Who ever thought that Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio would get into a bidding war over the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft? Thats 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 Terkels 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 todays 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, hows it going?
Max Brooks: I was just thinking that things have changed, at least for America. The wars over, the economys up, switchgrass is growing everywhere.
DRE: Democracy is on the rise all over the world.
Max: Exactly [laughs].
DRE: World War Z is wild. Its like court transcripts or something but better because its 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 wasnt 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: Im 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 thats 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 formats exactly like The Good War. Its 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. Thats 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. Id 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 its not reliable. Every time Id look something up, I just gave myself more homework because Id have to go fact check it. Some websites, like government websites, are pretty reliable. But if you look through the blogs youll think aliens have arrived.
DRE: So something like the organ harvesting in China was all real.
Max: Yeah, thats all real. But I ran it by a few doctors that I know and thats 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. Thats 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 Id be going down a certain road that wouldnt 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 wouldnt 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 didnt 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] Romeros 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 dont have memories, they arent 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 thats how you tell a good story. But like an idiot, I didnt set out to tell a good story.
DRE: How was it writing something that didnt 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 dont 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 didnt know that would happen. I didnt 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. Its an entire world thats been created and you can do a million things with that world. Right now Im 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. Its 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 clich of a post-9/11 book, but the war that were 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 thats 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 Irans nuclear policy. Also naturally, every time I write about Israel, something goes crazy over there.
DRE: Well, thats just Israel.
Max: Yeah, some things are evergreen.
DRE: Thats going to be happening long after were 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 theres a real danger of a backlash against the military and national security. When the Iraq War ends, I think were 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 wouldnt 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 Im 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 isnt 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 theyre perfect in doing the things that they want to do. But I think people are realizing the governments not even close to perfect especially when they dont 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 youd 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 theres 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, its that its not a conspiracy, its 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 hes 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 thats what really scares me.
DRE: Its funny that people thought that Romero was going to use the same kind of zombies forever. I dont 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. Theyre actually letting the zombies kill rich people, you cant kill rich people. Bush is in the White House. I love everything Romero does. I think most people dont get him. Most people think hes a zombie guy but hes really a social commentator like Studs Terkel or Andy Rooney. His movies reflect our society and what were doing at the time. But I think most people see his movies and walk away and go, Wow, zombies got their head blown off, thats awesome. Thats 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 1970s 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, couldve have taken place anywhere. There was nothing about the mall that had any meaning. There really was no talk about materialism, but then again its a good thing were 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: Thats a different publishing company than Random House. Thats Duckworth. I dont know what the Brits have up their sleeve. They scare me. Were 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, Im going over there. God bless them, theyve been really big fans of the book. Im curious to see if we sell the rights in Germany because there is now a German version of the Zombie Survival Guide.
DRE: Thats a little scary.
Max: Thats a compliment. When the Germans ask you to help them make war, I couldnt 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, Its like wow.
DRE: Whats it like to be fought over between Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio?
Max: I couldnt 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 theyre bidding on, right? Thats because once again, Ive done everything wrong when it comes to commercial success. I only have one sex scene in the whole book. Thats the worst thing you could ever do in publishing. I also only have one main heroic dude. Its crazy and they were bidding over it. I said, Oh boy, I hope they read it first.
DRE: Whats the status of that right now?
Max: I think they have a screenwriter and I think its going forward. So now I think its going to be in development for probably a year. But who knows whats going to happen. As much as I love [Brad Pitts production company] Plan B, its 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. Itll be made probably by someone whos looking at the budget and saying, Well, we have x amount of movies already slated for this year and we just wont have the money to make this one, so its not going to happen.
DRE: Did you have any desire to write the screenplay?
Max: I didnt have a choice because in order to get this thing going they need an A-list screenwriter. Im 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 theyre going to make this movie, theyre 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 havent but I got to see it.
DRE: Its 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 havent seen or read anything because Ive been living in a cave for the last two years working on this book. Ive 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 Id make up bibliographies, write fake book titles and put my friends names in there. Ive 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 Romeros films so much and theres so many Romero wannabes out there, but theyre always taking the wrong path with Romero. Theyre 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 Id heard enough good things about him that I wasnt 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 cant get his zombie projects made is crazy.
DRE: Did you see Joe Dantes 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: Ive heard some great things about the audio book for World War Z.
Max: Fuck me, everybodys doing it! Random House gave me carte blanche to let me cast anyone I want for the audio book. Were not just going to have a narrator. They said were 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: Whod 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. Weve 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: Id 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 wouldnt want him because hes 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 wouldnt 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. Im very happy because audio books were always really important for me. I grew up on them because Im dyslexic. When I was in high school I had to get audio books or else I wouldnt know what I was doing. So for me a good audio book is really important and now with downloads and podcasting, its a renaissance.
DRE: Are you working on anything else non-World War Z?
Max: At this point the only other job Im doing non zombie is co-producing something called The Watch List for Comedy Central.
DRE: Whats that?
Max: That is a collection of American comedians of Middle Eastern descent all doing routines about what its like to grow up here in post-9/11 America.
DRE: Whens that coming out?
Max: I dont know but its 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 didnt 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, youre the new Japanese Americans or youre the new German Jews in the 30s.
Weve already shot all the routines and from the routines were 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 well see what happens.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
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Daniel Robert Epstein: Well it has been like three years since we talked, hows it going?
