Zack Snyder Breaks Down a Zombie Heist Scene from 'Army of the Dead'

So this is the inside of the safe.

But yeah, you have the Snyder cut

of Justice League over there.

Some of Saddam Hussein's AK-47s.

And then money.

Hi everyone, I'm Zack Snyder.

And this is notes on a scene from Army of the Dead.

Team's all here.

Lovely to have you all gathered here today.

Meet your target!

I find this kind of mashup of zombie, and heist,

and action really compelling for me.

This is my postmodern take on zombie action heist movie.

The scene we're about to see is a scene where Bly Tanaka,

who is the owner of the casino,

he's introducing them to the plan that he has

for them to get the money, and where it is.

And he's kind of explained everything

that's gonna happen in the movie.

So this is the obligatory warehouse scene

where everyone gets together to find out

what the plan for the movie is.

The Vegas Bly.

You can't fly into Vegas, it's restricted airspace.

But you can fly out.

There is an abandoned rescue helicopter

on top of the north tower.

We shot this scene in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

This is a really cool old train warehouse

where they used to repair and/or build trains.

And now it is abandoned, and used for movie production.

We had been out and about shooting a bunch of stuff

in and around Albuquerque while they built

our big backlot set, basically the big intersection

by the MGM and New York-New York.

While they were building that and getting that ready,

we were shooting these couple scenes

in and around Albuquerque.

You always have that scene in a heist movie

where they like lay out the plan.

And they might have a miniature, or some sort of slideshow,

or some kind of prepare the plan scene,

which I thought was pretty fun.

Also, by the way, Hiro was really good at

pulling that sheet off.

He nailed it every time, it was glorious to behold.

The miniature of the casino,

this is based on a casino that's in Atlantic City

where we actually shot the actual scenes inside the casino.

So this is, the whole bottom levels of this

are actually as they are in Atlantic City.

And then we made the casino a bit taller than it is.

That's where we extended the casino up, that section.

Also this pool area doesn't exist.

But yeah, so you'll see that later on,

as we make our way into Vegas itself.

If you coordinate and communicate

this should be a simple in and out.

[dynamic music]

You enter--

This is a 360 degree dolly.

This, we shot on the intersection set.

You could see like some of those zombies

are CG and some are real.

These guys at this level are real.

And this guy's probably CG.

And then as they go back across this entire environment,

back here is all CG.

In the film it's the first time

we see the whole crew together.

It's very much a put together the team movie, as well,

as all the other genres.

And so, yeah, having them all lined up there,

I looked at more like a Dirty Dozen

or Magnificent Seven style,

there's the team kind of a moment.

These were all gas guns.

This is like a 50 round magazine.

And these were, they're soft air guns.

So they're not firing anything except for air.

So all the muzzle flashes were added,

all the shell casings were added.

And the reason I did that

was because I knew we'd be going quickly.

I love using real blanks, but in this case

I knew that it would slow us down to have an armorer

on set all the time, and reloading all the things.

So with the gas guns we were able to do it safely,

of course, too, because I knew I'd be

going in front of there.

I've shot a lot with blanks.

And the problem is, when you move in front of the camera,

there's a lot of stuff, actual fire, and gunpowder,

and wadding, comes out of the barrel of the gun.

And so I have to like have shields,

and they have to build all these things

to protect the camera and me

from something that might come out of the barrel.

But in this case, since it's air, it's 100% safe.

But it does move the gun.

When the soft air fires, it wiggles the gun.

So it gives them a little bit of like resistance.

See the shell casings and everything.

Sam Win I've worked with for a long time.

I met her as a stunt performer,

but she's an amazing actress as well.

She's a complete ass-kicker.

And it was just, it was great to put her in the movie.

You see them all in their most fantasy version

of fighting zombies where they're just completely in zone.

The audience is supposed to be at that point,

like these guys are stone cold zombie killers.

This'll be no problem for them.

The bat for Matthias was because it's the most,

it's a very iconographic zombie killing tool

in a sort of fantasy sense.

