World War Z author Max Brooks
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Who ever thought that Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio would get into a bidding war over the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft? That’s something even Nostradamus wouldn't have predicted, but it happened. Said bidding war was over the rights to Max Brooks’ wild new zombie book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, which tips its hat to Studs Terkel’s The Great War--but rather than featuring interviews with people involved in World War Z, the book investigates nearly every aspect of what would happen if there were a real zombie infestation in today’s world. Brooks is definitely an expert on all things zombie, having written the bestselling Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead.

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Daniel Robert Epstein: Well it has been like three years since we talked, how’s it going?

Max Brooks: I was just thinking that things have changed, at least for America. The war’s over, the economy’s up, switchgrass is growing everywhere.

DRE: Democracy is on the rise all over the world.

Max: Exactly [laughs].

DRE: World War Z is wild. It’s like court transcripts or something but better because it’s zombies. How did you come up with the idea for doing the book?

Max: The initial inspiration was in high school reading The Good War by Studs Terkel.

DRE: Someone on the net mentioned it was a lot like that book.

Max: Yeah, I read it in high school and it just blew me away. It was the first time I saw World War II on a personal level and it stuck with me for years. Then when it came time to do another book, I thought, “This is what I really want to do.”

DRE: Did someone ask you to do another zombie book or did you want to do another zombie book?

Max: Random House initially wanted me to do another humor book but I wanted to do another zombie book. We threw some ideas around and this is one I came up with.

DRE: They wanted another book like Survival Guide?

Max: No, just something humorous.

DRE: Survival Guide wasn’t exactly humorous and World War Z is definitely not that humorous.

Max: Anyone who thinks this World War Z is funny has severe emotional problems.

DRE: But it does have some funny stuff, like when Bill Maher has sex with Ann Coulter.

Max: I’m glad you liked that. Initially if people asked me who that was I was just going to say Stephen Colbert.

DRE: Did you have to pitch the book?

Max: Initially I just threw it at them and they said, “Yeah that’s really cool.” I knew I was onto something, because I started thinking about it on the cab ride home. The minute I said it, the stories just started generating.

DRE: I never read The Good War, is it structured in the same way?

Max: The format’s exactly like The Good War. It’s just interviews, people talking.

DRE: It seems like you had to do a lot of research for this book.

Max: I did way too much research. That’s why the book took two years. For every hour I spent writing I spent at least ten hours researching. I had to study science, medicine, technology, weaponry, military organization, culture, history, geography, environmental science. I’d better get a big frickin’ rebate for all the stuff I ordered on Amazon.

DRE: But it all paid off, because it seems very real even if certain parts are not.

Max: Actually everything is either real or based on something real. I was very lucky to know people who are experts in those fields. I know doctors, a guy who was on a nuclear sub, I know someone who works at the Pentagon, I know someone who works in the government. So I could just call them to check facts or to ask them questions.

DRE: How do you know these people?

Max: Partially because me and my wife have had eclectic lives, so we have collected a lot of great eccentric people.

DRE: Did you to travel for research?

Max: No, all this was done at the library or just in books and maps or on the phone. The internet is great, but it’s not reliable. Every time I’d look something up, I just gave myself more homework because I’d have to go fact check it. Some websites, like government websites, are pretty reliable. But if you look through the blogs you’ll think aliens have arrived.

DRE: So something like the organ harvesting in China was all real.

Max: Yeah, that’s all real. But I ran it by a few doctors that I know and that’s how I learned about what diseases you can get from organ donors. Organs have to be carefully screened for things like Hepatitis B or Hepatitis C or HIV. That’s a risk that you run when you do one of those shifty organ transplants in a third-world country.

DRE: Was it difficult to take any of these things that you were researching and apply it to zombies?

Max: Oh yeah. A couple things I had to throw away because I’d be going down a certain road that wouldn’t make sense logically because once you write a set of rules, you got to stick to them. A lot of high-tech weapon research, I had to throw away because a lot of them wouldn’t work. I definitely boxed myself in by my own logic.

DRE: Was it difficult to keep humor out of it?

Max: No, that was the easy part. The creative part was the easy part. I didn’t even write it in sequential order. I wrote it according to which particular interview was burning a hole in my brain. But then editing stuff was a bitch because I had to go back and get them all in a linear fashion.

DRE: Do you consider these zombies to be following [George] Romero’s zombie rules?

