Writer/director Zach Cregger didn’t know where his story Weapons was leading him until halfway through writing.

Cregger told Blavity/Shadow and Act Managing Editor Trey Mangum that even though he had the idea for children to mysteriously run away from their homes, as we’ve seen in the trailers, he had no idea where they were going or who was luring them out of their neighborhood.

When did the ending of ‘Weapons’ come to Zach Cregger?

“ That came to me about halfway through. I kind of had the idea of where it was all going,” he said. “But I mean, I’m writing half this movie and I have no idea where the kids went. So that was scary for me. As a writer, you thought, ‘Am I wasting my time or not?'”

Zach Cregger on the anthology-like format of ‘Weapons’

The story eventually shaped into an anthology-like storytelling experience, with all the loose ends wrapping up in the final chapter. He said that “it just kind of felt like what the story wanted to be.”

“It wanted to kind of cover the whole gamut of this town, like kind of every aspect of this town, I wanted to kind of hear from. And I knew I couldn’t do that with one or two characters,” he said. “I needed to do it with more. It felt like it posed an interesting challenge just as a writer to try and see if I could pull it off, you know, do like these different segments and have them all be cohesive and separate at the same time.”

Weapons follows a community as they try to figure out why all but one of a classroom full of children mysteriously disappeared from their homes in the middle of the night. The film also stars Alden Ehrenreich, Josh Brolin, Austin Abrams and Cary Christopher, with Benedict Wong and Amy Madigan.

Weapons is now in theaters. Watch the interviews below:

Zach Cregger

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