The maker of worlds: Rebel Moon's Zack Snyder unravels the secrets of his universe

It takes a lot of work to build a universe. Take it from Zack Snyder’s whiteboard. 

The detailed index of dates and events, glimpsed briefly by EW during an hourlong Zoom interview with the filmmaker and his producing partner/wife Deborah on Halloween, is a physical manifestation of his plans for Rebel Moon, Netflix’s two-part sci-fi film epic that will launch an entire galaxy of spinoffs and tie-ins across various media. And that board only holds the history of a single planet in the Rebel Moon mythology. 

But for all his extensive planning, the one thing Snyder couldn’t anticipate — or rush — was nature itself. The central conflict of Rebel Moon revolves around wheat, specifically the crop grown by hardy human settlers on the rocky planetoid Veldt in the first film, arriving this Dec. 22. When an imperial spaceship from the authoritarian Motherworld (the planet chronicled on that whiteboard) lands on Veldt demanding that hard-earned harvest to feed their merciless army, the settlers set out searching for any Davids who might be able to help them topple Goliath. One farmer in particular, Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), finds former imperial footsoldier Kora (Sofia Boutella), dashing bounty hunter Kai (Charlie Hunnam), the swordswoman known as Nemesis (Doona Bae), the general-turned-gladiator Titus (Djimon Honsou), the regal animal wrangler Tarak (Staz Nair), and revolutionary Milius (E. Duffy). Thus begins a new space saga that’s part Seven Samurai, part Star Wars, and pure Snyder.  

Every element of the wheat’s life cycle (its sowing, its growing, and its eventual harvest) plays a part in Rebel Moon. So to make sure they’d be able to capture it at every stage, Snyder says his team planted “10 football fields” worth of wheat in the Santa Clarita Valley — an uphill battle, considering the arid climate of the Golden State is much more conducive to grapes and almonds than the typical byproduct of the Midwest.

“What's funny is that our people in charge of growing the wheat didn't want to disappoint us,” Snyder says. “But the wheat wasn't growing fast. We would have to scramble and figure out what else we could shoot.” 

If only all 10 football fields would have grown as well and as fast as the wheat under Snyder’s care; the director lovingly tended to a control group in his garage to project how well the other plants might be doing, but it quickly outpaced its peers. “I should have been in charge of the wheat,” Snyder sighs. As if the one thing Snyder was lacking on Rebel Moon was another job title. 

In addition to directing the two films, he co-wrote the screenplay (alongside his 300 collaborator Kurt Johnstad and John Wick veteran Shay Hatten) based on a pitch he’d been brewing for years. Snyder also manned the cameras as his own cinematographer, a role he often filled in his old days as a commercial director but left behind during his past decade of helming DC superhero epics like 2016's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and 2017's Justice League. “I remember you saying that the bigger the movies got, the further you got from the camera, and it drove you crazy,” Deborah reminds her husband, sitting next to him on the Zoom call. 

Now, the hard work has paid off. The wheat (and the sci-fi universe) did eventually grow to fruition, and the results made a clear impact on Rebel Moon’s many actors — and hopefully its viewers as well. 

“It saves us a lot of work when it’s real because everything is there in front of you to react upon,” says Boutella, who stars as Kora, a former Motherworld soldier who is now assembling a team of resistance fighters to protect Veldt from the imperial oppression she used to enforce. “You can see it on camera, too. It does something to the eye. It looks different, especially with a bunch of CGI around.”

It better! Because Netflix is betting more than $160 million that the Snyders can create a Disney/Lucasfilm rival out of Rebel Moon as easily as they grew wheat in the desert.

From 'Star Wars' to star maker

The seed of Rebel Moon was first planted back when Snyder was a student at Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Design in the late ‘80s. Tasked with creating a one-line pitch, the future director settled on “The Dirty Dozen in space.” In other words, a ragtag team of warriors from different backgrounds assembled to fight for a common cause — but piloting spaceships and wielding laser guns instead of World War II bombers. Apparently, this idea killed in the room, and Snyder never forgot that. As he cut his teeth on commercials and achieved mainstream film success with his Dawn of the Dead remake and adaptations of seminal comics like 300, Snyder kept the idea in his back pocket. 

