In anticipation of the June 29th drop date for the DVD/Blu-ray of Overture Film’s The Crazies, B-D’s Chris Eggertsen got a chance to catch up with director Breck Eisner to discuss his remake of the 1973 George Romero film. Following you can hear his thoughts on the original movie, what scenes he wasn’t able to shoot because of time constraints, the bleaker alternate ending that was filmed but that unfortunately did not make it onto the DVD/Blu-ray, and whether there have been any discussions of a sequel.
BD: The Crazies was your first feature-length horror movie. How has your experience been with horror fans?

It was actually really great. I mean, I did an episode of `Fear Itself’ kind of as a ramp-up to doing the movie. `Fear Itself’…we shot eight days for a 42-minute T.V. hour. That was a lot to shoot in eight days. Doing a feature and having a bit more flexibility in the schedule was great. But the base lesson I learned about directing horror was how long it takes to reset blood. You get a little bit of blood on someone’s shirt or god forbid, you get it in someone’s hair…it kills you. You know, you don’t think about all that when you’re thinking about horror. But if you get it wrong, you’re dead. And you’re talking low-budget, which typically horror almost always is, or really, always is…

I think shooting a good horror set piece is like shooting a good action set piece. You gotta have a clear journey that the characters are going through, you have to make sure you design the piece so the characters are at a different place at the end of the scene than when they began. Surprises, unexpected turns. You gotta shoot it with enough coverage and enough pieces that you have the ability to build up the tension…as a filmmaker, it’s a fantastic thing to do, to shoot horror. I absolutely loved it.

BD: Were you a fan of the original film before you signed on?

I wouldn’t say it was one of my favorite Romeros, you know, I knew it, I’d seen it, but I’d pretty much forgotten about it. But I’d definitely seen it because when it was mentioned to me I remembered it and I knew the story and it definitely kind of sat in my mind for some reason. And I decided that that was a really good thing. The fact that you see a movie once when you’re twelve and you can clearly remember the movie, it’s typically a sign that there’s something in there to be mined. And that’s what I felt when I was offered this movie.

BD: Had you been offered a remake of a better-known or more critically-respected Romero film, do you think you would’ve done that, or was it nice that you were remaking a Romero film where there was a lot of room for improvement?

I would definitely not have done a well-known Romero film, absolutely not. I think that takes a lot of balls. I think [Zack] Snyder had a lot of guts to [remake `Dawn of the Dead’], and he did it well. I don’t know if I would’ve had the same guts. You know, if I really love a movie, and I rewatch the movie, and it still is really good for a present-day audience, I’m not gonna touch it. But if it’s a movie where it’s a really good idea and a really good concept and there’s something in there, but either because of limitations at the time or because it’s 30 years old and the world is a different place, then that’s a different story.

BD: Coming into it, what did you feel were the particular shortcomings of the original and how did you improve upon those?

I think the shortcomings of the original are two-fold. The main shortcoming is more a factor of times have changed. When Romero created The Crazies, and in fact created the modern zombie, it was fresh and new. And the concept of infected, crazed killers was a really groundbreaking idea…at the time…so I think one of the shortcomings of the original movie is you need to use [expository action] to explain what the hell is going on, and with the [expository action] comes the point of view of the military. My feeling was the audience’s today know it, they understand it. You can give as little [expository action] as possible, as little military point of view as possible. Put the audience into the dark as much as your heroes are in the dark and let the audience play catch up…[unintelligible]…I’m not sure I’d really call it a limitation as much as a 30-years-later reality, but one of the real limitations that Romero had…

It was a pretty ambitious scope to work in, the idea of the U.S. military coming in and containing this incredibly deadly disease is one that, you know…if you want it to feel real, it needs to be pretty big in scope. Romero obviously had very little money to do it. The movie feels not quite realistic when it comes to the military’s response to the [disease] that they’re containing. And I think that’s one of the things that I really wanted to…use budget where I could to expand upon. Then again, I felt like Romero’s limited budget…the actors were not always at the level that they could be, and for me getting real, top-notch actors, these guys Tim Olyphant, and Radha [Mitchell], and Danielle [Panabaker] and Joe Anderson, they’re all real actors first and foremost, not just personalities. They brought real chops to the movie.

