Zach Cregger still regrets his first film: "I made a bad movie and I suffered for it"

Cregger was talking, in essence, about why he expects Resident Evil to be his only big foray into IP filmmaking, spurred on by the fact that he loves the zombie-blasting game franchise in question (and has enough clout right now to be able to make a movie completely working from his own ideas, without a lot of rights-holder interference). In Cregger’s mind, the only thing that really matters when it comes to making movies is whether you love a story enough to devote a decent chunk of your life to telling it—something, he makes clear, that did not happen on March, which was brought to him and Moore as an already-written project, and which the duo attempted to re-write, unsuccessfully, into a film they were happy with. Cregger makes it clear he regrets the decision to jump at this first big Hollywood offer now: “I made the mistake in my 20s of being like, ‘Oh, I have an opportunity to make a movie. I don’t really love the story, but I could make a movie that I’m in.’ And what happened?”

Cregger is quick, in the interview, to note that he and Moore didn’t necessarily agree on the film’s ultimate quality. “That’s not fair to say,” he quickly appends, “Because Trevor, who I made it with, is no longer here. He had a pretty different attitude towards that movie, and I think he would disagree with me. So I’m only speaking for myself.” (If you want to watch Moore and Cregger happily go back and forth about the film’s merits, you can watch clips from their 2021 streaming show Newsboyz, where they gleefully read scathing reviews that accused the movie of carrying “a whiff of real evil.” Cregger, still more than a year out at the time from his sudden resurgence as a filmmaker with Barbarian, took time on the streams to describe his horror at watching Miss March‘s editor’s assembly and realizing he’d made “a really bad movie”; at the time, he described the experience as less pleasant than being set on fire.)

All of which presumably helps explain why Cregger has been so picky/focused about working from his own scripts and story ideas, even as his production slate fills out with Stephen Spielberg collaborations, or embarks on studio-pleasing projects like a film adaptation of horror character Siren Head. “If you’re trying to just, ‘Hey, here’s a hot IP, I think we can shoehorn something in here and get it in a theater,'” Cregger notes, “Well, then you’re coming at it from kind of a bad place, and I think you’re probably going to make a bad movie. I think that the North Star should be like, ‘Do I love this story? Do I love this story enough to spend a year of my goddamn life telling this story?’ That’s a heavy thing.”