There was a brief period where it could’ve become a Star Wars project, though Deborah was never in favor of that. In any case, those conversations with producer Kathleen Kennedy took place before Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm, at which point, Snyder remembers, “They were off and running on The Force Awakens, and that was the end of Rebel Moon as a Star Wars thing.” 

He certainly had plenty of other projects to keep him busy — and another cinematic universe he was trying to get off the ground. After tackling famously dark superhero comic Watchmen with the 2009 movie adaptation, Snyder took his talents to the genre’s original icon, Superman. With Deborah, he worked on developing an interconnected universe of DC films around 2013’s Man of Steel that Warner Bros. hoped could rival the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Though the film and its crossover sequel Batman v Superman inspired intense passion among certain viewers, they divided critics and didn’t score the same world-conquering profits as, say, the Avengers.

Then, while making 2017’s Justice League, the Snyders exited mid-stream. Though Avengers helmer Joss Whedon was brought in to finish the film, Snyder’s true-believing fans never gave up hope of seeing the “Snyder cut.” Their years-long campaign eventually bore fruit with Zack Snyder’s Justice League in 2021. The four-hour film marked Snyder’s farewell to superheroes — and to existing intellectual property. 

Watch the full video interview with Rebel Moon director Zack Snyder.

Following in the footsteps of fellow filmmakers like David Fincher, Tyler Perry, and Guillermo del Toro, Snyder eventually pivoted to Netflix, where he returned to his zombie-movie roots with Army of the Dead. When it was time to decide on a follow-up, he reached into his back pocket for that old sci-fi pitch from his school days. 

“I said, ‘We could do an Army sequel, or… I have this insane sci-fi universe,’” Snyder recalls. “‘So if you guys are interested in developing original IP, I'm here for that.’” (It turns out these weren’t mutually exclusive options — Snyder recently told Total Film that Army of the Dead and Rebel Moon actually share a universe.)

“The Dirty Dozen in space” is straightforward enough, but Snyder always had grand ambitions of building out a whole galaxy of stories and characters around that core concept. So at first, he and Deborah considered developing Rebel Moon as a TV show for Netflix. Snyder reached out to producer Eric Newman — who first worked with him on Dawn of the Dead before becoming a showrunner of popular Netflix shows like Narcos — but they ultimately realized a series wasn’t the right format to bring Rebel Moon to life. 

“Movies spend more than TV shows, with very few exceptions, and that matters when you’re trying to realize the scale of what’s in Zack’s head,” Newman says. “Zack’s head operates on a film budget, not a TV budget. But his infectious passion for telling his stories made it as close to a sure thing as you can have in the movie business.” 

The script was still massive, though, so Rebel Moon will actually be two movies. Part One: A Child of Fire assembles the team and introduces the universe, while next year’s Part Two: The Scargiver brings everything together explosively. 

"We're at the epicenter of a new universe"

After more than a decade in the content mines of established stories, the Snyders are relishing the chance to build their own universe. Rebel Moon wears its pop culture influences on its sleeve (notes of Avatar and Heavy Metal are in there beside the aforementioned echoes of Seven Samurai and Star Wars), but simply being unbound from replicating past stories or living up to legacies has been an exhilarating experience. 

“Mostly everything right now is based on a book or based on a game. It's a remake, or it’s a sequel,” Deborah says. “There are very few times you get the opportunity to do something that's wholly original, and then to do it on a scale where there's different worlds and creatures and cool costumes has been really exciting. We’ve lived and worked in something that was so established for so long, it was 10 years of doing that, so it's nice to just do something different.”

Creating an original story carries its own challenges along with the freedom, though. You still have to make sure your own canon is consistent if you hope to rival giants like Marvel or Star Wars. 

