The upcoming release of World War Z starring Brad Pitt is creating a lot of publicity for its massive budget and the fact that it bears no resemblance to the bestselling novel. The one person least surprised is the book's author, Max Brooks.
Brooks said his novel about a world nearly destroyed by a zombie pandemic, shares the same title as the movie "and that's it."
He talked about his book and the movie during an interview at Mansfield University.
"I knew they were going to rewrite it. I grew up in Hollywood. I knew it was going to go through a million changes."If you've read the book then you know why the story would have to be adapted to the big screen. The book is written as a series of interviews with people who were present at the time of the zombie outbreak but conducted at a time after the outbreak was contained, years later.
The book told many different stories from many different points of view. There's no easy way to take a book like that and adapt it to a single movie, or even a trilogy (which is something I've heard floated around), while keeping the story focused.
It would seem a compromise would be to take aspects of the book, maybe a few of the story settings, and then string them together with a set of characters, or even one character, that is the focus of the story. The original "War Of The Worlds" wasn't about a divorced dad saving his children, but making that the focus of a film adaptation bridged the gap to how films work.
So, for those who take Brooks's words above to be a negative commentary on the upcoming movie should consider those points as well.
"World War Z" hits theaters on 21 June.
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