Having lunch, and like, three dead people walk by,
and you're like, "This is my life now."
Their sweat's dripping on me.
At some point, you just want to tell and take everything off.
"Look out!"
I got the, um, Oscar in the end.
I will steal some of his tricks.
Hey everyone, I'm Zack Snyder,
director, cinematographer, and writer of Army of the Dead.
I was talking to Scott Stuber,
and Scott was my executive on Dawn of the Dead.
I wanted to make a movie, it'd be good to do it with Netflix.
I mentioned, "Oh yeah."
"I have this idea for this zombie heist film set in Vegas,
where these guys have to go in
and get this money out of a safe that's under the strip,
and battle zombies to get it."
And then everyone was like, "Well, that sounds like a great movie."
"Let's make that movie."
I was actually at a party,
and it was through Zack Snyder's agent
who was telling me about the script,
and immediately, I just wasn't interested at all,
because I wasn't looking for an action film.
The thing I really love about Dave is that he's intimidating,
and he has all those qualities,
but he also has this vulnerability.
My agent said, "At least read the script."
So I did, I read through it,
and it wasn't what I thought it was.
I'd been talking with Dave a lot,
and we really wanted to work together.
Then I was sold.
Who else is on your crazy-ass list?
I get a call from my agent saying…
"You got Army of the Dead!"
I was like, "Army of the Dead. What is it again?"
"It's a Zack Snyder movie," and I'm like, "What?"
Seems like an interesting premise, I've never done anything like it before.
Oh my God, Zack Snyder, I've wanted to work with him for ages.
Yeah, this is gonna be huge.
Oh please, dear God, I want to have this part.
I get a call out of nowhere, and they said,
"Zack Snyder wants to talk on the phone with you,"
and I remember it pretty clearly.
I was out somewhere in Manhattan on a day off with my wife and kid,
and I was like, "I have to go back to the hotel, right now,
'cause I have to talk to Zack Snyder."
Hundred percent, I'm in, yeah.
You don't want to know the risks, or--
Why would I want to know the risks?
While I was filming alone,
I thought at times that I was the star of the movie.
Zack is likely a lot of times
just filming me blurry in the background.
And I told him that that dawned on me,
and we had a bit of a chuckle together about that.
Can I show you what Zack gave me?
He presented this to me on my last day.
This Oscar for best out-of-focus actor.
I got the…
the Oscar, in the end.
We had a large ensemble cast, maybe the largest I've worked with.
W-w-w-w-wait!
How precisely do we do the zombie killing?
Oh, Jesus.
Everybody is an expert now on how to kill a zombie,
even though they don't really exist.
We shot guns for like, two weeks before starting.
I mean, I don't think I ever once got
a shot in the middle of the bullseye.
I don't even think I hit the paper. I think I was very far off.
We had a team come in and would split us into groups,
and we would take buildings, and clear rooms,
and he'd show us proper technique for things.
One time we had a quick-draw contest.
And they lined us all up,
and whoever was last, he would toss out,
and we'd just keep going.
And it got down to me and Ana.
She smeared me. Smeared me.
I saw it out of the corner of my eye,
like hers was already up, and mine was just coming out.
So she won the prize.
Yeah.
Funny, because I had no idea what kind of machine it was.
It's like the biggest gun machine out there.
The bullets were like, this big.
Your whole body moves with the machine,
like you feel everything vibrating.
I did kali for years, which is a Filipino martial art,
knife fighting,
and I finally got to do some of it on film.
So there's a particular moment in the vault,
where I get to do some of that, which I love,
because I've never had a chance to show that side of my performance.
We had deconstructed, in some ways, the genre when we did Dawn.
On this film, we were challenging ourselves conceptually
to bend it as far as we can without breaking it.
So what if we had a zombie that, for either a government experiment,
or maybe it's something having to do with Area 51,
has special powers?
So we created the alphas.
They're smarter, they're faster, they're organised.
Straight out of your nightmares.
When you've got them there,
and they’ve got the prosthetics and the hair, and contacts,
I mean, it's amazing.
One scene where I was,
there were hundreds and hundreds of them running by,
and I was hiding from them.
The scene with the queen,
when she checks out Theo Rossi, the sacrifice,
to see if she wants to take him,
like, having her jump down, was genuinely terrifying.
No, no, no!
The queen and the other zombie kind of physically over me,
and their makeup is so incredible, and their sweat's dripping on me.
You feel like you're in it.
There was multiple makeup artists,
and they had this whole zombie, kind of…
line that they were just putting all the background,
all the zombies through.
When you see 'em running at you, and like, the scenes in the casino,
where you got like 50 super freaky athletic guys
that look like zombies just running at you,
it's terrifying.
It really helps you be in the moment.
People might be in full zombie makeup,
but they'll walk by you, like, eating a banana,
and they're like, "'Sup?"
You're having lunch, and like, three dead people walk by,
and you're like, "This is my life now."
All the stunt girls were so cool.
