World War Z

Quantum of Solace Director to Helm World War Z


At Fear Fest last weekend, I finally got the chance to tell author Max Brooks to his face how much I loved World War Z, and he seemed appreciative. Seriously if you haven’t read this book yet, stop whatever you’re doing and rectify that immediately. It’s just a flat-out fantastic novel.

That being said, I have no idea how it will translate to film, but a movie’s been planned for it for a while now. This morning Variety reported that Quantum of Solace director Marc Forster has been tapped by Paramount to direct said movie, working from a script by The Changeling (the new one, not the George C. Scott movie) scribe Michael Straczynski.

"The genre always fascinated me,” Foster told Variety, ”and when they pitched it to me, it reminded me of the paranoid conspiracy films of the '70s like All the President's Men," Interesting take on the mateiral ... WWZ is the detailed account of how the zombie apocalypse went down 10 years after it happened from those who lived through it. Personally I think it’d do better as a series on HBO than a 2-hour film given the nature of the material, but no one listens to me...

Keep it here for more as we learn it!

Source: DreadCentral

'World War Z' a Thriller... Like Bourne Identity?! Eww....

How many of you caught the new James Bond movie QUANTUM OF SOLACE? Well, I thought it was a complete bore and lacked any thrills that a Bond movie should have, which is why I am frightened that director Marc Forster is going to be adapting World War Z for Paramount Pictures. In a new interview with writer J. Michael Straczynski, I have found a whole new reason to be paranoid... the film is said to be compared to THE BOURNE IDENTITY (yikes). Read on for the skinny.

Straczynski talked with MTV a bit about the plans for his adaptation of WORLD WAR Z, which will be directed by QUANTUM OF SOLACE director Marc Forster.

“We talk about it as a thriller, the closest comparison being ‘The Bourne Identity,’” explained Straczynski, who’s also penning a “Forbidden Planet” revisiting. But at least there's something to look forward to, such as a sea of zombies.

“Most zombie movies to this point have been small, focusing on a few people in a house. And this has got real scare. You’re in India with hundreds of boats trying to get out of there with a tidal wave of zombies. The scale of what we’re doing here is phenomenal.”

As for how he plans to adapt the novel, which is written from the perspective of a United Nations agent reporting on the events of the zombie outbreak through interviews and eyewitness statements, Straczynski said he plans to preserve that storytelling angle as much as possible. In fact, the movie will serve to show how the book was produced in Brooks’ zombie-infested world.

“The fictional concept of the book is that its written by someone with the UN, so let’s tell that story,” he explained to MTV News. “Let’s show the book being written. We follow this guy all over the world as he goes on these interviews, and he has his own personal story as well. You’re cutting between the past and the present, how he got to this point.

“It has that international feel to it, and because it goes backward and forward in time, we can cherry-pick our favorite moments in the book,” continued Straczynski. “Some of it is crazy in scale. It’s huge. It’s as political as the book was. And it ends with that book being completed.”

Source: MTV

World War Z will be a HUGE Scale Zombie Movie

MTV had the opportunity to talk with J. Michael Straczynski about his upcoming adaptation of Max Brooks‘ World War Z. Straczynski says that it will be the first large scale zombie film.

“Most zombie movies to this point have been small, focusing on a few people in a house. And this has got real scare. You’re in India with hundreds of boats trying to get out of there with a tidal wave of zombies. The scale of what we’re doing here is phenomenal.”

Marc Forster recently signed on to direct, and Straczynski will be doing one more draft based on the filmmaker’s new notes. Straczynski calls the film “a thriller”, comparing it to the Bourne films. As cool as Straczynski makes the film sound, I’m a little nervous about the comparison to the Bourne movies, especially considering that Forster’s latest movie, Quantum of Solace, was heavily criticized for it’s disjointed action sequences.

AICN called Straczynski’s previous draft of the screenplay “a horror epic, a serious, sober-minded adult picture”, potentially “a genre-defining piece of work” with Best Picture potential (really?!). The basic premise of the book is that it is an oral history of the zombie war, compiled by an unnamed government employee. The movie follows this researcher, named Gerry Lane (possibly to be played by Brad Pitt, who is producing the project), as he travels the world conducting interviews with survivors, 10-years later. Forster told Variety that the story reminded him of “the paranoid conspiracy films of the ’70s like ‘All the President’s Men.”

The book was released in 2006, and is available on Amazon for $16.47. I’ve included the official plot description from the book after the jump:


“The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”