It’s not hyperbole to say that Zach Cregger’s new film, Weapons, is one of the best of 2025, as well as one of the best horror films in recent memory.
The story unfolds in the fictional town of Maybrook, where an entire elementary school class vanishes without a trace. What starts as a mystery about missing children quickly expands into something larger, following how the disappearance ripples through the community and connects seemingly unrelated characters in unexpected ways.
Behind the Alexa 35 on this one was DP Larkin Seiple. The Seattle-born cinematographer started his career shooting music videos, including notable works like “This Is America” for Childish Gambino and “Turn Down For What” for DJ Snake. His longtime collaboration with directing duo Daniels has produced some of the most visually inventive films in recent memory. But Weapons presented its own challenges.
The film was shot on a tight schedule, and there was a lot to cover. For Seiple, this kind of challenge isn’t totally new territory. The cinematographer has built a reputation for pulling off projects on tight budgets, most notably as the DP behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, which he shot in just 36 days for around $15 million. That film went on to win seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
We caught up with Seiple via Zoom to discuss his preparation process, the challenge of shooting in low light, and why he believes bold choices make interesting filmmakers.
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No Film School: What was it about Zach’s script that hooked you?
Larkin Seiple: It was unique. I hadn’t read a story in six chapters like that. I hadn’t read a mystery film that starts as a mystery and unravels slowly, and every time you get a little bit more of the puzzle, we cut to a new chapter, and you start from scratch.
It felt different than everything else I’d been reading, and I needed to know the answers. I also had a really good time reading it. To me, it’s something very addictive as a story, and if you can compress as much story as possible into a short amount of time, I find that fascinating.
We go all over the place, and I think I just love a good mystery, but also the way that Zach wrote it is very playful, and a lot of the visuals are a part of the script. There’s nothing out there like it. And I had to meet Zach and be like, “How did you write this, and what are you trying to say?”
No Film School: So many of my writer friends and I have talked about how economical his scripts are. There’s no air in it. And that probably helped a little bit in how you had to work, with your tight shoot schedule.
LS: When I first talked to Zach about it, the first thing we got into was the shot structure. How do you see these scenes? Is it a wide shot and then two closeups? And Zach was like, “None of that. I want it to be brutal. When Julia [Garner] gets in a car and she closes the door, the next shot is her opening the door at a liquor store.”
There is no shoe leather. We are not going to follow her there. We’re not going to establish if we don’t have to, unless there’s a character moment part that’s been incorporated into the establishing shot.
And a lot of it, too, was about how to do a lot with one shot, whether it’s the camera pans and we start from one character’s POV, and then we see another character, or it’s Julia at the school, and the shot starts on [Alex, played by Cary Christopher] in a long lens, and he’s just walking.
And then we zoom out and we’re like, “Wait, we’re in the car.”
And as we pan more, we realize, “Oh, we’re with Julia and she’s watching Alex.” And then we’re like, “Oh no,” and now she’s starting her car. She’s going to follow him.
We weren’t trying to be clever; we were just trying to make it as efficient as possible because in the movie, this long and with this much story, the fewer shots you have, the faster it’s going to flow.
WeaponsCredit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
No Film School: What does that look like practically in terms of your prep?
LS: The prep was very laborious. It’s probably the hardest I’ve prepped any project, harder than most TV shows, which are usually a lot longer than movies. We spent two months slowly shot listening to the film over Zoom or in person and really just playing around and dreaming up ideas, pitching crazy ideas, sussing it out, talking through the rhythm of it. And the beauty is Zach already had so many brilliant ideas for how he wanted scenes to go. It was very much in his head.
And then the next part was going to locations and photo boarding it. We photo-boothed the whole movie. We took every frame of the film on my iPhone, and we would shoot it. Even if it was just a hand insert, it was like, “Well, what angle is the hand insert, and where is it? How do we show that his hand’s going to get stabbed by a needle in one shot?”
Things like that.
And we put them all together, and Zach’s assistant helped us do this. There’s a lunchroom at the studio we were at, and the entire room, every single wall, was paneled with photo boards of the whole film, which also helped us schedule. We would go in there with our AD and start pointing at which frames go where, and then reordering them.
We had to basically figure out exactly where the camera is going to be and how it was going to move in order to make our days. Not that 50 days isn’t a lot of days, it’s just [that] there are 250 scenes in the film, so there was just so much to shoot, which is why I think it’s fun to watch. A lot happens in this movie.
No Film School: You’re really playful with the camera at a lot of points, but it’s not distracting from the story or the momentum. How do you choose those moments to be playful?