Max: In a strange way, I do more Romero than Romero because his zombies evolved [in Land of the Dead]. My zombies are even more zombierific because they don’t have memories, they aren’t afraid of fire. In [the original] Dawn of the Dead the zombies come to the mall because of their memories. Romero kept it fresh and new each film he did because that’s how you tell a good story. But like an idiot, I didn’t set out to tell a good story.

DRE: How was it writing something that didn’t have a strict story?

Max: With this book, I basically did everything wrong when it came to marketing. I must be the worst marketer in the history of writing because most zombie books are about one dude or a group of people. But I could just go out and read one of those. I don’t need to write about it.

DRE: But then again, the people who are marketing World War Z look like they might be doing a pretty good job of it.

Max: Yeah but I didn’t know that would happen. I didn’t talk to Random House for a year and a half after I submitted the idea. They had no input and I had no communication with them. So the day I turned it in, I was biting my nails. It was a big gamble.

DRE: Did you ever think of ways they could market it?

Max: There are a bunch of things that can be built around it because within the story there are other stories. It’s an entire world that’s been created and you can do a million things with that world. Right now I’m transitioning from author to salesman. Most publishing is self-publishing. I got to get out there and beat the drum really hard.

DRE: Was there any country or region that was more difficult to zombify than others?

Max: Pretty much all of them because I had to get their cultures right. China was a bitch because there really is no such thing as China. It’s had such an amazing history in the last hundred years. What would a 60 year old Chinese guy reference as opposed to a 30 year old Chinese girl? Every Chinese character had to be different. With India, was the character a Sikh, a Muslim, a Hindu, and which province was he from? At the eleventh hour, a Palestinian said to me, “Hey most Palestinians were kicked out after The Gulf War.” So I had to go back in and rewrite that whole bit.

DRE: I hate to use the cliché of a post-9/11 book, but the war that we’re in right now has proved so much about our world and it seems like World War Z really embraced all that.

Max: Yeah, unfortunately a lot of the stuff I wrote about was happening or happened after I wrote it. Before Katrina I wrote about what happens about to the Three Gorges Dam with a horrific flood. Actually when I wrote that, I thought, “Well that’s a little far-fetched, I wonder if people are going to get their brains around that one.” I wrote about the nuclear war between Pakistan and Iran before there was a brouhaha about Iran’s nuclear policy. Also naturally, every time I write about Israel, something goes crazy over there.

DRE: Well, that’s just Israel.

Max: Yeah, some things are evergreen.

DRE: That’s going to be happening long after we’re gone.

Were you incorporating feelings of the world right into the book or were you trying to write something that was pure?

Max: I was going pure, but there are some things I feel strongly about that I feel are going to happen whether we want them to or not. I think the real danger of the Iraq War is that there’s a real danger of a backlash against the military and national security. When the Iraq War ends, I think we’re in real danger of becoming post-Vietnam again where for ten years after Vietnam, any country in the world could pick on us and we wouldn’t do a thing.

DRE: It seems like the zombie epidemic in the book revealed the crack in every single government out there.

Max: Yeah, I think it goes to the heart of my philosophy of governments, because I’m an anti-conspiracy theorist. I think conspiracy theorists start with the premise that governments are efficient. I think conspiracy theorists actually sleep pretty good at night. Maybe the government isn’t doing what they want, but at least they have the power and the brains to do it. Whereas I believe governments are just made up of people and people make mistakes and people are weak and most of the time when really horrible things happen, the government says, “Oh boy, I really have no idea.”

DRE: You look at every piece of Cold War fiction, the government is perfect but they’re perfect in doing the things that they want to do. But I think people are realizing the government’s not even close to perfect especially when they don’t have much to do.

Max: Right. With the Vietnam War I would love to be like Oliver Stone and believe that it was this wonderful well-oiled machine between the government, big business, Lyndon Johnson. But the more I read about Vietnam, it was just a bunch of people blindly walking forward, and by 1975 they said, “Wow, who saw that coming?”

DRE: I was in Queens during the blackout and that was just a complete mess.

Max: We had a blackout three years ago in New York and you’d think after that people would be on the ball. I grew up in Southern California and every two or three years, fires would ravage the hillside. Then the rains come and wash thousands of tons of dirt into the ocean and take houses and people with them. Every two to three years there’s some government official on TV who says, “Wow, this really came as a shock.” The same thing happened three years ago! Growing up with that really gave me a sense of how incompetent, not just the government, but human beings are. So I think that goes to the heart of World War Z, it’s that it’s not a conspiracy, it’s really just human weakness.

