‘Weapons’ Artisans Talk Happy Accidents, Director Zach Cregger’s “Very Practical-Minded” Approach & The “Chokehold” Gladys Has On The Internet
Spoiler Alert: The following article contains spoilers for Weapons.
In Weapons, horror filmmaker-scribe Zach Cregger crafts images that are so striking, it’s hard to believe the movie’s visual language was fluid enough to accommodate happy accidents. But that’s exactly what happened, according to hair department head Melizah Anguiano Wheat, makeup department head Leo Satkovich and special makeup effects designer Jason Collins.
“Nothing is done [in] a vacuum — nothing,” notes Collins, whose company, Autonomous FX, Inc., contributed to the Warner Bros. film. “And I think you always end up [with] a better result when everybody is putting all of their ideas into it. What was great about this group of people, was there was no ego. It was just wanting to create the best character. I think some of that has to do with: We all love Barbarian. We love the script. We love Zach’s energy. Sometimes you win the lottery with people.”
When 17 children from one classroom inexplicably run out into the night, a frightened insular community starts pointing fingers at their young schoolteacher (Julia Garner) and the sole survivor, Alex (Cary Christopher). As the mystery unravels from multiple POVs, Alex’s kooky aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan) is revealed as the orchestrator of the tragedy — her fiery orange hair, nimble fingers, ghostly face and wicked crimson smile a memorable image that haunts the narrative.
“I can’t really put into words just how I feel about how she’s being perceived,” says Satkovich of the internet uproar over the character, who’s been memed to high heaven already. “It’s something that’s so surreal to me that I feel like I’m still processing … We knew that we were creating a very special character. I personally just do not feel I was prepared for just how much of a chokehold the world was going to be in.”
Along with Trish Summerville, the costume designer on the project, whom the trio describes as the “fourth leg to our table here creatively,” crafting the character makeup for Gladys was a “collaborative effort” and “journey.”
“It’s kismet when it happens on set, and all of us are sort of firing a million miles an hour,” Collins explains.
Though Gladys was described as “gaudy” and “outdated” in the screenplay, with “clown-like, caked-on makeup and red hair,” her look wasn’t “overtly spelled out,” per Satkovich. With characteristics so open to interpretation, Collins explains the description could perhaps invoke anyone from Ronald McDonald to Bozo the Clown, but the aim was to create a character who presumably “could be somebody’s crazy aunt … somebody’s stepmother, where [you’re] like, ‘Listen, man, you’re gonna meet this lady and you’re gonna get freaked out a little bit.’”
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Satkovich adds, “Zach definitely treated his creatives like he treats his audience — he has a very high respect for everyone on his team,” saying the artisans could then use the descriptor as a “great starting point.”
As a result, the team drew inspiration from a wide range of sources: the works of photographer Diane Arbus, whose portraits depict everyone from carnival performers to strippers, and artist Cindy Sherman whose 2003 “Woman in Sun Dress” could certainly be viewed as a relative of Gladys’s. The craftspeople also looked to Bette Davis’s aging child star in 1962’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Mink Stole’s villain in John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (whose statement glasses can certainly offer a jumping off point for Gladys’s own).
Ultimately, the team wanted a look that struck a happy medium between the “campy, creepy and, dare I say, normal.”
“It was really important to us that she felt rooted in reality,” Satkovich continues. “It’s very important that she didn’t feel like some sort of supernatural ghoul, or she didn’t feel like some sort of supernatural being. We wanted Aunt Gladys to look like maybe someone that we can all identify with at some point in our lives, someone that you look at and you’re like, ‘Something is just not right about them; something is off.’”
In bringing to the screen an “outlandish” character that could also feel lived in, mood boards and Photoshop could only accomplish so much, leading the team to experiment.
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Satkovich explains he “didn’t want to throw a face full of rubber on Amy” given her being an “expressive, emotional individual, we wanted Amy to wear the makeup; we didn’t want the makeup to wear Amy.”
He adds, “I think the fun part, once we realized whatever our natural inclination was as artists when creating a horror villain, was to do the exact opposite, I think it really opened that creativity door.”
