Alden Ehrenreich has discussed the link between his new movie Weapons and school shootings.
Alden Ehrenreich on link between new movie Weapons and school shootings
In Zach Cregger’s horror movie, Alden, 35, stars as a police officer whose small town is rocked by the sudden and mysterious disappearance of 17 children and Alden admitted there is “clearly some relationship” between school shootings and the movie.
He told Variety: “Trying to boil it down to a thesis is probably in vain, I think this story is more like a dream. It’s more poetic than rational. We had some conversations, [for instance] there is a moment where a gun appears in the sky.
“I think there’s clearly some relationship between that gun and a bunch of missing children and school shootings. He didn’t say that, but to me it feels like it’s there in a poetic sense. The thing that feels more concrete to me is that all of these characters are an expression and a part of Zach. Julia [Garner] said, during our press tour, that she kept making certain choices wearing T-shirts and glasses. In the end, she saw she was just dressing like Zach. It’s proof positive that filmmakers should take more personal risks. It smells original, in the same way that the audience can smell when something’s formulaic and they’ve seen it a million times.”
Alden put on weight to play police officer Paul Morgan in the movie in order to better portray “someone moving through a life that really isn’t his own”.
He explained: “One of the more important things for the character was to be carrying around as much weight as possible, physically and emotionally. I wear a bulletproof vest, and production was going to spare me because we shot in Atlanta and it was so hot, but we wound up keeping it. I gained some weight for the role, not so much to play a cop but to play someone moving through a life that really isn’t his own. Someone in a circumstance, a relationship and a job, that’s not genuine to who he is. And that is what’s tonally unique about Zack. Francis Ford Coppola told me on my first movie [Tetro] that if you write something really personal, it will become something no one has ever seen before. Because each one of us is completely unique and original. I think that’s true of this movie.”