Movies.com brings us this, which you should NOT read if you haven't seen the film yet:
“Basically in the original ending, after the Israel sequence and the plane crash, Gerry is in Russia, and the storyline of what he finds out at the WHO lab is what he finds in Russia but he applies his theory in a battlefield setting. We called it “The Battle of Moscow,” and it’s a huge battle with zombies and multiple other characters and ultimately Gerry defeats them by realizing that the zombies avoid him and go around him [after injecting himself with a virus]. So it’s in Russia, at night, in a snowstorm with thousands of zombies and big battles; kind of the scope of the Israel sequence. Some of that footage is still in the film, you see it during the montage when Gerry journeys back to his family on that small boat, we see a few glimpses from that battle. We never finished that footage because we all agreed after Israel and the plane crash you’re battle fatigued and you really want the movie to be more quiet and you don’t want it to go into another huge combat situation.
“The problem with that battle sequence is you get lost because obviously you can’t just stay with Gerry, you have so much more going on. So you lose the connection with him. What the ending should really be about is solving that riddle [of how to combat the zombies] with him. And to make it a more quiet and suspenseful is a much more interesting approach than to do it in a big battle way. That’s how these discussions came about and why we ended up setting the ending in a World Health Organization lab. As in all of my movies, I’m always about the character, about these quiet moments. So I was really happy when everyone came around and agreed and supported that vision.“
“It was very important for me to first cast the actor who would play that zombie [that Gerry confronts in the lab]. His name is Michael Jenn. He’s a performer and had all these different skills, but the key thing with me was to make you feel with this zombie this mirror that this used to be a human. We hadn’t had that moment in the film, this loss of humanity. I put a wedding ring on his finger and he’s banging it very subtly against the glass door. So to give this man a history that he was married, he had a life at one point. There’s also the reflection in the mirror that’s very metaphorical. And then you have Gerry being isolated in this capsule but at the same time being observed by this zombie. There’s a tension created by having the zombie outside, him inside and then the people observing through the security cameras, and then, of course, what is Gerry going to inject himself with? And as one of the lab people says, “It doesn’t matter what he takes,” because we don’t even know if it’s going to work or not.
“That idea actually of the sick being avoided by the zombies was an idea that screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan came up with originally and I was a big fan of it, I thought it worked. And what’s great about that scene is it’s all done in silence. Gerry is on his own for the first time in the movie. He’s a reluctant hero in a sense, an every man, this is a moment when he becomes a hero because he puts his own life on the line to prove an idea he has and I think it’s almost sacrificing his life for the greater good. That sort of idea is the ultimate in heroism. But at the same time he’s not doing it over the top, because Brad knows how to play that and even how he plays it, his look as he stares up to the camera while he’s being observed and looking back at the zombie at the door, that whole triangle in that scene and all parties being in their own space, it was a lot of fun to shoot and direct.”The film is now available in stores on DVD and Bluray.
