I want to avoid spoilers, but that’s also what I start with. “Barbarian” was very much a movie where the less you knew, the better the experience was. Earlier this year, you produced “Companion,” which I feel had a similar approach. And now we have this movie, which I think the marketing is doing a really great job of setting up the mood for without giving much away. So I wonder if you could talk about how important it is for you to maintain secrecy.

Zach Cregger: Yeah, I mean it’s crucial. I feel like if you spill the beans, then you’re cutting half of the joy out of the viewing experience. So I really want people to be able to go in and see the movie as it was intended, which is to be this kind of unraveling mystery. The word mystery has a lot of weight here. It’s not a mystery if you know what happened. So let’s keep it a mystery.

Could you talk about the format of the film? I had seen you comment that you were inspired by “Magnolia,” and it reminded me of “Magnolia” and “Pulp Fiction” and Robert Altman movies like “Short Cuts” and “Nashville.” Was that you wanted to do — a horror version of that?

Yeah, “Magnolia” [is] a big one. And obviously if I reference “Magnolia,” then I’m kind of in there referencing “Nashville” and “Short Cuts” just because they’re so linked. “Pulp Fiction,” for sure, I should be referencing that more often because that movie really inspired me so much as a kid to think about structure outside the box, which [Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary] did so well in that movie. But “Magnolia” really just because it’s a big ensemble and it’s totally proud to be an epic movie and to be a little bit messy. It paints with all these different colors, but it has such a specific palette, and it’s sad and it’s funny and it’s everything. I just love the audacity of that movie. So when I thought of writing a horror movie, not with [something like] “Hereditary” as my inspiration — which by the way, I worship “Hereditary” — but when I think of [“Weapons”] more as this is an ancestor to “Magnolia,” then it gives me license to just kind of think differently about how I’m writing it.

I had read that the book “The Gift of Fear” partially inspired “Barbarian.” I’m wondering if was something similar here. Again, I know you don’t want to go into spoilers, but if there was anything that inspired this specific story or the stories really because there are many.

Yeah, it was a personal tragedy that happened in my life. So it wasn’t like a piece of media or anything like that, but it was just something that happened to me. So it’s much more, if “Barbarian” was an outward-facing movie, a movie that had a lot to say about society — that sounds so pretentious — but it was a movie that was looking out and talking about the world. Whereas “Weapons is a movie that’s very much like me looking inwards and inventorying my s***, my life. It’s an autobiographical movie in a lot of ways.