Author’s anger at WWZ

The firestorm of negativity that threatened to immolate Brad Pitt’s film adaptation of World War Z has been fuelled by the book’s author Max Brooks, who has been unusually vocal in the lead-up to the film’s release.

Normally contractual arrangements prevent authors from being anything but supportive.

Brooks’ novel has been written like a chronicle, in which Brooks himself takes on the guise of an agent of the United Nations Post War Commission who, a decade after the Zombie War that decimated mankind, travels the world collecting individual stories of the conflict and its aftermath.

Brooks’ nervousness about his book increased when the eyepopping trailers for the movie hit the internet and cinemas, revealing Pitt and director Marc Forster had evolved the chronicler into a fully fledged character who races around the world to find the source of the zombie outbreak and wave after wave of undead overrun fleeing, helpless humanity.

There was little sign of the intimate conversations with shellshocked survivors that are the heart of Brooks’ novel.

In a filmed conversation the author quipped it appeared the only connection between his novel and the movie was the title, which indeed has turned out to be the case.

Brooks reveals he had nothing to do with the adaptation and was only invited in to read the script after the cameras were rolling, which he refused to do because he knew they would not listen to anything he had to say.

He would either be involved or let the filmmakers do it themselves.

“There were a lot of college kids who’ve been waiting to see The Battle of Yonkers since they were in junior high school and I don’t know that it is going to be in there, ” Brooks said, referring to a key event in the novel when the zombies established their dominance over mankind.

“So I cannot guarantee it is going to be the book that they love.

If I get a chance to see the movie before it comes out I will let them know if it is not like the book.

And I don’t know if I would blame them if they did not see the movie.”

Forster defends the decision to ignore almost all Brooks’ novel, arguing it would have been impossible to turn an assembly of oral histories into a two-hour big-budget movie.

“It’s a great book because it treats the outbreak of the virus so realistically. But it is an historical document which I had to move away from in order to capture the spirit of the book,” Forster said.

Rather than seeing World War Z in the tradition of the zombie narratives, his inspiration for adapting the book was the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s or the Bourne movies of today.

“I love movies such as The Three Days of the Condor, ” Forster said.

“I imagined Gerry to be much like the Robert Redford character, an ordinary guy who becomes a reluctant hero. He is not a superhero but somebody like you or me, simply doing his job, even if that job is killing zombies.”