LS: A lot of it is from the script, and a lot of it is about holding back information, whether it’s Justine has just met [Paul, played by Alden Ehrenreich]. They just met at a bar, and then you hard cut out of the sequence, and you’re like, “What happened?” And you just start on Julia staring at something off-screen, and a clever audience member will be like, “Oh no.” And then after a second, we cut and we reveal that, oh no, they slept together. They’ve both made a bad mistake.
We were constantly trying to figure out how much information we could pull back from the audience, but still could tease them about it, whether it’s Julia filling up a cup full of ice at her apartment in the opening before someone knocks on her door.
If you’ve watched horror movies, that kind of shot reads as something’s brewing, there’s something, why wouldn’t we just show her doing it? Why are we staring at the glass? Then you hear this knocking, and the camera slides across the room and shows you a very compressed shot of the door just looming in the distance.
A lot of it was as we were talking about it, we were just trying to figure out how to make a scene fun, and it was like if we had a great idea, we would do it, and if we needed it to be quick, we would kind of take that out and be really blunt with the framing just to move it along.
Julia Garner as Justine in New Line Cinema’s Weapons, a Warner Bros. Pictures release.Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
No Film School: It’s so funny you mentioned that shot because I do remember specifically looking at all the corners. What’s happening? What are we supposed to be seeing?
You’re kind of hitting on what I was going to bring up next, which is the film’s ability to shift so deftly between horror and absurdism and dark comedy. How do you approach knowing that you’re going to have those shifts in the story? Does it change how you’re working?
LS: It doesn’t. A lot of the comedy is from the performance. I think the trick to letting the comedy work in this is treating it very seriously. A part of the comedy is the release in it, and I think if you try to lean into that visually, it gets silly. I think you pretend that it’s not a comedy, and so that way it feels like whatever it’s happening to these actors is just poor, unfortunate luck or fate, and that they are stuck in it. No, we never once talked about how to make a shot funnier.
I think the only funny shot in the movie is an insert of seven hot dogs on a plate, so I was very excited about it because I was like, if we do this right, people are going to be like, “Oh, no, something is wrong. I don’t know why, but something about this shot of these seven hot dogs is telling me that something bad’s going to happen.” And we didn’t do anything. We just tried to make it as beautiful as possible. We’d spent time trying to make that shot look good.
No Film School: Do you have a favorite shot or sequence from the film?
LS: I’m torn. The ice cube shot, visually, is my favorite shot because we got this kind of vintage blue glass. And to me, it just makes my shoulders tense up because it’s one of those—it’s foreboding.
But then also I love the shot of Julia in the car, and she falls asleep at night, and then the camera pans and zooms in, and then just pans back. It’s a very simple move, but just hearing the audience during that sequence is so fun.
Again, it’s the camera. It is simply a panning shot. We pan right, and then we pan left. That’s it. I was just so excited by how much we got out of something so simple, and I think that’s the biggest takeaway. You don’t have to get fancy to make something effective.
And we tried to maintain that throughout the movie … the only time we got really technical is when we really had to follow a character. We weren’t trying to be slick, if that makes sense. We were trying to make all character-based or plot-based decisions with the camera.
No Film School: I think one thing that is so effective is that a lot of the tension comes just from being with the characters, and I think that’s a great example. Were you always going to shoot it that way?
LS: Yeah, no. I remember one of the first times I talked to Zach, I was like, “That car sequence at the door,” I was like, “Can you imagine a oner?” And he was like, “I have imagined a oner. That’s exactly how I saw it, too.” I think tension is everything, and a lot of the film doesn’t cut if we don’t have to.
I think living with the character is really fun, and it also means that by living with the character, we’re hiding a lot from the audience, and that’s one of the few times that the camera breaks the mold and it goes, “Oh, by the way, she’s asleep, but what could be happening over here?” And then you’re just like, “No.”
It’s one of the few breaks to me visually, actually, in the film, and that’s probably why I like that shot, is that we are doing more than is necessary for the character.
But a lot of the movie, because we’re with the characters, a lot of the movie is medium shots or full shots of actors, and that adds another tension. There is a claustrophobia to a degree because you’re always with the character. We don’t do a lot of wides, we don’t do a lot of bird’s eye jib, none of that. It’s generally that you’re just moving through the life of each person.
Austin Abrams as James in New Line Cinema’s Weapons, a Warner Bros. Pictures release.Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
No Film School: I love that part too. It was so fun to be in the theater. I just haven’t had so much fun in a horror movie in a really long time. People are really watching it like a sport, almost.
