bruceb

Some directors talk very well about their work. Others don't - there are directors who make really good movies but sound like jerks or morons when they're interviewed. And some sound great in interviews but make terrible movies, too. The evidence available to me so far suggests that Zack Snyder is one of those who makes better movies than explanations.[1]

I strongly recommend a policy of ignoring interviews with him, in favor of looking at the work itself.

Footnotes:

1. This may well be longer than the body of the post...

300 may be too weird a film to sensibly discuss in this context, so I'll take Dawn of the Dead instead. There's an argument about whether it does justice to a particular satirical thread in the original, and I'm not having that argument, either. I just want to point at all the things Snyder's version does right. It's not just the fantastically good title sequence, fantastically good though it is. It's a whole lot of things: the pacing of the opening and all the ways Ana brushes up against the emerging crisis without realizing it, the real tragedy in Frank's final moments and the argument about what to do with him when he dies, the horror around Luda's pregnancy, the handling of Andy and his gun shop isolation, the bathroom scene and what Kenneth will and won't forgive Andre for or deal with on his behalf...a whole lot that could have been fluffy and trivial but wasn't.

Many of these do come from having a good script. And a good editor. And good cinematographers and lighting riggers and a lot of other people. But then that's precisely what direction is about on a big project: getting good folks and getting them to work together productively. And we have evidence that whether or not he can talk usefully about it later, Snyder can in fact do this.