DRE: How much was the Survival Guide an influence on the book?

Max: The rules of the Survival Guide apply to World War Z. As I said before I parted ways with Romero, even though he’s obviously my inspiration. I had to go in the opposite direction. Most people start with Romero and go in the direction of making their zombies faster or smarter or more advanced than his. I go the other direction and make them less advanced because that’s what really scares me.

DRE: It’s funny that people thought that Romero was going to use the same kind of zombies forever. I don’t think anyone expected Big Daddy in Land of the Dead. What did you think of Land of the Dead?

Max: I really liked Land of the Dead. I love John Leguizamo and I love that it was rich versus poor. They’re actually letting the zombies kill rich people, you can’t kill rich people. Bush is in the White House. I love everything Romero does. I think most people don’t get him. Most people think he’s a zombie guy but he’s really a social commentator like Studs Terkel or Andy Rooney. His movies reflect our society and what we’re doing at the time. But I think most people see his movies and walk away and go, “Wow, zombies got their head blown off, that’s awesome.” That’s because all the zombie movies that have come after Romero had absolutely no social commentary. We went from Dawn of the Dead, which was the most brilliant indictment of the 1970’s to Return of the Living Dead with “More brains!”

DRE: Yeah. Even though I liked the remake of Dawn a lot they really squeezed the social commentary out.

Max: Exactly. In the original Dawn of the Dead the shopping mall was the star of the movie and it was really about America at that point. Whereas the remake, which was a great movie, could’ve have taken place anywhere. There was nothing about the mall that had any meaning. There really was no talk about materialism, but then again it’s a good thing we’re not as materialistic and shallow as we were back then.

DRE: [laughs] I read that your publishing company is having a bunch of people dressed as zombies come to the book launch party in London.

Max: That’s a different publishing company than Random House. That’s Duckworth. I don’t know what the Brits have up their sleeve. They scare me. We’re talking about the country that invented The Smiths, so these people are capable of anything. When they go dark, they really go dark.

DRE: Are you going to be there for it?

Max: Yeah, I’m going over there. God bless them, they’ve been really big fans of the book. I’m curious to see if we sell the rights in Germany because there is now a German version of the Zombie Survival Guide.

DRE: That’s a little scary.

Max: That’s a compliment. When the Germans ask you to help them make war, I couldn’t ask for anything better.

DRE: Especially for a half Jew.

Max: When the Germans reach out to a half Jew and say help us make war, It’s like “wow.”

DRE: What’s it like to be fought over between Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio?

Max: I couldn’t believe it was happening. That just snowballed. My cell phone was ringing every five minutes and the bids kept jumping up. I kept saying, “They know what they’re bidding on, right?” That’s because once again, I’ve done everything wrong when it comes to commercial success. I only have one sex scene in the whole book. That’s the worst thing you could ever do in publishing. I also only have one main heroic dude. It’s crazy and they were bidding over it. I said, “Oh boy, I hope they read it first.”

DRE: What’s the status of that right now?

Max: I think they have a screenwriter and I think it’s going forward. So now I think it’s going to be in development for probably a year. But who knows what’s going to happen. As much as I love [Brad Pitt’s production company] Plan B, it’s not up to them. It is up to Paramount [Pictures]. The farther up the chain of command you go, the less creative and more businessy you get. So eventually the decision will not be made by anyone creative. It’ll be made probably by someone who’s looking at the budget and saying, “Well, we have x amount of movies already slated for this year and we just won’t have the money to make this one, so it’s not going to happen.”

DRE: Did you have any desire to write the screenplay?

Max: I didn’t have a choice because in order to get this thing going they need an A-list screenwriter. I’m totally cool with that. I stepped away because I got all of the emotional satisfaction I needed writing the book. So the point is, if they’re going to make this movie, they’re going to need all the help they can get and I have not proven myself as a bazillion dollar screenwriter.

DRE: Have you seen A Scanner Darkly yet?

Max: I haven’t but I got to see it.

DRE: It’s really beautiful. For some reason I had the idea that World War Z would work with rotoscoping.

