Celebrated for his film Weapons, the director and screenwriter Zach Cregger returns to the cinema on September 17 with his take on Resident Evil, ready to face the highly aggressive fandom of Capcom’s thirty-year horror video game saga. Indeed, apart from the paycheck, which we assume wasn’t small, it is somewhat surprising that such a personal author would accept a project not based on his own original concept. Cregger is aware of this contradiction, and he explained it in an interview with Deadline.
Zach Cregger Took on Resident Evil Simply Because He Is a Video Game Fan
After signing Weapons, which earned an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Amy Madigan in the role of the deadly Gladys, Zach Cregger effectively became a significant “author” in the horror genre, at least for those who had not pegged him after the already acclaimed Barbarian. Now that Resident Evil is coming, Deadline asks him if he doesn’t feel now arrived, because they’ve handed him a major brand: “I’ve made things clear: I don’t work on franchises. I’ve done this and that. I won’t tackle other franchises, because I am a writer, I want to write what I want. I don’t want to write something where I have to make sure to connect all the points to satisfy so-and-so. I just want to satisfy myself. And the only reason I think Resident Evil fits me is that I love video games, I like the story that came to me and I’m doing it for me. I think it’s a cool film, I hope it meets fans’ expectations, because I’m a fan and it does it for me. I’m making the Resident Evil movie I would have liked to exist, so I’m light-hearted and my conscience is clean, without feeling screwed by some studio trap. […] In fact it is indeed an original story, but it is a story within the world of Resident Evil: I mean, I didn’t adapt one of the game’s plots.”
To confirm the process, Cregger in the interview explains how it was he himself who pitched his concept for a Resident Evil film to Constantin Film, urged by his producer Roy Lee, who had asked him which video game he would like to adapt, while he was still finishing Barbarian. He replied: “Only Resident Evil“. The rest is history: buoyed by the niche success of Barbarian, he was really able to present to Constantin with his idea (“very simple“). He wrote the screenplay with Shay Hatten, imagining that they would choose a more renowned director to helm it, but at that point the Weapons phenomenon had exploded and he received the green light to handle the film in full, even as director.
Comments