BD: Speaking of budget, obviously you were working within your own budget constraints. Was there anything you wanted to do that you couldn’t because of budget?

Oh my god, there’s so many of them! Literally ever set piece has more in it that I wanted to shoot. But the biggest letdown for me because of budget was the principal pitchfork scene. The entire scene as it exists right now is really just a preamble for what the scene was really supposed to be:

BD: Judy was on a stretcher and the wheels move, she’s supposed to wheel herself, just barely able to move her hands, pull herself down the chalkboard, out the door and into the hallway, and she’s being pursued at incredibly slow speeds by the pitchfork-wielding principal, and she’s pulling herself down the hallway using the locks on the lockers to propel herself faster and faster and faster until finally she reaches for another lock and there’s no lock there, and her hand slips and she ends up stopped in the middle of the hallway. And she looks around and she doesn’t see the killer and she looks and there’s like a case of school awards, and she looks over and in the reflection of the glass she sees the guy, the principal, about to kill her. And that’s when David shows up. And I was really looking forward to shooting that whole set piece and it all got cut, on the day.

BD: That was due to budget?

That was just due to we didn’t have enough time…we had a lot to shoot and we had a [mandate] coming in that you cannot fall behind schedule, so I was just like winging it the whole time, cutting and pasting things, combining scenes, cutting out shots, cutting out scenes and moments…there was a whole subplot of Russell trying to go to Cedar Rapids and…[he gets] his tires spiked…and that’s how he ends up on the bus…we had to cut all that out too. It was a lean, mean machine out there.

BD: Yeah, sounds like it. Are there any deleted scenes we can expect on DVD or Blu-ray?

No, I mean, in order to make the movie work, in order to get there with the budget constraints, my philosophy on making the movie was that we cannot afford to shoot a scene that for any chance will not be in the movie. So at the end of the day, there was one dialogue scene between David and Judy, a half a page of them sitting at the dinner table. We shot it very quickly, and we just didn’t need it for the movie. It’s a nothing scene. The only real scene we shot that didn’t make it into the movie was the alternate ending. The same day, I shot two endings to the movie. One was bleak, and that what’s in the movie. And one that’s even more bleak, and that one did not make it into the movie and I decided not to put it on the DVD…[we] tested the two and went with one.

BD: So the one you went with the one that was less bleak?

Yeah, it was a little less bleak. They’re both bleak, but this ending’s a little less bleak. Still, in the ending of our movie our heroes break the virus out of the containment center to spread it to a metropolitan center. So it’s still pretty bleak, it’s just not as bleak as the other ending.

BD: Does the other ending end with them not escaping, or…?

No, the other ending ends with them getting into Cedar Rapids. They end up in a diner, and on the T.V. in the diner is the news broadcast that basically covers up what happened, and David freaks out a bit out about it and says that’s not what happened, and Judy calms him down, and he says `I’m sorry’, and then he’s drinking his bottle of water and then a drop of blood falls from his nose and Judy looks up and David sees the blood and looks up at her, and we realize at the same time that they realize that David’s infected. And we cut off at that moment.

BD: There are a couple of featurettes that sound really intriguing on the DVD/Blu-ray, and one of them is called `Creepy Paranormal Pandemics’. What is that?

That’s about how we designed the disease. You know, we talked to the CDC, and we did a whole lot of real research and met with the CDC, and it’s about how we designed the Trixie virus and what elements we used from what diseases we combined…it’s basically about the cause of this biotoxin and how we came up with the specifics of our Trixie disease.

BD: Any idea if there’ll be a ‘Crazies’ sequel at all?

I have no idea. The movie did well, and people seemed to like it. The ending was not designed as a sequel, it was designed as what was best for the movie. And I have no idea. There’s no plans for a sequel right now.