Collins concurs, saying, “We don’t want to do the tropes, right? We don’t want to do the big witch, haggard sort of makeup and the rotted teeth and that kind of thing. You want to kind of go the opposite way, where you want to get just enough detail, where it’s left of center, and it really, really jars the audience, but not enough to take them out.”
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Gladys’s visage changes according to where she is in the film: In public, her aesthetic is more approachable; at home, with Alex, she is terrifyingly stolid. In the nightmare scenes, her makeup takes on a more garish tone, able to imprint an image with the audience, who only sees her for a fraction of a second. All of the above meant working with prosthetics, like smaller teeth, a fake nose and elongated earlobes, which would emphasize Gladys’s predatory, avian quality.
“You change certain aspects that allow you to have a different profile, a different straight-on. We gave her a contact lens that just narrowed her pupil ever so slightly, like she was a bird of prey — just being able to switch from this crazy, audacious character to somebody that would literally tear you apart in seconds,” Collins explains.
Of course, Gladys’s statement piece is her fiery hair, which Wheat says took testing 20 wigs to find the proper shade. There were also various editions: her “hero wig style” and “nightmare” alternates.
“[Amy] never questioned anything,” Wheat says. “She trusted me. She trusted the team with the process. She was our canvas, and she just let us play. I love the feeling of contributing something that helps their performance and takes them there.”
As for Gladys’s signature micro bangs, Wheat says those came about during the testing process, when the team was playing around with where to pin the wig.
“It was like silk,” she describes. “It just was like, ‘Man, oh, man.’ And Zach saw her, and we put her in front of that camera, and his face lit up, and he jumped, and he said, ‘Meliza, this is the wig. This is it.’ It was the best feeling ever.”
The wig’s color, bangs and placement all create a “disguise” of sorts for Gladys to move about in the world. At home, however, Gladys has no need to hide, with her turban intentionally bringing more focus to her “wicked eye and her teeth,” Wheat says.
“Your eyes aren’t looking at that hard bang that’s four inches too high,” she explains. “It’s like she’s naked; her look is stripped, and you can kind of see the raw elements of this character and the level of wicked that she is.”
Before viewers get to grasp the depths of Gladys’s villainy, the pic features glimpses of her throughout, teasing the horror to come, such as in Archer’s (Josh Brolin) nightmare, where his missing child Matthew is replaced by an illuminated Gladys — all toothy smile and hammy makeup.
Given that the jump scare featured her “most heightened look,” Satkovich retooled his approach to her cosmetics: “The hair was a little bit redder. Her makeup was punchier. It was more concentrated spatters of color and a more bold brow, some more eyelashes and [I] really clumped up the eyelashes — a bolder, redder lip.”
In fact, it was through a routine touchup that the lit-up scene came about: Filmed onstage in a tiny room, the goal was to utilize VFX overlay so Matthew could seamlessly transition into Gladys, meaning the two performers had to be tucked into the bed’s blankets just so. After nailing Madigan’s position, Satkovich went in to add more lipstick.
“I’m crawling over lights, crawling under lights, under flags. There’s so much stuff in this room … And I couldn’t see because the room was [so dark]. I think it was a grip that used their iPhone light,” he recalls.
When DP Larkin Seiple reacted, everyone’s first thought was trouble, but he and the VFX team liked the look, and the shot stayed.
“These were unplanned. They were organic, they were surprises, and they worked,” Wheat says.
Satkovich adds, “Everything was its own living, breathing aspect of the show — everything was so fluid.”
Another chance stroke of genius was Gladys’s braids, which Collins describes as “all happenstance, just by collaborative process.” Madigan had come to Collins’s Los Angeles studio for a scan so the team could create a silicone bald cap covered in thin hair, each individual strand of which had to be hand-punched. Because the fine hair often gets underneath the appliance, Collins instructed his workers to plait them into sectioned off, neat braids to ensure a smooth application process later on; when Cregger came in, he liked the look so much that the temporary convenience transformed into a permanent onscreen fixture.
“He was like, ‘She’s got to have the braids. We gotta have her have the braids in the scene,’” Collins recounts. “It’s so peculiar, and it’s so bizarre, and it’s just another element of Gladys, where you’re just like, ‘Who does that?’”
