Interview: Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Zombieland)
Seeing as most box office prognosticators are picking Zombieland to come out of the weekend as the #1-movie, it seemed like a good idea to learn what we can from the movie’s screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. In this interview at Cinema Blend.com, we find out how Zombieland started out as a failed TV pilot script:
So how closely does the movie resemble the TV show
you guys wrote at first?
Rhett: What we had in mind [for the TV show] was starting with four characters who were very dissimilar, so they would necessarily butt heads, and we wanted to slowly introduce new characters as we moved forward, and either kill them off or let them survive. But the freewheeling nature of the first hour of the movie was very much what we intended to extend out to a full season.
Paul: Obviously there was a lot less gore for television. The set pieces got bigger and badder as it moved to a feature.
Rhett: You’ll also see some vestiges of the idea we had for the pilot in the movie. For instance, the zombie kill of the week. That was going to be every week in the television show, whatever the zombie kill of the week was. We also had a segment that we called viewer e-mails, which would be Columbus and Tallahassee responding to purported viewer mail.
When you’re writing Columbus, you’re writing inside the head of a guy who’s kind of strange. How hard was it figuring out that voice?
Paul: That voice was actually Rhett Reese’s voice. Rhett Reese is very much Columbus. I think it was very easy to tap into for both of us.
Rhett: Yeah, I am a very neurotic person, and have been my whole life. One of the reasons we wrote this is we thought, wouldn’t it be fun to take someone who is naturally scared and place them in the scariest envrionment in the world, and the discover that the fact that they’re a scaredy-cat ends up helping them and becoming an adaptive strategy for survival in a violent environment. Because Columbus is the kind of character who always runs from things, we needed to pair him with a character who always runs into danger, and that was Tallahassee. Once we found that pairing it made sense. We had an inherent push-pull that worked nicely.
Other interviews with Reese & Wernick:
ScriptMag.com
Fearnet.com
FirstShowing.net
SlashFilm.com
Trivia: The duo created the non-scripted reality series “The Joe Schmo Show.”
UPDATE: Super strong Friday nite numbers for Zombieland per Daily Variety:
Sony had a spectacular Friday at the box office.
Not only did the Culver City studio notch its sixth number-one opener of the year with “Zombieland” at $9.4 million, but also filed second with holdover “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” which earned $3.7 million.
Starring Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg, “Zombieland” tells the tale of two guys who battle the undead en route to a zombie-free Hollywood theme park. The zomcom, playing at 3,036 theaters, earned an A Cinemascore among all audiences under 35 and charted the biggest opening day at the B.O. for Harrelson among his solo outings.
Budgeted at an estimated $23.6 million, “Zombieland” could make its negative cost back in full by Sunday.
Now we know why Sony is already talking sequel for Z-land.