LS: In the last theater I went to, there’s a panning shot when Alex peeks into his aunt’s bedroom, and the pan moves slowly, pans up the leg, and we end on the face, and the person in front of me just goes, “Oh, hell no.” And then the whole audience laughed.
It’s fun to go to a movie and actually have a group experience. I don’t think we get that anymore. We don’t either have horror movies like that, or I miss going to comedies whenever it feels rare. I’m dying to see Naked Gun. My friends are like, “No, it’s actually funny. And if you go with a crowd, everyone actually laughs together.” Hopefully, this will inspire people to bring it back.
No Film School: On a technical level, you have a lot of darkness in the film. You’re shooting a lot of nights, and you have a very dark house. Do you have any advice for DPs working in low light?
LS: Well, we did a couple of tricks. One was, like a lot of films, we built a LUT. And we did a really long process to get to where the LUT was for the film. All LUT stands for a lookup table, which is basically a series of zeros and ones that changed the contrast and how color is rendered. We built in a LUT that forced us to overexpose about half a stop to a stop, so even when I shot something dark, there was still information there that maybe looked like it was gone.
We’ve actually now built a LUT that forces you to overexpose three stops. You can go really dark and not pay the price, but overall it was just making sure that if you’re going to go dark, make sure you have things in the background to reflect or to create silhouettes against, and I think that’s what works in this is we have a lot of dark moments, but we’re able to still have a visual journey for the audience.
It’s not black on black and then lighting it. Backlight is great for that, though. Usually, I’m kind of anti-backlight. A lot of it was just finding locations that felt right.
The trick to getting really moody in Alex’s house was that there are so many windows that you always have the actors in silhouettes, so even if their face isn’t lit, you can see what their body’s doing. Or just trying to light with a soft source and shape it just on their faces from a distance is great, or maybe going brighter and then printing it down or using power windows.
But in reality, just go for it. If you’ve done your work and you’ve tested your cameras and you know what the image is going to look like later, you just go for it. If that’s what you want, that’s what you should get. I don’t think you should necessarily play it safe if you don’t have to. Bold choices are what make interesting filmmakers. No one’s like, “Oh, thank God that guy played it safe.”
I think it’s good to carve out at least the actors, if not the background, from the actors, if you’re going to go that dark, because then at least you can follow something.
I know there’s been a lot of pushback about night scenes being too dark in the modern era of digital filmmaking. At the same time, it could also be a scene where sound design is everything. I always felt like when it gets too dark, it’s telling the audience to listen.
And this is the first movie that, in the grade, Zach asked to go darker. A lot of night scenes and a lot of interiors were brighter originally, and he printed them down. He wanted people not to know, to have to guess specifically where Josh [Brolin] is throwing Austin [Abrams’] character around; he kept making it darker. He wanted people to be a little concerned about where the actor ended up.
WeaponsCredit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
No Film School: Is there something that you wish you had known earlier in your career? Advice you would give yourself?
LS: If I were giving myself earlier advice, it would be to pick a script that has a good story and not good visuals. I’ve definitely made that mistake in the past, where I picked something that I thought was visually interesting, but my heart wasn’t in it.
And I think also, I think eye lights are really important. That’s the one thing I fight for now, when I shoot every scene, is I make sure there is an eyelight for each actor. If you can’t read what their eyes are, you can’t really see what’s going on inside their head.
There’s that cheesy quote about the eyes being the window to the soul, but I fight for it, and if you watch Weapons, it’s in every scene, but there are two actors at the very end of the movie that don’t have highlights for a very specific reason.
I think they’re really important. I think they’re going to elevate your photography because the first thing that audiences look at when they look at an image is the actor’s eyes. There’s tracking. They’ve done science that can show that they look at the person’s eyes before they look at anything else on the screen.
No Film School: Is there anything else you wanted to add about your work?
LS: I think the reason Weapons is so fun is that it was so planned out. That was the only way we were able to achieve it. There. We removed the guesswork from set. We would talk it out, and then we would photo board it, and sometimes we would even take the photo boards and put them in Premiere and see if they cut together and see if the sequence felt right.
There’s an opening montage of kids running from different houses, so we made the world’s most boring version of that, which is just pictures of houses cut to the George Harrison song to figure out how long each one needed to be. It’s like, “Oh, the kid needs to run for five seconds where the song feels like it should cut.”
I think just prep the hell out of it, and then you can also figure out if you have a good movie or not. If you’re not excited after prep to make the movie, then something is wrong.
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