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Breck Eisner

There’s something in the water in Ogden Marsh.


When the inhabitants of the quaint Iowa town start pulling guns on each other in the middle of a baseball game, it’s clear this isn’t just a case of the Mondays. But when everyone you know is going crazy, how do you stay sane? A loaded gun, a strong stomach and a penchant for questioning authority are definitely good starts.


Cineplex recently spoke to the director of The Crazies, Breck Eisner (Sahara), yes the son of former Disney head honcho Michael Eisner, about why he signed on to remake a George Romero flick, what makes a good scary movie and why filming in rural Iowa was a good thing for his cast.


George Romero is an icon of the genre. Why remake one of his movies?

I think the real question is, why we’re remaking this movie, at least for me. I wouldn’t remake any Romero movie. I was originally approached by Dean Georgaris and Michael Aguilar who had acquired the rights and had a first draft written by Scott Kosar. When I first heard about it, when my agent first mentioned the title to me, I had thought about this long-dormant movie that I saw maybe when I was 12 or 13, on some VHS tape, and the fact that it stuck, that the concept of the terror of your friends or your family or the people you trust most turning on you, that that concept still resonated was something that gave me great thought that this might be a movie that has resonance today. Of course, I went back and re-watched the movie and realized that yeah, it had a lot of great things, the social commentary, the core concept was really good but the movie had suffered from limitations that George Romero had to work with, primarily budget. It felt to me that this movie still had relevance in a post-9/11, post-George Bush, Iraq world and given the fact that a key element had suffered, it felt like a movie worth tackling.


Romero is listed as an executive producer on the film, which would imply he at least tacitly approves. Has he seen your version?

That was all done before I was involved, because Mike and Dean got the rights maybe a year before they approached me and had that first draft written, that work was done before I came on. But since then, the movie’s been completed, I’ve shown him the movie, we screened it for him up in Toronto, and he seemed to be really positive on the film, at least to me. Obviously, that’s a nerve-wracking call; ‘So, Mr. Romero, what did you think of, ah, your movie?’ But he seemed quite positive, so that was exciting.


Given his ardent following, how did you face the pressure of potential fanboy/fangirl backlash?

I was somewhat emboldened by the success of Dawn of the Dead to be honest, that didn’t hurt. Not that this is the same as that remake, this is a much different take on one of his movies, but I felt that having George Romero approve the idea and it wasn’t that we bought the rights from some studio that had had a fight with him – the rights were bought directly from George Romero – and that helps. It’s also a movie that’s much lesser-known than a lot of his movies and people love it, and people hold it in high esteem but it’s a much smaller audience. The people that love it are real cinephiles. I think those audience members are such hardcore fans of his that they’d be willing to see, and happy to see, a rebirth or another re-imagining of his movie.


Timothy Olyphant in The Crazies
Timothy Olyphant has a rather tough day at work (Courtesy of Alliance Films)

How did Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell [who play the married town sheriff and doctor, respectively] come on board?

Well, Tim was the number one for me. His was the lead character so I started with him and you make all these lists and Tim was the first and only person we went to on the movie, which never happens, so that was exciting. And then once we cast him, it was like, who is the right person for this other role and who is the right person to go with Tim? And we again made these giant lists and again Radha came right at the top of the list - she is perfect for it - and once again we had the luck of the first person we went to, was willing to do it. We know that the two of them carry the movie, and the thing that I found interesting about the script and the process is that oftentimes in genre movies, you set up the married couple as the perfect couple and everything’s great and it feels like a fairytale to me. Yeah, this couple’s in love and they’re very connected but they have their own issues that existed even before the movie starts. I wanted the movie to be realistic in the portrayal of a relationship that is both loving and conflicted in the normal human ways.


The look of this film feels very believably and tangibly small-town. Where was it filmed?

We were on-location, we shot in rural Georgia and rural Iowa so I always find that taking your crew and your cast away from their own environments is great for the movie because everyone bonds, especially when you’re in a small town, where there’s nothing else to do. So everybody spends a lot of time together and on our days off, everyone is at the same bar or at the same Denny’s so that experience was great. The movie was a tough shoot, it was cold and buggy and there was a lot of night shoots. It was go, go, go, non-stop. Everything was location, nothing was built. The sheriff’s office was a bank that was actually open while we were shooting. [Laughs] I like doing that. In a day and age where a lot of the work we do is CG and a lot of the stuff on-set is your imagination, it was fun to have everything really be there.


There are plenty of cover-your-eyes, jump-from-your-seat moments in The Crazies. What makes a good scary movie?

Good concept, first and foremost, a great script, good characters it evolves with, a good villain or villains, those are the easy, big broad answers. But then what you’ve got to build is great tension – a good scare is all about the lead-up – and shooting a good scare set-piece is like shooting a good action set-piece. It’s all about the tension and the build-up to the actual shot or the stab, or whatever the scare is. I think to make a really good scary moment, you don’t need necessarily a big set-piece as long as you have good tension and you keep the audience tense as long as you can, give them a break just long enough so they can catch their breath and then start ratcheting it up again.


What would you like audiences to get from this movie?

Scared, first and foremost. The movie is a ride: it’s exciting, it’s terrifying, and that’s the primary experience of going to the movie. I also hope that…the message is in there. You know, Romero, in his early days, was very much about the message and I want to make sure the message - don’t just blindly trust the military automatically, or the politicians, make sure you’re aware of yourself and your surrounding and the world that we live in - I hope that message comes through.




The Crazies opens in Cineplex Theatres February 26.



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