“The daunting part of it is it's up to us to ask all the questions and answer all the questions,” says Snyder’s longtime producer Wesley Coller. “It's different than, ‘What canon do we have to be mindful of?’ That creation element falls solely on you, and it is just a different process. Now we’re at the epicenter of a new universe.” 

One thing that helps is not coming up with every single element yourself. Snyder is the visionary behind Rebel Moon and has the last word on every idea, but he’s also open to input from his collaborators. Boutella, for instance, brought her extensive dance experience to the role, which Deborah says “really allowed for amazing action.” 

Boutella explains that she wanted to respect the “incredible” amount of work done by the Rebel Moon stunt team by being as efficient as possible with her fight scenes. Dancing taught her how to do that. “You have to learn the choreography very fast, and you have to be resilient. You have to do it over and over and over and over again. That’s the dancer mindset,” says the Algerian. “It also has to do with how you execute your movements. Rhythm is really, really important. I don't do a count, but I know the rhythm of each move. There’s a music to it.”

Boutella also “has the ability to improvise physically,” according to Snyder, who recalls a time when he changed the choreography of a scene in the midst of filming and his star rolled with it. “If a normal person has learned that choreography for months, that is not really an option. They've just memorized it as it is,” he explains. “She performs the fight. She’s not just doing the choreography, she actually knows what it means.” 

In the world of the movie, Boutella’s Kora watched her family get slaughtered by Motherworld soldiers who then indoctrinated the orphan in the ways of their military empire. Boutella, who grew up in France after fleeing her home country alongside her family when the Algerian Civil War broke out in 1992, connected with that backstory. 

“It resonated closely with my experience,” Boutella says. “I had to leave my country when I was 10 years old. I didn’t feel completely at home when I was in Paris, after having to make such a drastic change. Of course, the circumstances are completely different, but for me, it resonated. I felt I could access that feeling of not necessarily belonging.”

Other actors brought pieces of themselves to their characters, as well. 

Nemesis’ introductory scene, for example, is maybe the coolest fight scene in the film. Wielding two flaming swords, she works to protect a young human child from an alien spider woman (Snyder’s Sucker Punch star Jena Malone). But it wasn’t until Bae was cast in the role that the character really came into her own.

“We knew that Nemesis was a swordswoman, but before we got Doona we were talking in the early days about how she would fight and what her technique would be,” Snyder says. “Thank God my team is incredibly versed in different martial disciplines from around the world, because when we got Doona, then we understood, ‘She's South Korean, she has a very particular cultural lineage, so let's draw on that.’ They were able to use the martial traditions and costumes of Korea, but as a sci-fi version.”

Titus, meanwhile, is a former general of the Motherworld who has since become disillusioned with the Imperium that conquered his world long ago. Like Boutella, Honsou easily connected with his character’s background. 

“He had been sent to the Motherworld's military academies where he was immersed in the culture of the Motherworld, while his own culture from back on his home planet was repressed in order to assimilate,” Snyder explains. “And Djimon was like, ‘Oh, that's what the French did to me!’ He was able to really relate to this colonial power that's out there just gobbling up big chunks of the universe. We did that pretty much with every single character in the movie,” he continues — revealing that since Nair speaks Russian, they consciously incorporated elements of that real language into the invented one Tarak speaks, in order to “take advantage of a natural Russian speaker's way of forming words.” 

Rebel Moon’s roots in the real world go beyond the characters themselves. The Veldt settlement draws visual inspiration from the Vikings, while the moon of Pollux has a Roman-style gladiator arena. The Motherworld’s military is inspired by European World War I uniforms, and the architecture of the imperial capital is a fusion of “dieselpunk meets Soviet submarine,” according to Snyder. The knight-like robot known as “Jimmy” (performed by Dustin Ceithamer and voiced by Anthony Hopkins) is clearly inspired by medieval knights.

The way they thought about it, Snyder says, is that these characters’ home planets could be space equivalents of the actors’ real native countries. The score, by frequent Snyder collaborator Junkie XL (a.k.a Tom Holkenborg), also incorporates elements of Earth culture into the movie’s sci-fi tapestry. 