This is a super impractical device.

Nailing big nails through a bat.

It seems like a cool idea from a zombie standpoint,

but in reality, he's got the most impractical tool.

[raucous music]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!

My apologies, how precisely do we do the zombie killing?

Oh Jesus.

Like he looks at the bat

and then goes, wait, wait a minute.

How exactly are we doing the zombie killing?

'Cause you guys all have machine guns.

[Scott] Is there anybody else here

who hasn't killed a zombie?

We were really trying to personalize everybody

because when you have a big ensemble, it's good to

kind of be able to have icons, to separate them.

Like you have, Ana has her key,

and Scott has his glasses.

And there's always like little trinkets

that identify each person.

But this is also good example of you can see, I shot this,

this is a 50 mil, one of the Dream lenses.

And you can see the bokeh, all of these crazy

the way it renders the background in this kind of

super crazy, and the depth of field is so short.

Like if you can look, his shoulder's out of focus,

and like the fall off is like right in there.

And I just felt like by really trying to reduce

the depth of field constantly,

you're always isolating everyone,

and kind of bringing them into this kind of narrow view.

And it's slightly claustrophobic.

It makes the movie feel claustrophobic,

even though you're outside half the time.

So I thought that was really, it really,

and I just think it's beautiful.

Like, look at that.

It's creamy and crazy.

And of course, Tig wasn't there for any of this.

Tig was added later.

It was a real exercise for me, technically,

as a cinematographer to have shot this

incredibly organic, handheld, like, natural light film.

And then have to go onto a stage and reproduce the lighting

exactly in the most technically accurate way possible.

So it was like a really kind of a crazy exercise to say,

okay, we're gonna put Tig into the movie,

but it has to look like this weird,

organic, completely natural thing.

And you could see that you can't tell that she wasn't there.

And in all these shots, so look.

[Bly] From there, you move down the strip.

There's Tig right there.

She's completely CG in this shot.

So we picked up, each one of those pieces was done,

even the out of focus little pieces of her,

were done specifically for that moment.

And shot against green screen on a stage.

And she was completely added.

One of the fun things about this

was the different character zombies

that would be in Las Vegas.

Like I think this guy, he looks like a dealer.

We had all the jobs of the different people.

And Stephanie loved putting people in track suits.

And for some reason, she had this idea

that everyone in Vegas had track suits on.

And I thought it was great.

So this is a good example of a good geography moment.

Here is, back here, that's the Olympus, right?

This is a casino we added.

This doesn't exist in real life.

And then the Bly is behind us.

You know, you can sort of see, there's the Bellagio,

this is the Paris, kind of where we are

in the reality of Vegas.

This is a paratrooper.

In the title sequence you see

all these paratroopers coming into Vegas.

There's a number of these, when you watch the movie,

that if you kind of tally them up,

you can, it's like a quiz show.

Like how many hanging, how many paratroopers

didn't make it to the ground in the movie?

And there's a handful of them.

And you can find them.

And if you look, this guy's kind of just slightly swinging.

We shot this in Albuquerque on a hill, outside the studio.

We built this hill with a tractor.

And sorta like this is real.

And then the green screen was back there.

So we had this little hill and we had a couple

little pieces of foreground rubble.

And then that's green screen back there.

And so all that's of course, digital.

[Bly] You'll reach the casino in less than two hours.

You go in and find the generator.

This was us building the casino.

The idea of this back here was,

that's daylight back there, but we built this.

Of course, the idea is that there's like

of course no windows in casinos.

We put it in there because I knew that when they

arrived at the casino, there would be no power on.

And so if you didn't have like some sort of light sources,

distant light sources, it would be just black in there

and there'd just be flashlight light.

And I just, I always, I like the idea

of that little kind of blue rim.

[bomb exploding]

[Bly] Is at the end of the hallway.

There's the Gotterdammerung.

If you look closely, right in this area,

there's a placard that says Gotterdammerung,

and where it was built in Germany.

