Brad Pitt lands the June cover of Vanity Fair, and hot damn, he looks good! He’s been on the cover of Vanity Fair a bazillion times, and I always enjoy his interviews. In this issue of Vanity Fair, Brad talks all about the making of his new movie World War Z, from the shocking budget overages, to the on-set drama and having to re-shoot the ending.
Screenwriter Damon Lindelof tells Vanity Fair that the film had problems, early on. “He took me through how excited he was when he read the book, what was exciting for him, the geopolitical aspect of it. ‘But 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.’” The actor asked him to watch an edit, and told him, “The thing we really need right now is someone who is not burdened by all the history that this thing is inheriting, who can see what we’ve got and tell us how to get to where we need to get.”
In her revealing report, Holson also speaks to director Marc Forster and Paramount executives Marc Evans and Adam Goodman about the many problems that plagued the set—which included re-writing and reshooting 40 minutes of the film to find a coherent ending—and, most astonishingly, how the budget ballooned to around $200 million.
While closing down the production in Malta, for instance, the wrap-up crew found a stack of purchase orders related to the cast and extras that had been casually tossed into a desk drawer and forgotten; the amount totaled in the millions of dollars. Marc Evans, president of production at Paramount, was shocked. He calls the overages an “unthinkable action” which needed to be addressed immediately. “It was literally insane. Adam [Goodman, president of the Paramount Film Group] and I believed we’d gotten out of Malta good, and I found out we weren’t. That is a nightmare.”
When it came time to watch the director’s cut, Holson reports, the room was silent. “It was, like, Wow. The ending of our movie doesn’t work,” says Evans. “I believed in that moment we needed to reshoot the movie.” After 10 minutes of polite discussion, everyone left. “We were going to have long, significant discussions to fix this,” he recalls thinking.
“I said to them, There are two roads to go down here,” says Lindelof. “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? And Road Two, which I think is the long-shot road, is that everything changes after Brad leaves Israel.” That meant throwing out the entire Russian battle scene—or about 12 minutes of footage—and crafting a new ending. “I didn’t think anyone was going to say, ‘Let’s throw it out and try something else,’ ” Lindelof recalls. “So when I gave them those two roads and they sounded more interested in Road B”—which meant shooting an additional 30 to 40 minutes of the movie—“I was like, ‘To be honest with you, good luck selling that to Paramount.’ ”
The rest of the story will be released when this issue hits shelves on May 2.
I cannot WAIT for ‘World War Z.’ Zombies are NOT my cup of tea, but Brad Pitt is. The sacrifices I make. Have you seen the latest trailer for ‘World War Z?’
WATCH IT AFTER THE JUMP! (more…)
Posted Tuesday, April 30th, 2013 at 9:09am
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