Bloody-Disgusting spent an evening on the chilly set of THE CRAZIES April 7th in Fort Valley, GA at Peach County High School. During the windy, brisk night we had the chance to view a crucial scene involving a military attempt to contain the virus by dividing the infected from the healthy into large, fenced internment camps. The shoot is one of the biggest scenes in the movie and you can read more about it in our CRAZIES set report.

Before the big scene, director Breck Eisner took some time to sit down with press and discuss the movie as well as the night’s big shoot ahead.

BD: What parts of the original film did you want to change?

Breck Eisner: Any time you do a remake or a re-imagining, you want to have target aspects of the movie that they didn’t have access to when they first made it. My theory is they should have something they couldn’t do the first time around that you could do differently. It’s not like you’re just redoing PSYCHO or redoing a perfect film. Romero obviously had limitations in terms of the budget. He had $275 grand to make the entire movie. We’re obviously spending more money than that. It’s not a big-budget movie, but we have bigger assets so that we can represent the government with the scale and force that it needs to be in a movie like this. It’s this oppressive and realistic force.

BD: The narrative of the original played both sides. Does this film play the same way and does it lean to either side?

BE: There is no military point-of-view. The original script by Scott Kozar was mostly military and it was more of an action movie. When I came on the movie, my first thought was I wanted to get rid of the point of view of the military. Any time you [have that], it goes away from horror and it goes to action, BOURNE IDENTITY kind of tension and not horror tension. To me, it was much more interesting being in the point of view of our townsfolk and with this oppressive, nameless, faceless force of the military and the bio-containment suits wandering around and being the force that’s putting them through the terror [along with] the other infected Crazies that are roaming the town.”

BD: In the original Romero movie, there is this idea that you never really know if people are going crazy or is it the fear the military is inspiring. Are you taking that and is there other commentary you are hoping to make with this?

BE: There’s a bunch of commentary we’re hoping to make and that’s one of the things I really enjoyed about the original. For me, there’s this sense of Augden Marsh, which is the name of the town where our heroes live, as this idyllic place. But we’re not painting it in a perfect landscape. The idea is that the characters are natural and real but underneath there are these competing agendas and human qualities. A lot of times small town people say, ‘Oh it’s perfect, everything ideal and like the ‘50s and everything back then was so easy’ but that’s not the reality.

The idea for me was of this disease, when you get infected, it unlocks these deep latent qualities in people and it brings them to the forefront. There are these hunter characters, for example, who we meet when they are in the act of actually hunting and they stumble on a plot point and our heroes end up following that plot point. Those hunters will come back in the movie infected. It’s not a zombie movie, it doesn’t turn them into creatures of a certain agenda. ‘Brains, brains,’ or whatever the agenda of a zombie happens to be. You maintain your identity to a degree or your drive or your persona. It just becomes extremely heightened and focused to a point of almost absurdity. That was the idea we’ve been playing with in terms of what the effects actually are.

In terms of social commentary, this project definitely began under the regime of George Bush. There is definitely a social commentary to the feeling of the use of military as a machine and the ends justifying the means. There is a clear delineation between the soldier ordered to do something and the mechanism of the military used to accomplish an ends. That concept is a strong message in the movie, which is one of the reason I didn’t want to go to the government point-of-view. I didn’t want to see these people debate what they should do. I wanted to see the effects of their decisions on the lives of this small town.

BD: It must be difficult to enter a project and make it different from the Romero stuff and films like 28 Days Later, etc.

BE: It’s a theme that’s tread on over and over again. When horror is best, it’s themes that are dealing with reality and your latent fears that are brought to the surface. One of the things I’m hoping to do is dive into those themes and update Romero in a post-Vietnam world. I think the times we are living in are kind of similar to the time when Romero made it felt like the time was right to make this for that reason.

BD: Are there physical changes in the crazies?

BE: There are five stages of the Crazies. The first is before anything happens, the fifth is when you’re dead. The second stage is a performance-based craziness which is somebody you know acting differently but not looking differently at all. The next two stages are various levels of physical differences. We did a lot of R & D with Rob Hall from Almost Human. We did a lot of different tests. The challenge for us was making them look interesting and iconic but not like zombies and not so far over the top that you don’t believe that it could be a sickness that made this happen. I wanted to go far enough that there is an iconic quality to it. You’ll see, when they’re at the very latest stages of the disease, its pretty pronounced. We used a lot of references. We used Ebola, Rabies, Tetanus. There are a couple of other disease references. We went through these really horrific books. We took Steven Johnson Syndrome and said, ‘What if instead of weeks it took 12 hours?’ And if we took Rabies, that idea where you can see it tightens up all the musculature.