Because in the prequel, Matthias' movie,

you learn all about the guy who designed these safes.

I came up with this idea for this mythology

of the safes based on Wagner's Ring Cycle.

And so each of the safes was named

for a chapter in that opera.

And our character, Dieter, in Germany two years before this,

in the movie that we already shot,

that's the companion movie for this,

he's trying to crack those other safes.

[Bly] Meanwhile, our fearless

pilot/mechanic fuels the helicopter.

[dynamic music]

That's just bad-ass Tig shots.

I really love the way this shot came out.

'Cause I just, I just love Tig.

You have to analyze her helmet.

I work with this guy, Adam Foreman,

who's an amazing tattoo artist and graphic designer.

And I said, come up with some cool stuff for the helmet.

And he just came up with some great ideas for it.

There's a reference on the back,

no ass, no grass, no gas, no free ride.

Just fun, 'cause she's just, look at her.

She's amazing.

I think she just liked the idea of having a cigarillo.

'Cause she thought like,

that's something she would never do. [laughs]

And she just was like, I think my character would be like.

She picked the cigarillo.

This was like one of the only shots,

we went to an airport and I just filmed this shot of this,

because our helicopter doesn't work.

It was the only time we had to use a real helicopter,

'cause everything else was CG.

Like when the helicopter's flying and stuff,

it was completely just CG prop.

We had it on a crane and kind of just lifted it up.

[Bly] Back at the main door our safe cracker gets to work.

Like a surgeon, or a painter.

His masterpiece rendering barely audible clicks.

So this is the inside of the safe.

But yeah, you have the Snyder cut

of Justice League over there.

Some of Saddam Hussein's AK-47s.

And then money.

We kind of did this embellishment

of lighting the inside of the safe, 'cause it's just sexy.

I don't know that that would be real.

[Bly] Then, all you have to do

is load the money on the helicopter.

So in this shot, we shot this twice.

Here's Tig, right?

That's, this is actually Tig.

When we put Tig in the shot, we had this shot already

of the helicopter, and we built the dolly track.

And what I would do is I would,

I kind of had a good idea where the camera was

when we shot it in Albuquerque.

So I would get a monitor

and I literally would take a grease pencil like this.

And I would line up, I would literally draw

on the monitor to line up the shot.

Because if you look, if you superimpose it,

you can take these two elements, the front element

and the back element, to find the height of the camera.

So like if you keep booming down, down, down,

and you can get this line and this line to line up,

you'll know the camera's at the right height.

And then you go left and right.

And you line up this, these two and this one,

and now you know the camera is left and right correct.

And then what we did is,

'cause we had the duplicate helicopter,

and then we put Tig in the seat,

and we literally manually dollied the camera.

And I would try and operate

'cause there's a little bit of operation,

when I'd watch the monitor

and try and keep all the lines lined up.

And then in post they glued it together, and it worked.

And then we also had to do it the exact same time of day

'cause all the shadows had to match.

And if you watch, look it, she closes the door, boom

[Bly] Fly off into the sunset.

This is a full CG shot.

Nothing like this happens really in the movie,

in the real movie, or the movie that,

what happens to them when they go

into the reality of the heist.

But I really wanted this like really beautiful

Apocalypse Now style fly into the sun

on the helicopter shot,

with the gleaming kind of pieces of Vegas.

This kind of romantic.

I remember laboring over the amount of heat distortion

that was coming out of the motors,

and the amount that it would like,

that this heat would kind of be displaced

in the reality of the helicopter behind it.

[raucous music]

[Bly] All this, a full day

before the nuke ever leaves the launchpad.

I like this sort of, after a giant helicopter shot,

to get us back into sort of the reality of the story.

It just felt like a really nice

little way to snap us out of it.

Sorry to be too literal.

But that was kind of the, [laughs]

that's kind of where it comes from.

I love this little sequence.

It's kind of like that great.

It's a version of the expectation

of how easy it's gonna be to do it.

And you can imagine it's not quite as easy

as what are they lay out here.