Zack Snyder & Matthias Schweighöfer Talk Army of Thieves’ Influences

Matthias Schweighöfer reprises his fan-favorite role of Dieter in Netflix’s Army of Thieves, which is out October 29 on the streamer. The heist film also stars Nathalie Emmanuel, Ruby O. Fee, Stuart Martin, and Guz Khan.

“In this prequel to Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, small-town bank teller Dieter gets drawn into the adventure of a lifetime when a mysterious woman recruits him to join a crew of Interpol’s most wanted criminals, attempting to heist a sequence of legendary, impossible-to-crack safes across Europe,” explains the official synopsis.

ComingSoon’s Jeff Ames got to chat with Army of Thieves director and star Matthias Schweighöfer and producer Zack Snyder about the film’s influences, its ties to the greater universe, and more.

Jeff Ames: Zack, there are so many great characters introduced in Army of the Dead. What was it about Dieter in particular that made you want to produce a spinoff?

Zack Snyder: Well, there’s a bunch of reasons. The first, probably reason is the amazing job that Matthias does with the character and how compelling he is, and how you want more and more of him as the movie goes. So that part is really initially the why of it. Then we realized that we encapsulated within Dieter’s character is the sort of mythological origins of the safe and it really offered us this amazing opportunity to create another sort of genre-busting heist film, and then introduce a romantic element, which was something we hadn’t really explored super heavily in Army.

Absolutely. Matthias, Army of Thieves has elements of other classic safecracking heist moves like for example, Thief with James Caan, Ocean’s Eleven and The Italian Job. Was there a particular film in the genre that you drew inspiration from paid homage to while tackling this project?

Matthias Schweighöfer: To be honest, I watched these films, like The Italian Job and Ocean’s Eleven, but I wanted to create something new. So, we really focused on the world of the safes and this story. Like, okay, what did we not see till now? What’s an interior of a safe looking like? But to be honest, I love the acting in Ocean’s Eleven. So I really focused on that part on the film.

Zack, you’re planting seeds for this massive Army universe. How does Army of Thieves and the characters introduced in this film figure into your future plans?

Snyder: Well, it’s one big, mythological mosaic. Shay [Hatten] and I have been working really it carefully to sort of weave a tapestry of these characters into like multiuniverses and multidimensions so, yes, they all play heavily. It’s like Game of Thrones with zombies. So who knows when these different characters are gonna show back up again. You wanna like the mother of safes, I guess, would be the [comparison]. I’m not gonna mess around with that metaphor anymore. I already broke it.

I thought it was great. It works. Matthias, what were the qualities about Dieter that you were excited to explore in this movie?

Schweighöfer: Yeah, his background. Why is Dieter, Dieter? Where is the name coming from? What’s this world anyway? Why is he a safecracker? Why is he good at safecracking and what are his interests? What’s Dieter’s world. So, that’s what I wanted to explore.

Zack, there’s a sort of meta-commentary running throughout these films, as the characters’ actions are informed by films and TV shows. Like notably the Brad Cage character. Is pop culture one of the heroes or would you say villains of your universe? Or am I reading too much into that?

Snyder: Not at all. We really consciously made a huge effort to use and deconstruct the very sort of genre that we’re inside of. Because we introduced that kind of what I would say, sort of the Heat style safecracking bank, robbing genre into this movie, which kind of wasn’t in Army. We really felt it was important to kind of also talk about where a lot of these, how we’ve learned to watch them and, or appreciate them is through moves like Point Break or et cetera.

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