dreaming of smaller, more personal projects on the set of Justice League, did he sense back then that Hollywood’s superhero phase was nearing its end?

“It’s hard to say what else is left for these films to do,” he says. “But as a genre, it has a lot going for it. It holds up a mirror to us, it speaks to the best in us, it offers a moral tale in most cases, it has high stakes, it can be multicultural, its stories can feel universal. And it’s pure wish-fulfilment too. I mean, Superman can fly. That alone is incredibly compelling.”

It was Christopher Nolan, whose own Dark Knight trilogy brought Batman back from cinematic purgatory, who initially thought of Snyder to direct Warner Bros’ Superman reboot in 2010. Since then, the pair have become unlikely buddies: as lockdown eased in Los Angeles, Nolan had Snyder over to his place to watch Tenet, while a few weeks ago, Snyder showed Nolan the four-hour directors’ cut of Justice League – complete with a 15-minute interval, with entr’acte composed by Junkie XL – at a private IMAX screening.

"Chris has been involved in this thing since Man of Steel, so I think it was as cathartic for him to see it as anybody,” Snyder says. “We had a long conversation afterwards about how it feels in its four-hour format in the theatre, and he said he thought it had regained its epic sensibility – that mythological aspect that I thought was inherent to the story I was telling all along. Now, I haven’t seen the other version” – the truncated, fatally compromised 2017 Whedon Cut – “but there is apparently a way to wring the mythological aspects of it,” he shrugs. “But for me, that’s the single thread that when you pull it out, the whole thing unravels. So we were both very glad to see it stitched back in.”

Army of the Dead is available on Netflix now