Exclusive Interview with The Battery’s Jeremy Gardner & Adam Cronheim

Former baseball teammates with opposite outlooks on their dead new world, Ben and Mickey try to survive the living dead and each other in The Battery, the directorial debut from Jeremy Gardner (who also writes and stars). With Scream Factory releasing The Battery on Blu-ray and DVD this week, I chatted with Jeremy and co-star/producer Adam Cronheim about making a memorable zombie movie on a micro-budget.

With zombies being so prevalent in pop culture right now, what angle did you take with The Battery to differentiate it from the horde?

Jeremy Gardner: Zombies tend to go big. They tend to have these broad, cultural relevancies, especially with [George A.] Romero’s themes of militarism, race relations, and consumerism. I wanted to focus on the specific human psyche. To watch one person’s mind slowly wilt under the pressures of the zombie apocalypse. So I figured I would just do both sides: do one person who revels in it and do one person who refuses to accept it. So that was my in, was to just focus on the way a human brain would adapt to it.

Adam, how did you get involved with The Battery? I understand you were cast shortly before filming began.

Adam Cronheim: My best friend from university introduced me to Jeremy after he found out he needed someone to play Mickey. He told Jeremy that I used to play baseball and then started acting. So we met and there was no real audition. The audition was just getting together and it seemed like we clicked right away. We went out and tossed a baseball around to seal the deal and then we just went out there and did it.

The Battery takes a similar approach to the zombie apocalypse by placing human relationships as the highest priority amidst a story set in a zombie-ridden world. Can you talk about the importance of keeping the movie character-driven?

Jeremy Gardner: It was the most important thing. I often talk about the fact that I don’t think micro-budget filmmakers shy away from catering their story to their budget. If you told me I had to write a movie that all takes place on a porch, then I think you could write a great story that takes place on a porch. And so I knew that if it was going to be super low-budget, the way to do it was to just focus on characters who were smart enough to stay out of cities, so they’d stay in the woods.

During a night of drinking, Ben gets Mickey to call the corpses walking outside their car “zombies.” This is unique, considering that in many living dead films and novels, the concept of zombies doesn’t exist in the characters’ world prior to the outbreak. What was your motivation for having that pre-existing awareness in The Battery?

Jeremy Gardner: I’ve heard people sit and watch a zombie movie and they go, “Why don’t they know it’s a zombie?” Because they’re not grasping the fact that this hasn’t ever happened before in pop culture. And there’s no Romero and there’s none of those things in this world that looks almost exactly the same as anything else, it’s just that you have to erase everything from zombie culture from it, so I didn’t want to do that. I thought it would be funny to throw a little nod in and say, “Yes, we do know that we’re in this world."

Something else that helps Mickey deny his apocalyptic surroundings is music. He’s constantly wearing headphones with the volume cranked up and that’s a dangerous thing to do in a world where a zombie can sneak up on you, but the songs also keep Mickey sane. Adam, can you talk about Mickey’s obsession with music?

Adam Cronheim: I think it’s a big link for him, and not only the music, because when we shot the movie there was never any music in the headphones—I was just wearing the headphones. I used the headphones as a safety blanket and theoretically the music was his tie to the days he wanted to get back to. It was his crutch.

You filmed The Battery in some beautiful backwoods locations in and around Kent, Connecticut, the same area where Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978) were filmed. How did these isolated settings bearing a bit of horror history add to the atmosphere during shooting?

Jeremy Gardner: It was just incredible. One of our producers, Douglas A. Plomitallo, he kept trying to convince me to go up to Kent, but it was further away than I wanted to have the production, but once we got there it was inevitable that we were going to shoot there. There’s something about it—it’s old and overgrown and once it gets dark out there, it’s dark.

The night we shot the drunken dancing scene was the one night we found ourselves deep in the woods in that abandoned campground after night fell. You’ve never seen people pack up a set so quickly and try to get out of there because the darkness was like ink. There were bugs everywhere and the forest was constantly making sounds and it definitely gave the sense that you were making a horror movie or in a horror movie, either way.

Rather than have Ben and Mickey driving around in an apocalyptic ride rigged with barbed wire and welded-on weapons, The Battery features the simplicity of a 1990 Volvo station wagon, adding to the film’s effective realism. Can you talk about how you came across the car and why you chose to use that stripped-down yet spacious vehicle in a zombie movie?

Jeremy Gardner: I actually found it on Craigslist. I knew I was looking for a station wagon because the third act was going to take place inside the car and I wanted it to be as long as possible. I wanted enough room back there and I figured we could take the back seat out and really spread it out. But it was really the first offer I found. I was just like, “Oh, this guy wants $900.” I asked if he could take $600, and I drove up and bought it. And the guy had two more of the same model of station wagon. He was like, “Oh, I love these cars, I just drove this one to Maine last week.”

***Potential spoiler in the following paragraph.***

Jeremy Gardner: And I could see that there was a sunroof, but I couldn’t find how to open it, so I figured maybe it was a version that had the space for a sunroof but didn’t actually have one, so we didn’t even realize that the sunroof opened until the day before we started shooting, so we rejiggered the whole ending for Mickey to go out through the top.

What were your experiences filming in the cramped quarters of the station wagon?

Adam Cronheim: The summers now are not like they were then, but this was three years ago. I don’t know what the average temperature was in August of 2011, but it was really hot in the back of that car and on top of that I chose not to wear socks throughout the shoot. Once I took my sneakers off in the back of that car, the smells started coming out, so it was definitely a little unpleasant. I think Jeremy being upset that my feet smelled added into everything that we were doing character-wise. The misery of it really played and that’s why it looks like it played, because it really played.

Jeremy Gardner: One thing I wasn’t expecting about it was that I’m fat and it’s hard to crumple my big body up and that was the most uncomfortable thing for me: finding places to get comfortable where I could act and also not feel like I was pinching my lungs in half with my gut falling over my belt buckle. It wasn’t made for a big caveman. [Laughs.]

I understand the Volvo barely made it through the shoot and did not survive afterwards. Can you explain what happened?

Jeremy Gardner: Too soon, man, too soon. [Laughs.] That’s one of those weird coincidences of movie making and life in general that you almost can’t believe. That car had 270,000 miles on it and it was a really mountainous terrain up there. There’s a lot of going uphill and we drove that thing for two weeks back and forth to set, up and down mountains, drove it all the way back to Norwalk, which is about an hour and a half away, to shoot some interior stuff.

We drove it all the way back to the mountain and when we finally wrapped on everything but that last moment, that last sequence, it exploded. I don’t know if it was the head gasket blowing apart—Christian says it was—but I went to park it in the final spot that it would be in the movie and it was just like, “Okay, I’ve done my job. I can’t be here anymore.” But if it had happened a few days earlier, it would have wrecked us. We would have had to tow it around, but it just so happened to last until the very last spot we needed to shoot. I will never forget that car for doing that.

The Battery’s ending leaves the door open for more films set in that zombie-ridden world, and I understand there’s an idea for a sequel that’s tentatively titled The Orchard. Can you talk about the status of the sequel and any other projects you have on deck?

Jeremy Gardner: The Orchard is always a possibility. I do have an idea for it. Recently I’ve been talking about doing The Orchard in a similar run-and-gun style. If we try to make it bigger, like Desperado (1995) [in comparison to its predecessor, Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi (1992)] it might not work, so I’m thinking at the moment let’s try to keep this little story small and intimate and figure out how to make The Orchard in that regard.

Right now we have a comedy that we shot called Tex Montana, which is a documentary-style survival host absurdist comedy that we’re about to cut. And I have a new script that’s a relationship monster movie that we’re trying to get made right now.