Director Marc Forster hasn't said too much about his upcoming World War Z, but with his Machine Gun Preacher opening soon, the German-Swiss director talked with Film School Rejects about his adaptation of Max Brooks' best-selling novel.
The movie version has come under scrutiny lately, when a synopsis revealed that the movie would stray from the novel's post-zombie outbreak setting, though, really, the surprise is really that so many were shocked that a movie wouldn't strictly adhere to its novel source.
While Forster didn't address the synopsis in the interview, he did discuss what they did take from the book, which is the political angle and the reality of the apocalypse.
I think that’s the whole point of it. The book is not a narrative by any means, but that’s what I found in reading it: it can make for a political commentary within a genre picture.
You know, I want it all to feel very real. Zombies are a metaphor for human behavior. There’s so much interesting stuff happening in the world right now, and on a global scale of change. Not just in the Middle East, but a lot of other places, as well. I do think zombies are a great metaphor. In the 70s, zombies were very popular, and George Romero was making critical movies about consumerism. It’s a great metaphor to play with. If you make them a part of your environment, then the more people can identify that this could happen in the here and now.
Hopefully, that will be enough for people to overlook the abandoning of the flashback structure of the novel. I, for one, am excited to see Brad Pitt kill zombies. But, he won't be getting any help from Bryan Cranston, who was reportedly cast in August. In a separate Film School Rejects interview, Cranston revealed that he could not work with Forster because of scheduling issues.
I didn’t work with Marc Forster. I was supposed to, but scheduling got in the way, so I’m not able to. I regretted the omission. I sent him an email, wished him well, and said I was sad it didn’t workout. You know, on some other project we’ll hopefully — will you please tell him I said hello? And tell him the zombies are coming to get him.
World War Z opens December 21, 2012.
