S Craig Zahler: ​‘Shoot­ing graph­ic vio­lence is like set­ting up a mag­ic trick’

The cin­e­ma of S Craig Zahler exists some­where between the art­house and the grind­house. His films are invari­ably bold, enter­tain­ing and incred­i­bly vio­lent – fun genre exer­cis­es designed to sat­is­fy the mid­night movie set while care­ful­ly eschew­ing many of the tropes and clichés that are com­mon among ​‘cult’ movies. Zahler has fol­lowed up his 2015 can­ni­bal west­ern Bone Tom­a­hawk with the sim­i­lar­ly riotous Brawl in Cell Block 99, which sees Vince Vaughn snaps limbs and smash skulls as an incar­cer­at­ed man on the edge. Here, the direc­tor dis­cuss­es his cre­ative process and offers some advice on shoot­ing movie violence.

“Graph­ic vio­lence is all about know­ing how much to show. I come from a place of try­ing to push my own but­tons. When I’m writ­ing a moment of phys­i­cal vio­lence, if it’s sup­posed to be some­thing real­ly hor­rif­ic, I’m going to need to keep com­ing up with ideas until I think it’s gone far enough. If it’s sup­posed to be a char­ac­ter who has been pent up for hor­ri­ble sequence after hor­ri­ble sequence and final­ly they’re let­ting stuff out, then it real­ly needs to be a lot more than what would come out of a nor­mal person.

“A lot of that is just down to my writ­ing process. Every moment of graph­ic vio­lence that you see in Bone Tom­a­hawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99, they’re all in the script, and so they’re imag­ined at that point. In some cas­es with the more extreme sequences, there have been times where I’ve writ­ten some­thing and been uncom­fort­able with it, where I’ve won­dered whether I’ve maybe gone too far. That’s a fine line some­times, and it’s hard to always know when to pull back and when to push it fur­ther. Because you can have a movie where someone’s swing­ing an axe and heads are falling off left and right and it can be a case of dimin­ish­ing returns.

“My first real inter­est in movie mak­ing came when I was 12. I was fas­ci­nat­ed by movie make-up, espe­cial­ly hor­ror make-up and effects, I had a sub­scrip­tion to Fan­go­ria at the time. That mas­sive­ly influ­enced the kinds of films I end­ed up mak­ing. In Bone Tom­a­hawk where you have guys get­ting shot with arrows, I didn’t want any CG in there, so we end­ed up tak­ing arrows and send­ing them on trick lines; there are dudes stand­ing off-set throw­ing arrows at the actors. With that film or in the case of Brawl in Cell Block 99, where a lot of bad things hap­pen to var­i­ous people’s limbs, I approach shoot­ing graph­ic vio­lence like set­ting up a mag­ic trick.

“When I’m fig­ur­ing out how I’m going to film break somebody’s limb, I know first off that I always want to show the actor’s face, which is some­thing that most film­mak­ers don’t do. I think one of the rea­sons why the vio­lence in my films leaps off the screen in the way it does is because I’m not giv­ing it you in a com­fort­able way. There aren’t a lot of edits, there’s almost nev­er a cut on the actu­al moment of graph­ic vio­lence itself, and there’s very lit­tle music or oth­er dress­ing to the scene.

“Things like music and using close-ups make things seem more cin­e­mat­ic, so what I’m doing by strip­ping away that stuff is I’m mak­ing the vio­lence feel more real. I shoot vio­lence in a real­ly unvar­nished way, with­out all this cin­e­mat­ic frost­ing, and there’s no CG so there isn’t that slight off, dig­i­tal feel. It makes the impact sharp­er, because it’s not how audi­ences are used to see­ing movie violence.

“When I list my influ­ences I’ll talk about Wong Kar-wai and John Cas­savetes and Sid­ney Lumet as much as I’m gonna talk about Don Siegel, Sam Peck­in­pah and Ser­gio Leone. What’s inter­est­ing to me is that, when I go to one of the many rep cin­e­mas in New York – which is one of the rea­sons I chose to live in this city – almost every­thing that’s revived is genre. I just saw two Edward G Robin­son gang­ster movies, and it’s west­erns and it’s hor­ror movies and it’s crime movies. My favourite movies of all time – 2001, Deliv­er­ance, The Sweet Smell of Suc­cess, Taxi Dri­ver – are genre pic­tures, and I think there’s some­thing about the genre cin­e­ma that make it endure.”

Brawl in Cell Block 99 is released 20 Octo­ber. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.