The Beach House's Jake Weber Talks Low-Budget Horror, Creative Freedom, and Zack Snyder's Director's Cut of Dawn of the Dead

From Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead and a long run on TV's Medium to Hell on Wheels and 13 Reasons [...]

By Russ Burlingame

From Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead and a long run on TV's Medium to Hell on Wheels and 13 Reasons Why, character actor Jake Weber has become a familiar face to generations of TV and film fans. His latest film, The Beach House, hit Blu-ray and DVD today, shortly after its debut earlier this year on AMC's Shudder, a horror-themed streaming service. In the movie, he plays the husband of a terminally-ill woman who, along with a younger couple, finds himself vacationing at a beach house for the weekend when things suddenly go really, really wrong, and everyone ends up running for their lives.

Weber largely takes a back seat to the film's central character, Emily (Liana Liberato), but one of the best parts of the first act is the genuine emotion between Weber's Mitch and his on-screen wife, Jane (Maryann Nagle). As so often happens, especially on smaller movies with a limited budget, a couple who spend decades together in-universe have to be brought to life by actors who just met.

"I think in terms of relating to other actors with whom you haven't had a lot of experience, and then all of a sudden you're on screen, I think it's just...it's a match," Weber told ComicBook.com. "You just get used to it after so long that you just figure out ways to make it feel familiar. And hopefully if you have what is known as chemistry, which is not necessarily the way people think of chemistry as sexual chemistry. It's just that if the actress can move in a relaxed way together and to each other, that tends to translate as history. Good actors, they just do this. It's like learning lines. It's just one of those things."

One would think it has to be tough moving between TV -- where he has dozens of hours over several seasons to flesh out some characters -- and movies where he has to shoot everything in four weeks. That's not entirely untrue, but Weber told us that he doesn't tend to put too much thought into things like that.

"I had a teacher once was this sort of famous character actress," Weber explained. "She said, 'You treat every single project that you're on if it were the greatest project and the greatest opportunity ever, Because it deserves that, and you deserve to treat it with that respect.' And that's how, if the material is not as strong, you will elevate it, and you also leave with self-respect. That is not the case with this script, which is very good. And obviously their talent is shooting on such a low budget. But the director is very good, and shot at very stylishly. He was economical with his use of time. And we had a terrific leading lady, and I felt she really came across well. And so I think that the movie worked for me. And you never know which film is going to be the little engine that could. And even in Dawn Of The Dead, when I was working on that, I didn't consider that I was working on a zombie movie. I treated it as a war movie, basically. We were in Vietnam or any kind of an apocalyptic world that people find themselves in. So I just don't think you treat genre any differently than you would anything else. You just try and find all the reality that you can in it."

Speaking of Dawn of the Dead, Weber has confidence that Zack Snyder's Justice League will be worth a look. He said that as a result of the declining life of the DVD market, he sees fewer director's cuts than you had in the heyday of the format...but he also thinks that for the most part, there's more freedom for most filmmakers.

"Look, I have never seen a director's cut that was not stronger than the studio cut," Weber told us. "Zack had the opportunity to put that out there, but now there isn't as much opportunities for that since when they released the DVD, and then you get the director's cut. And that's the cut that everyone's been waiting for. I just recently saw Zack Snyder's director cut on a big screen -- it was the first time I'd actually seen his cut; I'd only seen the movie at the premiere -- and he improved it a lot. It improved an already terrific movie. But studios are very concerned about time, how much attention people can give to a movie. I was watching The Deer Hunter with my son the other day. And that movie, I remember the scandal, because it was over three hours long and nobody thought that an audience could handle that. Well now, our attention span, we binge watch and we see we can take three hours easily. I mean, I can do three episodes of a one hour show easily. I think that now filmmakers are given more time, and that's a good thing. So I wonder how different the director's cut is now from a studio cut. And I think you would probably have to speak to directors about that."

The Beach House is available on DVD, Blu-ray, digital, and video on demand platforms.

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