Inside “Weapons”: Zach Cregger on Atlanta Crews, Practical Effects, and That Haunting Opening

Weapons became one of the year’s most acclaimed box office hits, and while the film’s success was certainly by design, it still surprised writer/director Zach Cregger. Cregger knows how to craft a movie that gets under your skin—his last film, Barbarian, was one of 2022’s most unsettling and surprising films, not even he could have predicted that Weapons would become a pop culture phenomenon.

The story Cregger presents in his new film is deceptively simple; one night, at exactly the same time, all but one child from a class mysteriously vanishes. Creggor populates the film with excellent actors—Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Benedict Wong, and Amy Madigan—as the townsfolk try to find their children and figure out what in the hell is going on.

With Weapons arriving on Digital, Creggor tells The Credits that the film’s success was a series of happy accidents, good luck, and timing, and a stellar local crew in Atlanta, Georgia.

What do you make of Weapons’ box office success?

I don’t know how to feel about it. I certainly don’t know what to say. It makes me incredibly satisfied, and you hope to God you get a reaction anywhere near half of this, so for it to do what it’s done is a dream come true. It’s been very strange for me, because I’ve been in Prague prepping another movie since before the movie came out. I haven’t been in the States or any English-speaking nation for the release, so I’m experiencing the success through phone calls with friends, and the little I dare to put my toe in on social media.

Weapons was filmed in and around Atlanta. Was that a creative choice, or partly influenced by incentives?

That was the motivator. I was originally hoping to shoot it in the Pacific Northwest, then I was really trying to get it going in Cincinnati, but the lottery system for their tax rebate is insane, so we couldn’t risk it. At the time, I was a little bummed to go to Atlanta because I was hoping for a grey, cold movie, and Atlanta is the hot South. I was like, ‘Well, I want this to look like Prisoners,’ then I found out they shot Prisoners in Atlanta. We had to do some scouting, and I ended up finding these locations that perfectly suited the story. I hit the jackpot with my crew. The crews in Atlanta were the most lovely, skilled, joyful people.

Did you need to bring many people in?

I brought in my cinematographer, producer, costume designer, line producer, and special effects makeup person, but everyone else was local. It would be a grave error to bring an outside person in to run locations.

Are you aware of the Weapons tourism, for want of a better phrase, where people are now visiting and checking out the locations?

No, I was not aware of this. It’s funny because the neighborhood where we shot was so good to us. They were so welcoming, really inviting, and didn’t give us hassle at all. We shot in almost every house, with kids running out and all kinds of stuff, so we saturated that place. I remember thinking, ‘If this movie makes any kind of a splash, I do worry.’ You hear about Breaking Bad and people throwing pizza on that house’s roof, driving them crazy. I was like, ‘I hope these poor people don’t get their lives made more hectic.’

Tell me about the main house because that becomes the dark heart of Weapons.

We must have looked at 150 houses, and that is no exaggeration. We needed one that was situated at the end of a T-junction because when you open the door, you have to look straight down the street. It had to be a two-story house on a slight rise, it had to have woods in the background, and it had to have the neighboring house very close so that when she goes round back, it feels like she’s trespassing. I also had to have an unobstructed view from the front door to the stop sign across the street, the backyard had to not have a dip, even though almost every house in Atlanta does, and the owner had to be willing to let us shoot there. It was a needle in a haystack. It was one of those things where I was losing my mind thinking, ‘We don’t have a movie if we don’t have our hero house.’ I remember the day we turned down that road. I saw it at the end of the block, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this might be it.’ You get out, you get excited, and then you knock on the door. They couldn’t have been nicer.

There were people living there? I assumed it was an empty property.

No, you go and ring doorbells and you say, ‘Hi, your house looks great. We’re part of a movie crew. Would you be down to let us poke around?’ Most people are like, ‘Of course,’ and you go in, they’re living their lives, so you go look in all the rooms. You’re a group of maybe seven people, having conversations about where you’re going to put furniture, and this is right in front of the owners. It’s a bizarre thing, but they were great. They could not have been more welcoming.

The opening scene with all the kids running out of the houses is so haunting. I can only imagine that it was tricky to shoot, even though it looks straightforward.

The hardest part was a looming strike, which meant we could not extend our production. We were shooting six-day weeks. Because of things like that sequence, which is obviously at night, it meant that we would wrap our first unit, and then Larkin Seiple, my DP, and I would start a new shift with a new crew and shoot that montage. Imagine what that does to the human body, and then you’re trying to get kids to run. It was really a difficult, challenging sequence because we were stitching it together on the sidelines of our main production. I’m very happy with it, though, so it was worth it.

Weapons look like you leaned heavily into practical effects. Was a lot of it in camera?

I’m glad you think that, but there’s a lot in this movie that is completely VFX. You would never know. For instance, the scene where Marcus, played by Benedict Wong, gets hit by the car; that’s not a real car, and that’s not a real person, but it looks good. It goes to show how, if you use VFX correctly, you can’t disparage it.

So what did you want to do practical?

We did a lot of practical, don’t get me wrong. The face peel is one example. All the eyeballs in this are VFX. The gun in the sky is obviously a visual effect. The head smash was all practical. We built three different moulds of Terry with his face in various stages of distress, and then you just hide the edit. When Gladys, played by Amy Madigan, cuts her hand, that’s VFX too.

What were the inspirations behind Gladys?

We wanted her to live in that uncanny valley. She has a lot of prosthetics on her face, but we never wanted her to look too crazy. You want her to look just off enough that you’re drawn in. That’s why we have got the little nubbins of teeth, why her nose is just a little bizarre, and she has one contact lens instead of two. There’s a slight asymmetry. The earlobes come down a little too long, so those are prosthetic just to give her a longer head. We looked at Cindy Sherman‘s photographs a lot. For me, I was really inspired by Twin Peaks, particularly when Kyle MacLachlan lands on the tarmac and the woman in the colorful outfit comes out and performs a dance. I saw that as a child, and it scared me so bad. I don’t know why, but it was this woman was so vibrant in this gray world, and it felt perverse.

There are many iconic artists in the new music genre, and it’s not easy to obtain approval to use the music of artists like George Harrison. Did you have a Plan B?

Everything we got was first choice. George Harrison was one I wrote in the script. From day one, I knew I needed that song. It was expensive and it hurt, but if you’re going to get music from a Beatle, you’re going to have to show up. It was money well spent. That song is phenomenal. The Percy Sledge song was in the script, and so was the Harry Nilsson one. I love music, and I was thinking about the music as I was writing it. Luckily, I had a studio that had my back, and we were able to get it.

Weapons is available on Digital and arrives on Blu-ray and 4K UHD on Tuesday, October 14, 2025.

Featured image: Director/Writer/Producer Zack Cregger with Julia Garner on the set of ‘Weapons.’ (Courtesy of Warner Bros)