“Rebel Moon is an advanced score, with many futuristic elements, but it is also very grounded and human,” Holkenborg says. “The sound is even earthy at times, as Rebel Moon starts on an agricultural planet. I used simple instruments to underscore the characters' humanity and morals. The characters all share a tragic history but come from different places in the universe. I used a lot of vocals, which is unusual for me, to try and give many of the characters their own vocal signature and to capture their individual journeys.”

Zeal of the converts

Although the Rebel Moon heroes all hail from different backgrounds, many of them share a particular history in common. Both Kora and Titus once served the Motherworld and now fight against it. The same is also true of the revolutionary warrior siblings Devra and Darrian Bloodaxe (played by Cleopatra Coleman and Ray Fisher, respectively), who the Motherworld’s forces are deeply intent on capturing before their resistance movement (including loyal followers like E. Duffy’s Milius) grows too powerful. 

Snyder cast Fisher as Cyborg in his Justice League movie, and though the actor has spoken publicly about the negative experiences he had with Whedon and DC executives after Snyder’s departure from the film, it hasn’t soured their relationship. The two stayed in touch over the years, and their reunion on Rebel Moon was a happy one. 

“I love Ray. I talk to him all the time, pretty much every day,” Snyder says. “But no one's seen him like this. He's a big dude, and we saw him in that [Off Broadway play Fetch Clay, Make Man] where he plays Muhammad Ali. I love Muhammad Ali more than anything, but Ray is definitely more ripped than he was. So having played that role before and then all the training he got for this movie, what he was able to do as a physical presence was really incredible, on top of what he’s able to do dramatically.” 

Anyone impressed by the look of Darrian Bloodaxe or his sister (both coated in colorful war paint and battle-worn armor, wielding all kinds of weapons as they lead true-believing freedom fighters like E. Duffy’s Milius) is in luck, because they’re the focal point of the first Rebel Moon tie-in comic. Written by Mags Visaggio but overseen by Snyder, Rebel Moon: House of the Bloodaxe will hit stores in January to explain the backstories of these cool-looking characters. 

“It’s about where they come from and how they ran amok of the Motherworld,” Snyder says of the comic. “It’s about how they were at one time loyal, and all the politics and drama of how they ended up as outside rebels against the Motherworld.” 

In addition to the comic, the Snyders also have extensive plans for other Rebel Moon spinoffs. An animated short film will explain the story of the shadowy figures known as Kali, who power the empire’s most dangerous technology. A narrative podcast will delve into the history of the Motherworld, while novelizations and making-of books will flesh out explanations of the film. There will also be plenty of additional material in the R-rated “director’s cut” versions of each film, which Netflix will release at an undisclosed date.

“It's a full hour longer,” Snyder says of the other cut. “It's not just slightly different or a little bit more. There are big chunks of the movie that are different. A lot more stuff is fleshed out.”

“Zack is a world-builder,” Coller explains. “He loves the layering of a world and the details of a story and the nuances of a character. His process always has him doing so much exploring what’s under the hood, not just what we see on screen. Having the opportunity to take this fresh idea and build all of that out, asking this question over here and finding the answer to that over there, was the most exciting part to him.” 

It’s also hard not to notice the parallels between Snyder building his own universe with the experience he gained on DC properties and the multiple Rebel Moon characters who are battling the Motherworld with the skills they gained fighting for it in the past. 

“I like the idea that we can find ourselves within a system that we don't necessarily agree with, or that has gotten corrupted while we've been in it,” Snyder says. “The pure, redemptive story that implies is cool.”

“You could still be a hero,” Deborah notes. “Just because you’re one way doesn’t mean you always have to be defined that way. People can change, and grow, and learn.”  

Whether these rebels (both real and imagined) will find redemption is a question for the future. First comes the fire, then the scars. Welcome to a whole new world.

Cover Director: Jon Deaton for Netflix

Cover DP: Pierre Habib for Netflix

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