Director Breck Eisner on Reining in The Crazies and the Lessons of Sahara

How graphic is the violence?

Depends who you ask. If you ask my mom, she'd say incredibly graphic. If you ask any of my friends who love horror movies, they'd say it's aggressive but not over the top. It's a horror-thriller movie, not a gorefest or porn horror as some people like to call certain types of horror. There are moments that are really quite graphic and violent and terrifying, but also the realism of the movie, there to enhance the scares not overwhelm them.

Were there any scenes you had to cut for ratings?

No. I mean it was clearly going to be an R. There was never any question that it would be anything but an R. But I don't think I had to cut anything to keep it to an R.

So nothing to look forward to in the unrated DVD release?

Every scene we shot is in the movie except for one scene that I shot, that is incredibly bleak and really dark. It didn't make it into the final movie.

I wanted to ask you about Sahara. Looking back now, the dust having settled, what have you learned about the perils of launching a franchise, and working from pre-existing material?

For me the biggest lesson in the perils of making any movie, whether it's a franchise or costs a dollar or a $100 million -- you got to have a solid script going into production. It's crucial. That's your blueprint. You can make a bad script an OK movie if you work really hard, but it's really easy to make a great script an OK movie. Which is not the goal any of us want. But what happened in Sahara is that we had an author who by contract had absolute script approval, and who wouldn't approve any script. And they had a date they had to shoot by before they lost the rights. And those two do not mix well. And so on production we were having to make it up as we went. We didn't have a clear path. We were only allowed to make script changes once we started photography, and at that point it's just too late. So the perils of that is that you have to be sure you have a good script no matter what it is you're making. That was the biggest lesson I learned from Sahara. And it's a lesson they seem to forget over and over again in these big movies. They figure out a release date, they figure out the rights, and sometimes a script doesn't come together but the commitments have already been made. And that's a dangerous situation.

And looking ahead, I wanted to ask about Flash Gordon.

Flash Gordon is a project I've been pursuing for years, it's a real passion of mine. The writers have been breaking story the past couple of months, and we have a couple months to go until the draft goes into Sony. Assuming they achieve everything we talked about, I think it will be a really great script. It's not a remake of any movie that's been done before. Nothing to do with the camp of the '80s, nothing to do with the serials of the '50s. It's definitely based on the Alex Raymond strips from the '30s and '40s, told from the point of view as if he was redoing the strips today. The audience that was reading the strips back then was a very different audience than today's audience. It's an action-adventure, very dynamic, aggressive, with a really strong central character.

What kind of commitments have you gotten from Sony?

We're a long way off. It's a gigantic movie, so these things are tough to get made. I made Crazies took me years to get made -- I can't imagine a movie of this size. There's a long way to go. Sony's got to commit big money to it and love it, and there's going to be years of prep. It's a lot of work! But if we can pull it off, I think it would be quite fantastic.

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