Zack Snyder caught COVID in the Amazon and kept rolling camera anyway.

That's the detail The Hollywood Reporter leads with in a new interview, and it tells you something about how differently Snyder made this one. His new film, The Last Photograph, premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday, and unlike every DC movie or Netflix production he's made in the last decade, nobody but Snyder himself paid for it.

A film with no studio behind it

Snyder told THR that working without a corporate backer changed the entire calculation. "There's no agenda to the movie," he said, contrasting it with studio filmmaking, which he described as closer to selling a product than making something whole in itself. There's no sequel to set up here, no toy line riding on it. Just, in his words, an experience.

The scale reflects that. Snyder says the budget came in smaller than some of the commercials he shot early in his career, before Dawn of the Dead and 300 turned him into a studio tentpole director.

Twenty years, several drafts, one tragedy

The project has apparently been kicking around for two decades. At one point it lived at Warner Bros with Sean Penn and Christian Bale attached, framed more as a spy thriller. Snyder eventually got the rights back once it was clear he wasn't shopping it to a rival studio.

What changed the material, according to Snyder, was the 2017 suicide of his daughter Autumn. "Yes, the framing is very similar and the events are similar, but what it became was a meditation on death and redemption," he told THR, adding that it's also about how differently people process grief.

The plot now follows a war photographer with a heroin habit who survives a mass killing that claims a diplomat and his wife. When the diplomat's brother turns up, the two men head deep into an unnamed South American country hunting for the family's kidnapped children.

Snyder behind the camera again

For the shoot, Snyder pulled in his regular collaborators, wife and producer Deborah Snyder, executive Wesley Coller, and 300 producer Gianni Nunnari. Stuart Martin and Fra Fee, both previously seen in Rebel Moon, star as the two leads.

Snyder operated the camera himself, something he hadn't done consistently since his commercial and music-video days, aside from a partial return on Army of the Dead. Deborah Snyder told THR the smaller crew let her husband work faster without losing the visual polish he's known for. "You just don't need all the bells and whistles," she said.

The result, per THR's description, drops the slow motion and green screen that defined Snyder's studio output, though a helicopter does go up in a commando raid sequence.

Whether an indie two-hander about grief finds an audience beyond festival crowds is the open question once Toronto's over. Distribution hasn't been reported yet, and that's the next thing to watch.