Max Brooks: I was just thinking that things have changed, at least for America. The wars over, the economys up, switchgrass is growing everywhere.
DRE: Democracy is on the rise all over the world.
Max: Exactly [laughs].
DRE: World War Z is wild. Its like court transcripts or something but better because its 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 wasnt 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: Im 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 thats 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 formats exactly like The Good War. Its 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. Thats 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. Id 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 its not reliable. Every time Id look something up, I just gave myself more homework because Id have to go fact check it. Some websites, like government websites, are pretty reliable. But if you look through the blogs youll think aliens have arrived.
DRE: So something like the organ harvesting in China was all real.
Max: Yeah, thats all real. But I ran it by a few doctors that I know and thats 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. Thats 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 Id be going down a certain road that wouldnt 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 wouldnt 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 didnt 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] Romeros 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 dont have memories, they arent 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 thats how you tell a good story. But like an idiot, I didnt set out to tell a good story.
DRE: How was it writing something that didnt 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 dont 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 didnt know that would happen. I didnt 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. Its an entire world thats been created and you can do a million things with that world. Right now Im 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. Its 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 clich of a post-9/11 book, but the war that were 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 thats 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 Irans nuclear policy. Also naturally, every time I write about Israel, something goes crazy over there.
DRE: Well, thats just Israel.
Max: Yeah, some things are evergreen.
DRE: Thats going to be happening long after were 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 theres a real danger of a backlash against the military and national security. When the Iraq War ends, I think were 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 wouldnt 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 Im 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 isnt 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 theyre perfect in doing the things that they want to do. But I think people are realizing the governments not even close to perfect especially when they dont 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 youd 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 theres 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, its that its not a conspiracy, its 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 hes 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 thats what really scares me.
DRE: Its funny that people thought that Romero was going to use the same kind of zombies forever. I dont 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. Theyre actually letting the zombies kill rich people, you cant kill rich people. Bush is in the White House. I love everything Romero does. I think most people dont get him. Most people think hes a zombie guy but hes really a social commentator like Studs Terkel or Andy Rooney. His movies reflect our society and what were doing at the time. But I think most people see his movies and walk away and go, Wow, zombies got their head blown off, thats awesome. Thats 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 1970s 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, couldve have taken place anywhere. There was nothing about the mall that had any meaning. There really was no talk about materialism, but then again its a good thing were 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: Thats a different publishing company than Random House. Thats Duckworth. I dont know what the Brits have up their sleeve. They scare me. Were 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, Im going over there. God bless them, theyve been really big fans of the book. Im curious to see if we sell the rights in Germany because there is now a German version of the Zombie Survival Guide.
DRE: Thats a little scary.
Max: Thats a compliment. When the Germans ask you to help them make war, I couldnt 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, Its like wow.
DRE: Whats it like to be fought over between Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio?
Max: I couldnt 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 theyre bidding on, right? Thats because once again, Ive done everything wrong when it comes to commercial success. I only have one sex scene in the whole book. Thats the worst thing you could ever do in publishing. I also only have one main heroic dude. Its crazy and they were bidding over it. I said, Oh boy, I hope they read it first.
DRE: Whats the status of that right now?
Max: I think they have a screenwriter and I think its going forward. So now I think its going to be in development for probably a year. But who knows whats going to happen. As much as I love [Brad Pitts production company] Plan B, its 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. Itll be made probably by someone whos looking at the budget and saying, Well, we have x amount of movies already slated for this year and we just wont have the money to make this one, so its not going to happen.
DRE: Did you have any desire to write the screenplay?
Max: I didnt have a choice because in order to get this thing going they need an A-list screenwriter. Im 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 theyre going to make this movie, theyre 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 havent but I got to see it.
DRE: Its 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 havent seen or read anything because Ive been living in a cave for the last two years working on this book. Ive 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 Id make up bibliographies, write fake book titles and put my friends names in there. Ive 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 Romeros films so much and theres so many Romero wannabes out there, but theyre always taking the wrong path with Romero. Theyre 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 Id heard enough good things about him that I wasnt 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 cant get his zombie projects made is crazy.
DRE: Did you see Joe Dantes 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: Ive heard some great things about the audio book for World War Z.
Max: Fuck me, everybodys doing it! Random House gave me carte blanche to let me cast anyone I want for the audio book. Were not just going to have a narrator. They said were 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: Whod 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. Weve 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: Id 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 wouldnt want him because hes 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 wouldnt 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. Im very happy because audio books were always really important for me. I grew up on them because Im dyslexic. When I was in high school I had to get audio books or else I wouldnt know what I was doing. So for me a good audio book is really important and now with downloads and podcasting, its a renaissance.
DRE: Are you working on anything else non-World War Z?
Max: At this point the only other job Im doing non zombie is co-producing something called The Watch List for Comedy Central.
DRE: Whats that?
Max: That is a collection of American comedians of Middle Eastern descent all doing routines about what its like to grow up here in post-9/11 America.
DRE: Whens that coming out?
Max: I dont know but its 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 didnt 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, youre the new Japanese Americans or youre the new German Jews in the 30s.
Weve already shot all the routines and from the routines were 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 well see what happens.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 12 of 12 COMMENTS
shy_violence:
I finished this book in like one day and then didn't stop talking about it for like 3 days afterwards. It is really well thought out and even though it is about zombies a lot of the social interactions feel very real.
lutin:
Well, the trailer looks awesome. I read this about a year ago, it's probably going to be a classic.