Editorials
‘World War Z’ Footage Preview! Director Marc Forster Addresses Reshoots, The Size Of The Film In Relation To The Book And The PG-13 Rating!
Last Friday, Paramount Pictures invited a group of journalists to the lot to check out about 20 minutes of footage from World War Z, which is out on June 21st. After a quick hello from Brad Pitt, we saw the 3D version of the trailer that’s hitting theaters today (it hit the web earlier this week), which actually looked pretty good for a post-conversion. Following the trailer we saw about 20 minutes of footage culled together from the first two acts of the film. Then we were given a group interview with director Marc Forster, during which he fielded the questions that have been on a lot of our minds during this film’s lengthy production process.
Starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox and David Morse all star in the film that “ revolves around United Nations employee Gerry Lane (Pitt), who traverses the world in a race against time to stop a pandemic that is toppling armies and governments and threatening to decimate humanity itself.”
Head inside for my thoughts on the footage and the interview with Forster!
As the last of the journalists file into Paramount’s smallish Sherry Lansing theater, Brad Pitt enters the room along with director Marc Forster. The whole thing is running about 10 minutes late but Pitt assures the crowd with a smile, “it wasn’t us.” Forster stands to the side as Pitt provides a brief introduction to the footage, saying the goal was to make a film “his son would like” and that he thinks they’ve pretty much got it right.
Then he exits and the footage unspools. First, we get the debut of the new trailer, which hit the web earlier this week and is in theaters today – you’ve seen it by now. But you probably haven’t seen it in 3D yet, which for a post-conversion is surprisingly good. When the zombies pile up on that wall in Israel or come tumbling out of the fuselage of the plane, they’re definitely coming right at you. Usually when post-converts opt for the whole “popping out at you thing” they sacrifice the quality of the film’s quieter moments – but everything in the trailer looked pretty good. After that we got a look at a 20 minute assembly of footage from various parts of the film. This was in 2D since World War Z is still in post and hasn’t undergone its’ final conversion yet as a whole.
Things started out with an extended look at Pitt’s character, Gerry Lane, in gridlock traffic with his family. We get a few more character beats that set up the personality of the family unit. But something’s wrong, cops speed past the car only to come running back in the opposite direction. A police motorcycle zooms by, clipping off Lane’s side mirror. When he gets out to investigate – a giant truck starts plowing through traffic. Lane jumps back behind the wheel and follows the truck that’s essentially clearing a path for him. From there we see utter chaos as the city is overcome with the zombie plague (and these are definitely fast zombies). During his family’s escape, Lane catches sight of a bystander being bitten. The guy falls to the ground and there’s a small countdown as the seconds pass – by the time the countdown hits 8 seconds the bystander is back on his feet and fully zombified. The process is that fast.
The next beat we get a look at is Lane trying to get his family settled in on the aircraft carrier from the trailers while the powers that be strong-arm him into helping them figure out what’s causing all of this. At this rate the world’s population will be decimated within just a few days and they need his help (Lane’s some kind of UN expert) traveling the world to find patient zero. If he doesn’t help them, they kick his entire family off the boat. Suffice to say, pretty soon he’s out and about traveling the world. This seems like it’s going to be the heart of the movie, Lane going from place to place – finding different permutations of the Zombie plague in different locales.
The first stop is Israel. Lane drives around with a fellow UN rep while they discuss the crisis at hand. It’s here that we first hear the word, “Zombie.” Apparently the UN rep has found proof in old writings that a zombie plague was once considered a threat – and here we are again. This leads to the sequence at Israel’s Western Wall, where just as soon as Lane’s UN friend claims the walled off area is safe – it’s stormed by a sea of zombies. This is the money shot you’ve seen in the trailers and, lest you be concerned that the film’s climax has been spoiled, it actually seems to occur fairly early in Act 2. It was sort of hard to get a bead on the buildup to this shot because the sequence as a whole had been edited to fit into the footage assembly – but hopefully it gets a nice ramp up.
