Zack Snyder sat in the back of a cramped, beat-up van, drenched in sweat. Perspiration waterfalled down his face. His back was soaked. He was on the verge of passing out.
It could have been the triple-digit jungle heat. He was in the southern reaches of Colombia after all. It could have been from the triple-digit degree fever that he didn’t know he had. (He would later find out he contracted COVID.) But he had a camera on his shoulder and what he did know was that he could not afford to stop shooting the scenes he needed to get that day. He was in the middle of finally making his passion project, The Last Photograph, and he was both director and cameraman. The movie was figuratively and literally on his shoulders.
When he returned to Leticia, Colombia’s southernmost city that sits on the Amazon River, a woman offered a trembling Snyder cough drops. “Halls is the answer?!” he thought to himself. “OK, fine. Fuck it.”
When I ask him if he tried wearing a mask, Snyder scoffs, “There are no masks in the Amazon. They don’t… there’s no masks. That’s hilarious.”
It’s now just under a year later. Snyder is sitting in his sleek, modern, aerie office high in the hills of Pasadena, prepping to go to the Toronto International Film Festival where Last Photograph will premiere Sunday. The score from Escape from New York is playing on a record player, adding mood to a day that surprisingly becomes rainy.
It’s been a 20-year journey to make the movie and in that time, Snyder went from a commercials and video director to a big Hollywood studio director, to then directing some of the biggest-budgeted, most heavily scrutinized movies of the century, Warner Bros.’s DC movies of the 2010s. His journey still not done, he endured a personal tragedy and the loss of control of DC mega-movie Justice League, followed by the storied affair of the #SnyderCut, and then a return via a pair, or maybe a trio, depending on how you want to count, of Netflix movies, Army of the Dead and the two-part Rebel Moon.
But Last Photograph saw Snyder working in a way he has never been before: As an independent filmmaker. There is no studio or streamer backing him. The scale is small, the budget smaller than some of the commercials he worked on earlier in his career.
“There’s no agenda to the movie. When you make a big studio movie, there’s a lot of things to consider about the product that you’re creating. Because it really is like a product much more than a thing that’s really a tone poem, you know what I mean?” he says.
He continues, “Like, the stakes are lower, right? You’re not trying to sell the audience something. You’re just giving them an experience and that experience doesn’t necessarily have to end with a sequel. I’m not trying to get them to go to another movie or buy a toy. The why of the movie is completely different.”
Making Last Photograph, he says, “was really singular and intimate and that was cathartic for me, to get the experience of making a movie that was really just true to itself and owed nothing but to the moments that we were trying to create.”
Snyder filming The Last Photograph in Colombia.
Daniel Billington
The story is set in an unnamed South American country and follows a heroin-addled war photographer who is the surviving witness to a mass murder that included a diplomat and his wife. When the diplomat’s brother shows up, the two men find themselves on a journey that takes them further and further away from the city and civilization, in search of the family’s kidnapped children. There is almost a mist-shrouded Knights of the Round Table searching for the Holy Grail quality at times, with the pair looking for their own Grail that can heal them.
Last Photograph began life as more of a spy or war thriller, but it was always a two-hander. At one point, it had A-listers like Sean Penn and Christian Bale attached to star, when it was set up at Warner Bros., Snyder’s once-longtime production home. But after the suicide of his daughter Autumn in 2017, however, and in the years after leaving the studio, Snyder began approaching the material differently.
“Yes, the framing is very similar and the events are similar, but what it became was a meditation on death and redemption,” he explains, “And, for me, about how people see the world in different ways.”
Snyder acquired the rights to Last Photograph back from Warners (the studio let it go after it was clear Snyder would not be taking it to a competitor). Unshackled from a studio, and with a limited budget, he assembled a small crew, marshaling his longtime partners — wife and producing partner Deborah Snyder and executive Wesley Coller — along with Gianni Nunnari, the Italian producer with whom he worked on the 2007 adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300. For his leads, Snyder tapped Scottish actor Stuart Martin and Irish actor Fra Fee, both co-starred in Snyder’s Rebel Moon.
