According to Damon Lindelof’s honest comments to Vanity Fair, Brad Pitt approached him with an edited cut of World War Z as he wanted an objective opinion from someone seeing the material for the first time with no invested roots in the project. Pitt wanted someone to bluntly comment on where the film stood, along with how to fix it. Lindelof’s reaction? The ending as it existed was “abrupt and incoherent,” missing “a large chunk of footage.” Damon’s suggestions were to either doctor up the existing edit with new material that could make sense of the mess, as he explains “Is there material that can be written to make that stuff work better? To have it make sense? To have it have emotional stakes? And plot logic and all that?”
Then there was road number two, “Road Two, which I think is the long-shot road, is that everything changes after Brad leaves Israel,” which would mean ditching an entire battle scene in Russia (the 12 minutes previously mentioned) for complete re-shoots (the 30-40 minutes also previously mentioned). Lindelof didn’t think the scrapping of Brad’s exploits in Russia would fly with Paramount officials, due to the tremendous amount of work and budget it would require just for a fix, but apparently World War Z was such a piece of garbage that they didn’t even want to try and make Brad’s ending in Russia work.
Red flag number one I’d say, right? How are you supposed to trust a director and producers who present content which is so bad everyone stops, looks around awkwardly at one another, and collectively realizes what they’ve put together isn’t even fit for theaters? Or better yet, ones that didn’t even know what they wanted to shoot going into production? I understand filming on the fly and making adjustments here and there, but according to Pitt there was only the inkling of a plan as production kicked off. Lindelof revealed that Pitt told him “When we started working on the script, a lot of that stuff had to fall away for the story to come together. We started shooting the thing before we locked down how it was going to end up, and it didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to.”
Red flag number two for me right here, as with the source material already in place, there really shouldn’t have been much need for “not locking down how it was going to end up.” Sure, adaptations should be allowed to take creative liberties and produce a film that can appeal to the masses, but to just go in guns blazing and wing the production only makes me think the World War Z novel was optioned for name only, hoping to create a PG-13 zombie film which attracts mainstream viewers, genre viewers who are gung-ho for any type of zombie adventure, and then the more intelligent crowd who worship Max Brooks’ novel for the bit of geopolitical brilliance it is. In layman’s terms, Paramount is trying to trick people into seeing World War Z by optioning the popular novel, only to ignore the source material and present a story which has little to do with Brooks’ book. All of this could have been avoided by letting Brooks participate in scripting though, right?
Red flag number three: Max Brooks wasn’t approached by producers until after filming had begun. Here’s what he had to say:
Why would I read [the script]? This is not the movie you’re going to make,” Brooks said. “You’re going to do rewrites and reshoots. That’s what happens when you make a giant movie. My attitude is if you haven’t invited me in to contribute, then fine. Go make the movie you want to make and I’ll see it when it comes out.
Yup, I can’t get on board a project that purposely keeps whoever created the original content out until the very last minute when everyone knows his approval or disapproval didn’t mean a damn thing. Like they were going to halt production if Max didn’t like the current script? Confirming my fears, Brooks went on to tell the interviewer that World War Z shares no commonalities with his book except for the title, which is nothing but a low-blow to fans of Brooks’ literary work. The potential for a mockumentary style film along the lines of District 9 could have worked wonders, but with every new piece of information, it looks like we’re going to get nothing but a bloated action blockbuster that loses sight of Brooks’ geopolitical commentary, commentary Pitt admits was originally a giant drawing factor that made him come aboard the project.
