Watch the Weapons opening scene: How the first few minutes tell the origin of the movie itself (e...

The &34;Barbarian&34; followup begins with a child narrator saying, &34;This is a true story.&34; Writer/director Zach Cregger also began writing the film with

The "Barbarian" follow-up begins with a child narrator saying, "This is a true story." Writer/director Zach Cregger also began writing the film with that simple idea.

Watch the Weapons opening scene: How the first few minutes tell the origin of the movie itself (exclusive)

The "Barbarian" follow-up begins with a child narrator saying, "This is a true story." Writer/director Zach Cregger also began writing the film with that simple idea.

By Nick Romano

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Published on July 30, 2025 12:00PM EDT

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- *Weapons* director Zach Cregger explains how the writing process began with the child narrator that opens the entire film.

- The "way more grizzly and terrible" idea Cregger toyed with before landing on the premise of 17 missing children.

- Cregger talks about his love for the movie *Prisoners* and how he filmed *Weapons* in the same general area.

The beginning of *Weapons*, the new horror movie from *Barbarian* filmmaker Zach Cregger, tells the story of how it all came to be.

"This is a true story," the narrator, a little girl, says in the opening scene, which ** can reveal exclusively (above). "It happened right here in my town two years ago."

As the first few minutes unfold, taking viewers inside the local elementary school of the fictional town of Maybrook, Pa., the girl explains how Ms. Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), one of the newer teachers, showed up to her classroom to find everyone except for one child, a boy named Alex (Cary Christopher), absent. It's because at 2:17 that morning, all the other kids calmly and quietly "woke up, got out of bed, walked down stairs, opened the front door, walked across the front yard and into the dark, and they never came back."

On a blank page, Cregger began writing *Weapons* with this simple concept: a little girl speaking in narration.

Julia Garner as Justine in 'Weapons'.

Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

"Okay, cool. What could it be? I was just like, Let her talk," Cregger tells EW of his process. The first idea he wrote after that was, he admits, "something way more grizzly and terrible" than what the premise would become: an entire classroom of kids died by suicide. "I don't wanna watch that movie, I don't wanna make that movie, but I was writing that movie," he says. "That was the one self-edit that I did."

So he pivoted to the kids running away for unexplainable reasons and the community left behind to deal with it. "I knew I already had some interesting characters with some conflict right off the bat," Cregger continues. "I knew I had the teacher; she's gonna be public enemy No. 1. I could get an angry parent in there." That would end up being Archer (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the missing 17 children.

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"And then, for some reason, the movie *Magnolia* was looming over me," Cregger says. "I don't know why, but there was something, and the way in, I knew, had something to do with John C. Reilly." (Reilly played a mustachioed Los Angeles police officer, Jim Kurring, in that 1999 drama from Paul Thomas Anderson.) "I want to take the John C. Reilly cop, and I want that to be in this movie somehow," Cregger adds, referring to Alden Ehrenreich's Paul, a local police officer who has a history with Ms. Gandy.

Once the writer/director had those three characters, he said, "That's enough. Let's go." And the rest of the story unfurled before him.

Cary Christopher as Alex in 'Weapons'.

Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

A lot of the questions that Cregger asked himself during the writing process he then gave directly to Brolin's Archer as dialogue. During a parent-teacher conference at the school, the character gets up before the town and shouts, "Why just her classroom? Why *only* hers?" ("That's the premise right there," the director notes.)

As for the setting, a fictional mid-Atlantic suburban town, Cregger grew up in Arlington, Va., which looks similar to the neighborhood in Atlanta where they shot *Weapons*. He points to *Prisoners*, the 2013 thriller starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal about a search for two abducted girls in a Pennsylvanian town.

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"I kept getting pissed when we were scouting around Atlanta," Cregger recalls. "I was like, 'I just wish we could shoot in Pennsylvania where they shot *Prisoners*.' And then I found out, no, they shot *Prisoners* in Atlanta. So we didn't stop until we found exactly what we were looking for. It was like, if it works for them, it'll work for us."

*Weapons* opens in theaters this Aug. 8. Watch EW's exclusive look at the opening minutes above.

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