Weapons’ child actors fought to deliver the most gruesome blow in the film’s climax

The ending of “Weapons” is, in the best possible way, absolutely crazy. (This should go without saying, but, uh, spoilers ahead!) In writer-director Zach Cregger’s “Weapons,” we watch Gladys, a potentially ancient witch played by Amy Madigan (who deserves an Oscar for the role), invade the fictional town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, and hypnotize people, turning them into apparent energy sources for her diseased body. After performing rituals to trap several adults and 17 children, Gladys’ “nephew” Alex Lily (Cary Christopher) manages to figure out how her magic works and turn it against her…at which point these 17 children “arm themselves” and tear Gladys to shreds. According to Cregger, the child actors involved were very excited about it all.

As Cregger told Indiewire, he told the kids it was a horror movie and that they could punish the witch who trapped them in a basement. How did they react? “They said: “YESAAAH!’ They were really excited to do it,” Cregger said. “Kids haven’t quite developed empathy at that age, so there was no questioning. I said to myself, “Who wants to pull his jaw?” » And they were all fighting over who would do it. »

Cregger says he needed to be a lot more candid with his young star… but Christopher hasn’t read the script and Cregger isn’t sure he’s seen the whole movie. However, they understood it. “We just had to have a lot of honest conversations about his emotional situation. There’s no way to get him to portray the right levels of fear and anxiety and sadness,” Cregger explained. “He’s a real actor. He asks really intelligent questions. He totally understood everything we were doing, and you can see it in the performance.”

Let me, however, back up for a second and explain the build-up to the moment where, in a satisfying and disturbing twist, Gladys’ previously possessed children become her downfall. Gladys’ magic involves branches from a mysterious tree, and once she steals a good that belongs to her target, she wraps that good around a branch of said tree, smothers the branch in her own blood, and breaks it. From that point on, the person who once owned the possession becomes a heat-seeking missile…and when Alex imitates the magic, he manages to send his 17 elementary school classmates after Gladys.

The entire sequence is frenetic, wild, funny and stunningand as Zach Cregger told IndieWire, virtually no CGI was used in the process… except for one moment where the kids throw themselves through glass windows as part of their chase. “It’s pretty much all practical. The only CGI is some of the windows that the kids go through, but even that, it’s like we have the mullions and the mullions in, but we just couldn’t put the glass in because the kids can’t even jump through sugar glass. It’s too dangerous.”

Cregger then clarified that one particular shot, in which the borderline-raged children destroy a fence to get to Gladys, relied on special effects. “The shot that has the most visual effects is the one where they break the fence. It was actually a composite of five different passes, one with adult stuntmen, one with kids, one with the gate, one without the gate,” he explained. “It was kind of a nightmare. This plan is very quick but deceptively complicated.”

As Zach Cregger said, he tried to stick to practical effects as much as possible, including the satisfying climactic moment where all the kids tear Gladys apart. “Everything else is practical. Even Gladys is torn to shreds. I think her eyes blink while her face is separated, and that’s visual effects, but everything else is like…we had a mannequin with pipes in it, and the kids took the mannequin apart and were sprayed with fake blood,” Cregger recalls of the scene. He used lightning-fast editing and cutting to ensure we see Gladys being separated and which, cleverly, ensures we only see gruesome information before her destroyed body is shown.

Cregger said the children responsible for “separating Gladys” had a great time. “They were having the time of their lives,” he said, before continuing, “The only time I didn’t feel in control of the movie was when the kids separated Gladys.” I can only imagine how stressful it was for the “Weapons” writer and director to feel like he was losing control during the big finale, and Cregger said he felt this stress.

“I felt like I had it on hand for the whole movie because I photographed it and I knew exactly what I wanted,” Cregger said. “But with these kids screaming and piling on that mannequin, it was too much for me, man. We had two cameras rolling. We had to film at three different points and stitch them together from three different cracks on this thing. It was Really hard.” Fortunately, it largely paid off… and the end of “Weapons” is amazing. The film is now streaming on HBO Max.