Brad Pitt was seriously lost when he reached out to a TV screenwriter for help on “World War Z”, his apocalyptic zombie movie, according to a revealing new report.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, “Lost” co-creator Damon Lindelof describes how Pitt approached him after the troubled project was plagued by missteps and a blown budget.
“‘[W]hen 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,’” Lindelof says Pitt told him.
Lindelof says the veteran A-Lister wanted a fresh opinion to help the struggling production, helmed by director Marc Forster and written by Matthew Michael Carnahan.
“’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,'” Lindelof said of Pitt.
The movie, which was initially set for a December 2012 release, was forced to re-shoot nearly 40 minutes of film.
During the director’s cut, Marc Evans, president of production at Paramount, said it became apparent “the ending of our movie doesn’t work.”
“I believed in that moment we needed to reshoot the movie.”
Lindelof told the mag he was surprised the studio was willing to go with his “long-shot” suggestion to change a key scene and throw out the original ending.
“When I gave them those two roads and they sounded more interested in Road B”— Vanity Fair reported 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 mag also reveals how the budget for the flick ballooned to $200 million. In one instance, purchase orders totaling in the millions was found after the production wrapped up filming in Malta.
“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,” Evans said.
The movie is based on the Max Brooks’ 2006 book “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.”