The advance word on The Last Photograph is that it’s violent, heavy-duty violent. Zack Snyder just answered that talk directly, and he did it by quoting Sam Peckinpah.
Appearing on WMMR’s Preston & Steve Show ahead of the film’s September 13 world premiere at TIFF, Snyder was asked whether that word means John Wick-level action. He reached for an older reference.
“Yeah, it’s violent, but it’s about death and redemption,” he said. “There’s this great quote by Sam Peckinpah: ‘I’m a student of violence because I’m a student of the human heart.’ I think it has a little bit of that vibe. A little bit more of The Wild Bunch.”
For anyone who doesn’t know the name, Peckinpah — ‘Bloody Sam’ — directed 1969’s The Wild Bunch, the Western whose slow-motion bloodbath finale changed screen violence forever. He also spent his career watching studios hack his movies down, only for the restored longer cuts to be hailed as the classics decades later.
Sound familiar? It’s Snyder’s exact path, from the R-rated Batman v Superman Ultimate Edition to the four-hour Justice League to the Rebel Moon director’s cuts.
Even the trailer, which is on TIFF’s site, runs hot: “It’s adult content, so I couldn’t put it on Instagram one hundred percent. It’s got some aggressive photography in it, to say the least,” said Snyder.
Keep in mind buyers reportedly balked at the film being “extremely violent, even by Snyder standards” — the same thing said about every Snyder cut that turned out to be the better version.
And when Rebel Moon came up in the same interview, Snyder laid down the rule: “The director’s cuts are the movie.”
A Big Movie Got Put On Hold
The interview also revealed how The Last Photograph finally happened after nearly 20 years, because something bigger stopped moving.
“Last year, we were kind of working on a couple big movies, and one of them got put on hold,” Snyder said. “And I saw this — like, there’s four months. We could just go make Last Photograph.”
Producer Deborah Snyder took it from there: “Debbie was like, ‘I don’t know.’ But then she made some calls, then found some money — it’s not a ton of money — with some investors. And before I knew it, I was in the Amazon.”
Snyder said the project — written by Kurt Johnstad from a story the two batted around for years — was once set up as a studio picture: “There was a time when I was going to do it through Warner Brothers, so it was a proper budget and a proper kind of movie in the studio system. And then I had the DC movies, so I could never really find a window to go do this little movie.”
Shopping The Movie At TIFF
Snyder also confirmed exactly what Toronto is for.
“That’s how the game — the indie game — kind of works,” he said. “No one’s really seen the movie, so it’s kind of fun to show the movie not just to an audience, but kind of put it into the marketplace.”
And on what comes after: “We show the movie at TIFF, and then from there we can look for a distributor and figure out how to get the movie out to you guys.”
That matches the TIFF announcement — the film goes in as an acquisition title screening for buyers — and, as our insiders framed it, the indie route is the plan, not the fallback.
One Camera In A Dugout Canoe
Snyder served as his own cinematographer and camera operator, shooting on the medium-format, IMAX-approved ARRI Alexa 265 with ARRI DNA lenses modified by Panavision, with a handful of crew across Bogotá, the Chingaza mountains, Leticia and the Amazon, Iceland, and a couple of days in Pasadena.
“There’s a couple scenes in these dugout canoes down in the Amazon,” he said. “Normally I’d be looking at a monitor, the camera operator would be out in the boat, and I’d be watching the performance from a distance. In this case, I’m just in the boat. It’s me and Stuart. He’s literally paddling the boat.”
And if the boat tips? “We’re done. I’m on a flight back to Pasadena pretty quick.”
The production ran lean everywhere else, too.
Gaffer Erica Kim ran the lights entirely on batteries. There was no money for trainers, so Snyder and stars Stuart Martin and Fra Fee built their own gym in the Bogotá hotel and paid for it out of pocket.
As for the story, Snyder described a retired operative — “the kind of guy who’s sent to foreign lands to overthrow governments” — returning to the South American country he was posted in after his brother-in-law and sister-in-law are murdered and their two children kidnapped.
He picks up a war photographer who saw the gunmen but captured only a single photo, and the two head into the jungle: “a travel film, a little bit, and a mystery,” a journey back into the mistakes both men have made.
The Last Photograph world premieres Sunday, September 13, at 6:30 pm at TIFF’s John Bassett Theatre, and Cosmic Book News will be there.
Related: In the same interview, Snyder said Escape From New York is his next movie, had a message about The Dark Knight Returns rumors: “the rumors work,” and teased a “Game of Thrones-ian version of 300.”
