Breck Eisner's update of George Romero's '73 flick The Crazies hits DVD this Tuesday, so we thought this would be the perfect time to have a chat with The Crazies director Breck Eisner about why he chose to tackle an update of this lesser known Romero title and what it takes to teach today's audience the differences between a 'zombie' and an 'infected'. Hit the jump for our full interview with The Crazies director Breck Eisner.

FEARnet: What drew you to remaking The Crazies?

Breck Eisner: There are a couple different things that initially drew me. First and foremost it was the script. It was a really good script although it was designed in a way that was different than I wanted to go with the movie and we wound up restructuring and significantly rewriting the movie. But the core conceptual idea and the journey I had really responded to and I remember as a kid or teenager watching on Betamax tape, Romero's The Crazies thinking it was a great idea, lost in a movie that didn't have the resources to achieve the potential. Although it was not one of the movies I had seen multiple times, but I remembered [it] from a single viewing in my teens so I thought that was probably a good sign, the potential to be memorable.

I understand the original script was closer to the Romero film?

Yeah, the original draft was closer to the Romero version. When I got involved and it was a Paramount movie when it started it's since moved to Universal Rogue and then Overture. I think it was in the aftermath of the Bourne movies doing well; oddly it was kind of an action movie. It had the military and action and some X-Files stuff, it wasn't very scary. I didn't really want to do The Crazies as an action movie, especially in a limited budget way, it just didn't seem like the right way to go. For me taking the military point of view out of the movie and just focusing on our heroes, getting rid of the X-Files. I mean, this is a movie people have seen many times before. You know when Romero first did it in '73 the idea of a toxin getting into the water supply and turning people into crazed homicidal killers was a very new idea, oddly it's been mined many times since then. My focus was to get rid of the X-Files and focus on the characters and their journey, relationships and scares.

And with that familiar territory, over the years the lines of what's a zombie and what isn't a zombie have been blurred.

Good point. And we went out of our way to make sure that these characters were not zombies in the essence of the purist tradition of zombies. But anytime you have Romero's name and a bunch of human beings in a rage state trying to kill other human beings it's gonna be hard to say they are not zombies. But in a design way these characters that are the infected have different agendas. It's not like they're infected and have one agenda, eat brains or infect, their human agendas port over to their infected state. Whatever they were feeling before is extremely intensified and brought to this infected state.

As a filmmaker is it tough to get past these preconceived notions that people may have about your film before seeing it?

Yeah, the fact of the matter is you can say whatever you want to say but people are gonna take from the movie whatever is there, and they're gonna read into it. Intentions are great, but the reality is; what have you shot? What is your movie? You can't force an audience if it's not there. There is this tendency in this business to push ahead in the advertising to pick a point of view, whether it's really the point of view of the movie or not and just shoot to that point of view, and identify the movie very clearly, whether this is what the audience is getting.

Horror films especially suffer from this with labels like torture porn etc. 

And the funny thing about The Crazies is it's not really a horror movie, I mean, it is a horrific movie and horrific things happen. When I was originally doing press for it they wanted the line to be 'it's a horror movie, it's a horror movie', but one of the things I liked about The Crazies is it's sort of a hybrid movie. The characters go on a journey and relationships, things you often don't find in a horror movie these days. Then there's also this sense of sci-fi and action in there. I like mixing up genres and twisting them.

Genre fans tend to be receptive to that. Most horror fans are cinephiles and like to be cinematically challenged.

And I think horror fans like when you take chances. Horror fans definitely are true cinephiles and I love that about them. They always love and own a ton of movies.

Is the version of The Crazies on DVD the same as the theatrical?

Yup

No director's cut/extended cut?

Nope. It was a very tight budget to make this movie, [a] very ambitious movie to make. Moving between studios and expensive rights issues with Romero, our actual costs to make the movie was really low. The way I worked in order to maximize what you get on screen was to not shoot things that won't make it into the movie. And to be really ruthless about what you shoot. There was one scene in the middle of the movie, a short, half page scene of David and Judy having dinner talking about something which we didn't need and the only other thing that got cut was an alternate ending, I shot two endings for it, knowing that one was very aggressive and [would] probably be too dark. And one that was dark but not too dark and we went with the less dark of the dark endings. We decided not to put that ending on the DVD. We debated it for a while and decided that this is the movie.

What did we miss?

David and Judy walk into Cedar Rapids where they order bottled water the two of them are sitting there David has a bit of an outburst because he's watching on TV the news broadcast covering what happened, and he yells 'That's not what happened! That's not what happened!' and she calms him down, and he says, 'I'm OK, I'm OK', and all of a sudden his nose drips blood and he looks up and she looks at him and we realize that he's infected. And cut out on that look. It was pretty bleak. Intellectually, I really liked it, the audience was just too connected with the two heroes and it felt like too much.

Is that why you decided not to put it on the DVD?

Yeah, I didn't love the execution of the scene, somehow it just felt like it didn't quite fit, and it didn't quite work for me. If the scene was amazing, I prob would have put it on, but it just felt flat so I decided not to put it on the DVD.

The Crazies is on DVD and Blu-ray Tuesday, 6.29. Read our review of The Crazies here.