Since Weapons shifts temporally throughout its runtime, Satkovich had to track the “constant up and down” of each character and their transformations by breaking down the script by time of day to ensure continuity. Thus, every flick of a brush became a “conscious choice,” such as the degradation of Gladys’s lipstick, which becomes smudged over time to convey her increasingly erratic, trapped behavior.
“Just as they had their own arc in the storyline, every character had their own hair and makeup arc as well,” Satkovich says. “So everyone, at any given point, throughout everyone’s different POVs, all of their looks sort of peaked. Everyone had a starting point, then their looks peaked when they were at their most heightened, whether they were broken down or, in Gladys’s case, she looked her most wild … We did want to show the unraveling of the characters in real time and the continuity — the script was an extremely hard script to break down, because you couldn’t really go in scene order.”
And though Gladys is sure to dominate the public’s Halloween costumes, the team’s “synergy” was also applied during the climactic battle, which featured Cregger’s “very practical-minded” approach and interdepartmental collaboration to craft some of the most visceral, real-feeling scenes in the movie.
“The great thing about Zach is he doesn’t really want to, for lack of a better word, rape, anybody’s eyeballs out with gore — it’s probably a horrible thing to say — he doesn’t want to oversaturate somebody’s eyeballs with gore. I actually got that quote from him [from a previous article],” Collins says, clarifying the director wants the usage of blood and guts to be “effective.”
That meant crafting a “complete head smash” for actor Benedict Wong’s Principal Marcus, whose dreamlike sunny day off with his husband is crashed by Gladys. Usually, the special effects designer would use a hard acrylic structure for such a task, but the creative team had to opt for a soft head made entirely of silicone “because we were gonna let Benny go crazy,” Collins explains. The team then found ways to make the dummies “hyper-realistic,” allowing Wong to keep “momentum” while bashing his head; every several beats, the artisans switched out makeshift heads that were “crushed even more,” culminating with the final “completely caved in” one. Though the original plan was to stitch together the shots using VFX, Cregger instead chose to cut away to Gladys packing up her witchy accoutrements for a more “upsetting” final result.
“There were elements where we thought we were going to do visual effects, but pretty much, I was happy to say … that there wasn’t really any augmentation of anything that we did throughout the film, which I found really validating and totally great,” Collins says. “But it also felt more in-camera, felt more immediate, like you were there.”
Director Zach Cregger on the set of Weapons (Quantrell Colbert / Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection)
The same practicality was assigned to the notorious veggie peeler scene — which Satkovich notes “reads a little camp” — as well as the blood gag, when Justine shoots Alden Ehrenreich’s officer in the neck. For the cheek carpaccio, Collins designed and 3D-printed a larger-than-normal custom peeler (“to really sell it,” he says) that Cregger was adamant be lime green in color.
“It’s so cool [to do things practically]. And it’s something we don’t really get to experience a lot of anymore in filmmaking,” Satkovich says.
Wheat agrees: “It’s such a disappointment when that [happens]: ‘Oh, we’re not going to do that.’ It’s like, ‘Ugh.’ I’m a big fan of practical effects. It has to be that way.”
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But perhaps the most shocking and effective practical gag is the cathartic denouement, in which all 17 children unleash their pent-up torment onto Gladys, tearing her limb from limb, gouging her eyes and pulling her apart like taffy with a gushing, liquid center.
“I was always thinking, ‘Man, we’re going to traumatize these kids … this is pretty hardcore,’” Collins jokes. “Is there a waiver I can sign where I’m not responsible for their futures?”
To avoid any permanent mental anguish, producer Miri Yoon orchestrated a practice day for the child actors, many of whom were local to the Georgia area; the kids acted out ripping the body, which operated by way of a “mechanical cable release” system, and were first sprayed down with water-filled pressurized canisters before moving on to fake blood. As an extra challenge for Wheat, the extended (and hair-raisingly hilarious) sequence of a horde of children running through glass doors and breaking down wooden fences was accomplished by 17 little people, meaning the hairstylist had to match each stunt double’s hair to a child actor’s.
Collins recalls, “I love that it went as well as it could with 17 kids on a hundred degree day with 80% humidity in the air, and children just going crazy and not listening to anybody and it all kind of worked. It was pretty great, you know?”
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