I was feeling bad that I had to kill them.
I loved shooting that rooftop sequence with Nora,
where she has the zombie queen's head in her hands,
and she's threatening it.
We had Athena's real head,
so when she'd be like, "Look out," like that, literally,
she was on a dolly, being boomed up,
and then we had in the wide shots, we had an animatronic head,
that a guy on a remote control made bite and stuff.
But if you look, if you watch Athena's performance,
she's actually like, nervous, or she's wanting Zeus to save her,
like, I really think what Athena does in the scene
is equal to what everyone else is doing.
How's it going up there?
Good. I actually found a pool.
I'm working on my tan.
Gotta even this shit out. Know what I'm talking about?
Making a zombie film gave me a new-found respect for the genre,
because it is hard work.
There were long days, hard hours, some of it was very physical.
The constant fear, the constant breath work,
the constant tension, and the shaking,
and having to be in fear five days a week for six months,
it's quite tiring.
One day, there was so much lightning
that we had to stop shooting
and wait for the lightning to pass over,
and that was kinda crazy.
It was hot and uncomfortable out in the desert.
You know, I like the heat. I live in Florida.
We're out in the desert, it's a dry heat.
This is cushy to me.
I'm like Dave. I love the heat, I don't care.
But at some point you want to go to your trailer, take everything off.
A lot of times, there were PAs walking around with us,
the umbrella next to us, and I'm like, "Stop, man."
I like the sun, I like the heat. It didn't bother me.
So Zack is interesting because he's wearing so many hats.
Not only director, but director of photography,
he held a camera, like, that's so rare.
Now I've got the camera, I'm two steps away from the actor.
I have my headphones on, I can hear the performance, and I can see it.
And so I can just say, like, "Okay, that was cool, let's go again."
And just give them a quick little note.
I don't have to walk back over to the monitor,
or be separated from them, I'm just literally in it with them.
It just feels like we're running and shooting.
He was just going into some tight spot,
or was squeezing himself into this dirty hole.
He's just fully invested in it, and he's an artist.
And I will steal from him.
Unapologetically, I will steal some of his tricks.
You, Mr. Sausage Finger!
You made me mess up, and now we're back to ground zero.
When the dialogue comes from character,
or if they're improv-ing from character,
not trying to do something, I think it's really healthy.
The scene when they recruited me in my lock shop,
and I was so nervous because it was my first day of shooting,
I started to do my improv stuff…
Watch your fingers, Mr. Big Hand.
I thought it would be funny if I went to snatch the map back,
and he was very possessive of it,
and started, you know, he started then with the Mr. Big Hands.
Dave started immediately to laugh.
He was just very dismissive of me,
but I thought it made for a funny interaction.
And Zack was like, "What was that?"
But there are a lot of improv moments,
and Zack gives you a lot of freedom,
which I love as a performer.
You know when he's happy because he nods his head,
he smiles, and he's like, "That's it."
And then he moves in closer with the camera.
He called me probably after set one day, and said "We need you."
And I said "Okay."
I thought it might be stunt coordinating, you know,
I got to work on something, we got to reshoot a scene.
He said, "No, no."
He said, "I really need to tie it all together."
So he created a scene.
Nobody else knew about it,
except for obviously Zack, and those four crew members,
who got up at like, 4 am to set out to the desert to do this scene.
He needed that scene to round off again the storyline,
my character within the storyline.
There's the improv, and he allowed it,
and Zack just perfectly captures it,
like nobody's business.
I felt like the movie had to have, at its heart, emotion,
because, you know, that's the thing that keeps the world sort of real.
I know this is not gonna make up for what I did,
or what type of father I was.
Yeah.
Me, Dave Bautista,
I do have an estranged relationship with my daughters,
and I drew on that for Scott's relationship with Kate.
Kate!
-You're not coming! -I'm not asking you!
I'm telling you it's gonna happen.
When Scott has to put his wife down,
that moment wasn't written out as a very emotional scene.
It just turned into something else.
We probably spent, like, 10, 15 minutes talking about the timeline,
everything that's built up.
This scene was the reason why Scott and Kate's relationship fell apart.
You really try to create this real,
intense father-daughter relationship,
that you know goes through a series of stages over the course of the film,
and their relationship to each other.
My and Dave's storyline, it really got to me.
I will say that this experience of shooting
was probably my favourite experience of any film I've made.
He had a zombie flashmob to the song "Thriller",
and it was so cool, and crazy,
and everyone jumped in the pool, I mean, it was like…
It was just wild.
Very friendly, but so professional.
It was a great atmosphere on the set.
Is there more zombie movies in the future?
I'd like to see. I want to know. I want the insight, Zack.
Is that what's going on? Let me know.
Let me see what I can do.
I haven’t seen the script.
Alright. I'll leave you guys to it.
-Goodbye. -See you guys.
-Goodbye. -Bye everyone.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for spending time with Army of the Dead.
-Is it Linus? -It's Linus.
Linus!