Zack Snyder removed a zombie stripper from ‘Army of the Dead’.
Zack Snyder
The 55-year-old filmmaker’s latest movie sees a group of mercenaries venture into quarantined Las Vegas, which has been hit by a zombie outbreak, to pull off a heist and although there are a number of outrageous scenes and characters - including footage of undead Liberace, Elvis Presley, a horse and even a tiger - there was a point where he felt his ideas had gone too far.
He admitted: “We had a sequence where one of the male strippers had a huge penis with a bite taken out of it. We thought that was too much.”
The film finished shooting before the coronavirus pandemic hit and Zack insisted any references to the global health crisis – including temperature checks being undertaken on humans in the locked-down area – were purely coincidental.
He told Sunday Times Culture: “All coincidental! But the more I saw what was happening, I didn’t know if the movie would be cathartic or scary.”
However, he insisted it was important the movie featured “social commentary” that people could relate to, despite the outlandish theme.
He said: “But of course George Romero said it was all social commentary. And we felt obliged to do that with this movie.
“Editorialise a little bit and zombie movies are a great place to talk about us as a people. Ours is a monster movie where the monster is us. It is a social movie more than a science movie - the science is pretty iffy.”
Meanwhile, the ‘Justice League’ filmmaker would love to make a ‘Star Wars’ movie but admitted he doesn’t think his unique screen outlook would be suited to the series.
He said: “Where it gets difficult is when you take a director with a personal point of view and ask him to participate in a thing that is not asking for that.
“The journeyman film-maker? There are a lot of them, and they’re good. I just happen to have a specific point of view.
“The lesson I’ve learnt is it’s much easier for me, as a film-maker, to create a world and invite you into it. As opposed to me saying, ‘Let me put my cog in your wheel.’ Like, I would love to make a ‘Star Wars’ movie, I know a lot about it — but I don’t think I would survive that.”
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