BD: Why are you shooting in Georgia?

BE: Tax breaks. But also, for us, I really wanted the wide open plains. Originally it took place in Nebraska and now it takes place in Iowa and we are doing two weeks [there] starting Tuesday. What worked nicely here is we could have that same scope. There are wide open spaces and old houses and this school (Peach County High School) and a truck stop and a car wash. Its quite film-friendly and it also fits the look of the movie.”

BD: Why not just set the film in Georgia?

BE: I wanted this idea that there is nowhere to hide and there are literally miles of open space. Our heroes are not trapped in small boxes, but open spaces that go on for miles and miles and miles. It’s all just wheat or old corn fields. There’s literally nowhere to hide. You have 30-mile visibility all the way around. You’re stuck walking down these roads completely visible. The problem with setting it in Georgia is there is a lot of forests so characters would be able to hide. I wanted it to be open with this terror in these open fields where there is nowhere to hide.

BD: What’s the level of violence? Is it more suggestive or in-your-face?

BE: It’s not in-your-face. It’s horrific and graphic, but I wanted a real quality to it. To me the people should feel real and when there’s death, we’re not shying away from blood when its appropriate or blood hits when there is an entry wound. We’re not shying away from blood, but its not a blood bath by any stretch of the imagination. It’s visceral and horrific.

BD: Are you going for an R?

BE: Oh yeah.

BD: What’s horrific about the original is what the characters do to one another in their madness. Do you have to accentuate that stuff to try to shock people?

BE: To me, the way that I wanted to ratchet it up was to know the characters that are being horrible to other characters. What I love about Carpenter’s The Thing is that you knew all these characters before they turned. You didn’t know who to trust. In this movie, my feeling is that the characters you know are the best ones to have go crazy. Its a lot less interesting to watch the generic background characters you’ve never seen before turn.

BD: What did Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell bring to the table.

BE: They’re great actors. I wanted this movie to have quality performers With those two as well as Danielle Panabaker and Joe Anderson, they’re all really strong actors. From there, someone like Tim is a very physical guy and we can do all this stunt work. That physicality brings so much to me. Radha has an amazing, emotionally expressive face and she can be terrified and go through the terror and sell it.

BD: What’s been the most difficult part of the shoot?

BE: I’ll let you know after today. (Laughs) Today’s our biggest military scene. The most difficult thing of the shoot is how ambitious we’re trying to be and how much we’re trying to get. There is a lot of scope to the movie and we don’t have a lot of time or money. Most of it comes down to schedule. Whether its a small, intimate fight in a room, which we’ve had or a big set piece at a truck stop, where we spent a week. Or in a car wash we had a big set piece.

BD: Are there any cameos from the original?

BE: Lynn Lowry. We’re shooting Lynn on Wednesday of next week. She’s playing a little role which should be fun. She has a fun cameo. That’s the only cameo we have scheduled right now.

BD: The original starts off fast and has these scenes that are completely shocking.

BE: We don’t have a father raping his daughter in this one. That one point was just a bit much for us. We talked about stuff like that because we had some weird stuff.

It’s a different movie. It’s definitely a re-imagining from the original. It’s update from the times. The idea of containing a town now with Twitter and satellite and the whole concept of controlling is so different now. There’s a lot that’s similar and probably more that’s different.

BD: Did you do any research on how a real military containment would take place?

BE: Some of it we’ve gone with what’s real and some of it we made up to make the story work. We talked to the CDC about how they would do a containment and what accelerated diseases could cause this. And then we’ve talked to military in terms of what the containment would be. The stakes are pretty high in the movie and that’s what we’re playing with.

THE CRAZIES hits theaters February 26, 2010 from Overture Films.

Full Crazies Report:

Click here for our set report
Click here for our interview with FX artist Rob Hall
Click here for our interview with star Radha Mitchell
Click here for our interview with director Breck Eisner