I can’t imagine what it’s like to see something you created get completely transformed by other people. But while fans of the book WORLD WAR Z haven’t been too pleased by some of the alterations made for the movie adaptation, writer Max Brooks himself seems to be taking it in stride.
“There’s no reason anybody should have optioned this for a movie, it does everything wrong,” Brooks told the Daily Record while visiting the Glasgow set. “It doesn’t have a main character, the storyline is told from a hundred different points of view, it would be prohibitively expensive filming in all these different countries. You couldn’t pay me to turn it into a film. All I know is they have their work cut out for them. It is the equivalent of climbing [Scotland mountain] Ben Nevis on your knees.”
“I’m not involved so I just want to be able to enjoy watching the movie when it comes out. At least I know they did at least as much research into things as I did for the book.”
As the book’s readers are aware, the original format was an “oral history” that collected anecdotes from survivors of the decade-long worldwide battle with the walking dead. The movie is taking a more immediate angle, putting hero Brad Pitt in a race against the clock to actively prevent the global zompocalypse.
And while he’s cool with those changes, Brooks also holds no malice toward the mobile deceased: “I also had lunch with the zombies and they’re great. They look very much like what my impression would be of new zombies who had not really begun to rot, kind of like phase one zombies. They have a zombie school, where they are teaching extras how to act like zombies, and from talking to people on set they have really put a lot of research into everything.”