In Last Photograph, none of the well-worn Snyder hallmarks appear: no slow motion or green-screen shot. (There is, however, a commando raid where a helicopter gets blown up.) The movie is beautifully photographed and artfully composed. Snyder decided he wanted act as cinematographer, something he did when he was starting out and directing commercials and finally returned to with Army of the Dead.
“The budgets got bigger, the movies got bigger, and he would find himself further and further away from the camera,” says Deborah Snyder, who has produced her husband’s projects since first working with him on a Reebok commercial in the ’90s. With Snyder behind the camera, there was an intimacy to the shoot.
“It almost harkens back to his commercial and music video roots,” she says. “You have this smaller crew, but your visuals still look stunning. He knows how to make beautiful visuals, but you just don’t need all the bells and whistles, and all the people. You can move faster and shoot more. And I feel like that’s the evolution of him as a filmmaker.”
She adds, “When [the movies] got so big, you think you have more creative freedoms, but you actually have less, because you can’t move with agility.”
And agile Snyder was. It was a 32-day shoot, “the shortest by half of any movie I ever made,” he says. The crew averaged 40 set-ups a day.
“On our first day of shooting, I did 72 real camera [setups],” he says enthusiastically. “That’s insane. On Justice League, there were times when I did just four setups a day.”
Most of the movie is shot handheld, minus a dolly or two. Forget about any crane shots. Or a video village. Snyder remembers, “No trailers, no chairs, no nothing. It was just me and the camera, and literally a handful of people.” There was craft services, and the hotel everyone was staying in would offer live beetle grubs once a week for breakfast.
In our conversation, Snyder is energetic, bounding up and describing capturing a shot on the river against a setting sun. He reenacts shooting the commando raid and goes into detail about the process of using gas guns. And he talks about how Harvey Penick’s The Little Green Golf Book can also apply to filmmakers, especially the part about how you have to be good enough to give luck a chance. Luck and skill were on hand in the making of Last Photograph, even getting through the 100-plus degree fever.
“I really see in Zack a general,” says Nunnari, who recalls Snyder working through a sick wintery set in Montreal during the making of 300. “He knows he has to create something and he does it.”
Past the premiere of Last Photograph, Snyder is already putting the pieces in motion to return to IP filmmaking, currently puzzling over how to do a remake of the John Carpenter classic Escape from New York. (See, there was a reason why he had the movie’s record lying about.) The original, made in 1981, was set in a dystopian future in 1997. Snyder’s will also be set in 1997, a sort of futuristic period movie. The original captured his imagination as an impressionable 13-year-old Snyder and never let go.
“It is genre-defining and genre-defying at the same time because no one’s really been able to duplicate the kind of audacity that the movie has,” he notes.
He recently returned to Warner Bros for a special screening of one his favorite movies, John Boorman’s Excalibur. It was part of the private on the lot screening series led by studio heads Pam Abdy and Michael De Luca conduct. He was thrilled to be back — “I’m a huge fan of the vibes of that lot,” he says — and even subjected himself to an hour-long Q&A.
“There was some hard-hitting questions, too, like ‘What adversity have you faced in your career?’” Snyder thought about the irony of being asked this on the very studio lot where he lost his superhero universe. “I was like, ‘That’s a strange question to ask me in this room, but it’s cool.’”
One thing he has not fully returned to is watching DC movies. He has not, for example, watched James Gunn’s Superman.
“I just haven’t gotten around to it yet,” he says, letting out a little laugh. He quickly adds he is a supporter of Gunn’s and wants the DC division to do well.
Just as Last Photograph finds Snyder at his most contemplative, so too are his views on his DC legacy and the popularity of Marvel movies. Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman are the most popular and most recognized superheroes in the world, with the exception of Spider-Man. That should, theoretically, make them easier to sell to audiences.
In his view, Marvel has cracked the code on how to bend its characters into a very marketable way. He, on the other hand, was interested in what he believed was their inner and iconic core.
“[Marvel is] like an amusement park ride, right? The ups, the drops, the kind of cruising part, and then another drop. At the end, you’re like, ‘Wow, that was crazy, that was awesome.’ I had no interest in that. And you know, maybe that was a mistake. But I don’t think that way. I can’t do that. I’d rather just kind of talk about the mythology of them. And maybe that’s not as fun,” he muses.
And then he laughs.
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