Max: It might. My problem is that I haven’t seen or read anything because I’ve been living in a cave for the last two years working on this book. I’ve read so much nonfiction which is ironic because I hated homework. I never did homework in college. I used to write papers on subjects that I already knew about. Then I’d make up bibliographies, write fake book titles and put my friends’ names in there. I’ve done more homework for this book than I did in four years of college.

DRE: When you have a chance do you go see zombie movies?

Max: Sometimes, but I think the problem is I love Romero’s films so much and there’s so many Romero wannabes out there, but they’re always taking the wrong path with Romero. They’re leaving the social commentary behind and just filling it up with mindless gore. Which is fine, but that gets a little old after a while. I liked Shaun of the Dead because that was a great movie. Zombies aside, that was a well made, really well directed really just well written movie.

DRE: Did you ever hear back from Romero after you sent him a copy of The Survival Guide.

Max: I met him at a convention. I was terrified because, what if he was an asshole. But I’d heard enough good things about him that I wasn’t too nervous. He turned out to be a really cool guy. I always tell people to go out and buy his stuff before they buy mine, because he needs to be as bankable as possible. He started the genre, and we would be nothing without him. So we all owe him.

DRE: I interviewed Greg Nicotero [of KNB EFX] and I said how pitiful it was that they gave Romero like ten million dollars to do Land of the Dead and they spent $30 million on the Dawn remake.

Max: Romero gets screwed so often that it is insane and an outrage. The fact that this guy can’t get his zombie projects made is crazy.

DRE: Did you see Joe Dante’s zombie episode of Masters of Horror?

Max: Oh yeah, that was pretty cool! That was one of the few times a zombie pic has ever been true to Romero because it has a lot of social commentary.

DRE: I’ve heard some great things about the audio book for World War Z.

Max: Fuck me, everybody’s doing it! Random House gave me carte blanche to let me cast anyone I want for the audio book. We’re not just going to have a narrator. They said we’re going to cast as many people as we possibly can. I asked them if they would let me try and find people and they said go for it.

DRE: Who’d you get?

Max: I got Alan Alda as Arthur Sinclair. I got Carl Reiner as the Israeli guy. I got Rob Reiner as the wacko. We’ve got Henry Rollins as T. Sean Collins the mercenary.

DRE: Is T. Sean Collins based on [the Saturday Night Live writer] T. Sean Shannon?

Max: I’d say I definitely sprinkled some T. Sean in there. The characters in the book are all in some ways based or borrowed from people. But we got John Turturro as our Cuban guy. Jurgen Prochnow as our German and I got Mark Hamill for Todd.

DRE: You must have flipped out.

Max: The funny thing is that I was nervous that they wouldn’t want him because he’s so typecast as Luke Skywalker, but I know him from the voiceover world. I was on Batman Beyond for a while and he was the Joker in the cartoons.

DRE: Did he do a new voice for you?

Max: Yeah, you wouldn’t recognize him. Also he was in The Big Red One so I knew he could do it. My buddy Dean Edwards from SNL, does a voice too. I think the best compliment was that even the people that already knew me still wanted to see the material first because it is still their careers. So they all read it and thought it was great. I’m very happy because audio books were always really important for me. I grew up on them because I’m dyslexic. When I was in high school I had to get audio books or else I wouldn’t know what I was doing. So for me a good audio book is really important and now with downloads and podcasting, it’s a renaissance.

DRE: Are you working on anything else non-World War Z?

Max: At this point the only other job I’m doing non zombie is co-producing something called The Watch List for Comedy Central.

DRE: What’s that?

Max: That is a collection of American comedians of Middle Eastern descent all doing routines about what it’s like to grow up here in post-9/11 America.

DRE: When’s that coming out?

Max: I don’t know but it’s going to be on Comedy Central MotherLoad. Dean Obeidallah, who is a buddy of mine from SNL, came to me about a year ago and said “I want to do a Middle Eastern comedy show.” I told him I didn’t want to do that but I would do is a comedy show about Americans who have suddenly become Middle Eastern. I told him that you guys are not the new blacks, you’re the new Japanese Americans or you’re the new German Jews in the 30’s.

We’ve already shot all the routines and from the routines we’re going to dissolve into sketches. I made a stupid heartfelt speech to all of the comedians. I told them that this was their chance to make history, to be Dick Gregory and Richard Pryor but we’ll see what happens.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/World+War+Z+author+Max+Brooks/