Deborah Snyder on Intimate ‘Army of the Dead’ Shoot and Finding Closure with ‘Justice League’

The producer was working in commercials, but would often visit her then-fiancé Zack Snyder on the Toronto set of his zombie film.

And on Friday, she helps Zack Snyder return to his zombie roots with Netflix’s Army of the Dead, which hits around 600 theaters before arriving on the streaming service May 21.

Army of the Dead sees Dave Bautista’s Scott lead a rag-tag team into a zombie-infested casino to retrieve $200 million stored in its vault.

The duo reduced the number of people on set, and Zack Snyder discouraged the use of director’s chairs because the philosophy was that only those working on a specific scene should be on set at a given time.

As the Snyders launch a new franchise with Army of the Dead, they may have said goodbye to another with Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

25 release of Wonder Woman 1984 that nearly half of its retail subscribers had watched the movie on its premiere day.

Which is interesting, producers saying, “Yeah maybe this isn’t the right time.” We felt the movie was not a lower-budget movie and it didn’t have the spectacle to compete with something like a World War Z.

Then after spending all these years playing with superheroes, we were talking about, “What do we do next?” And Zack was like, “I always loved that idea, but the way the script was, I didn’t spend as much time developing it with an eye toward directing it, so I’d love to rewrite it.” We found this amazing writer, Shay Hatton, and Zack and he clicked and they wrote it together.

I think they were loving what they saw, but it was a bold move to develop these other projects.

The zombie pandemic is happening in America, and it’s causing instability in the banking and financial institutions so they are consolidating some of the money and this team goes together.

We couldn’t go to Vegas in a casino and shoot, because we had to destroy it, which is why Atlantic City was great, because there’s a bunch of vacant casinos sitting there.

For the actors, to have Zack in the heat with a camera on his shoulder right next to them, they felt like he was in the trenches with them.

How often do you get to decide you want to be a part of something and it’s already made? The big joke was, it was only her for 14 days.

He’ll see the scene cut before we break down a set so if he wants to add something, he usually does during the body of the shoot.

The studios are so focused on big IP and tentpoles, but there is a lot of other content the streamers are getting made that wouldn’t get made if it wasn’t for them.

The love from the fans for that film and for Zack’s vision and to be able to complete that vision was the why of it for us.

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