One of the more interesting moments of the presentation followed soon after. Lane is on the run with a group of Israeli soldiers. One of them, a woman, is bitten on the hand by a zombie. Having previously seen someone turn in a matter of seconds – Lane wastes no time in chopping her hand right off. Boom. Done. She looks at her stump in shock as he dresses it. The required amount of time passes, and she’s still a human. It’s an interesting take on preventing a post-bite zombie infection and I hope it’s something they explore more later on in the film.
After that the footage speeds up a bit, showing bits and pieces from here and there in the film, including a slightly extended take on the airplane sequence that concludes the new trailer. What I gather is this – the film is impressive in scope. A lot of the footage looks cool, but it’s still hard to tell how it will play out in the final product since even some of what we saw in the assembly appeared to have been edited for time. World War Z could go either way for me, but I’m certainly interested in seeing the final film.
After the presentation director Marc Forster took the stage to answer questions from the attending journalists. I’ve included some highlights that might be of interest to you below.
How close are you to being done? “We’re about 2 weeks away from locking picture.” And head shots kill them? “If you shoot them in the knees, they’ll crawl. But head shots kill them.”
What happened with all the re-shoots in the 3rd act? “We shot the movie and felt like the ending wasn’t what we wanted it to be. It could be better. So we showed it to the studio and went back and did some additional shooting and are happy with the result.” Is it a big difference? “It’s a different ending, yes. I prefer it and I think it’s powerful. It works in favor of the story.”
We didn’t see many single “hero shots” of the zombies in the footage – zombies with personalities. Are they in the film? “Yes, we have those moments. Later in the film. But at the same time, the idea we had for them came from nature. The flocking and swarming. In the George Romero films in the 70’s the zombies were such a great metaphor for consumerism, for me the metaphor was about overpopulation and less resources. Especially when the feeding frenzy starts.”
What’s the time frame of the movie? Does it take place over a few days or is it over a month or two? “No, it’s basically over a few days. It’s pretty compressed.”
In this film it looks like it takes about 8 seconds for someone to turn into a zombie. “It’s 12 seconds.” So you don’t have any of the standard scenes where someone gets bitten and tries to hide it when they’re turning into a zombie? “Basically, as we discussed in the film, some people turn faster than others. But there’s also the idea that viruses mutate, and some mutate faster than others. [Brad Pitt’s character] discovers at first that it’s 12 seconds, but then he goes to another place where it takes longer. So he’s trying to figure that out.”
How much did the book’s author, Max Brooks, have to do with the movie? “I met with Max a couple of times and we spoke about the book and his intentions. I think ultimately he gave his blessing. He hasn’t seen the finished film yet, but he’s seen some of the material and I’m looking forward to showing him [the whole thing]. I hope I get his blessing [on that].” Are there going to be more characters from the book? Yes. We have [other characters] we’re including from the book.”
Since it treats zombies as an infection, did they have CDC advisors on the film? “Yes, we had CDC advisors.” How many zombie actors did you use to show the plague spreading? “Sometimes up to 100 zombie actors. In some of the crowd scenes you have 50 with excellent makeup up front and then 50 with background makeup behind them. Makeup takes a long time!”
The book has a reputation for being more reflective, but the footage we’ve seen is very fast paced. Does the film ever take a breather to hit some of those beats? “Yes, it does take a break and become more reflective. It’s not all what you guys saw here.”
One of the most popular shows on TV now is “The Walking Dead”, which is extremely violent. Are you concerned that going for a PG-13 is a little tame considering what people are used to in their weekly viewings? “No, because we approach our zombies in a different way. And I consciously designed the film in a different way, so I think we will overcome that.”
It seems like a lot of the modern zombie movies have shied away from actually saying the word “Zombie.” Are you trying to reclaim that? “Yeah, I felt like the film should feel very real. Like it could happen right now in the world we live in. I didn’t want it to feel campy. There are characters in the film that talk about zombies.”
Did we see anything from the 3rd act in this footage? Or was it just the first two acts? “No, you didn’t see anything from the 3rd act. I guess the plane the going down was part of the 3rd act. But that’s about it.”
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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