AT: They also just marketed it like a zombie movie. They never bothered to explain that the people were not zombies, or even turning into zombies.
MB: I think they tried to make it a torture porn movie because the whole thing with the dragging of the pitchfork on the floor with the blood.
AT: And then there’s the whole thing with the saw. Saw. Really? I think we get what you’re trying to do.
MB: You could almost hear the creative executives going, “What if we threw a saw in there?” And then, “You know what we need? Crazy rednecks.” Because we’ve never seen that in a movie before.
AT: I feel like the beginning was at least interesting with the baseball scene.
MB: There was also one wonderful scene where they’re on the boat looking for the plane and one guy says, “I think we’re on top of it.” And then they got to a top shot and we see they’re on top of the whole plane. Then, the idea that the water is coming slowly down to the town is out there. Whoa. It had moments where we see what it could have been, and then, we see they go back to pleasing the “testing group.” “Oh, teenagers are dumb.” Which they’re not.
AT: I think that’s an interesting thing about your book, you never treat the reader like they’re too stupid to understand an important concept. Too many authors do that.
MB: I think they’re afraid of pissing people off. People who don’t get stuff get angry and then they resent you. And I’ve got some of that too. I’ve read Amazon reviews from my book that say, “Too detailed,” but, I’m not going to sacrifice something that I think is important to a story because I’m afraid of pissing someone off. I’m not Carl Rove. I’m not trying to win an election here.
AT: Zombie King.
MB: Right. I’m not trying to be the “zombie guy.” No, this is what I do. People say, “Why didn’t you just have a story?” I did. I had forty of them in the back of the book. “Yeah, but you just had little nuggets and they were vaguely written.” Well, that’s how real recorded attacks are written.
I had one guy come up to me at a convention to try to stump me. “Dude, if it’s an oral history, why is it written?” Dude, I didn’t invent the term “oral history.” It’s a whole genre. It’s when you collect interviews and put them in a book.
AT: How absorbed were you in other oral histories before working on World War Z?
MB: Well, I was a history major in college. I’m dyslexic, but history was the only thing that saved my scholastic career. I had a history teacher in the tenth grade who talked about why things happened, the human motivations that show that we’re all basically doing the same stuff we did thousands of years ago – just with different tools.
So when I wanted to do Recorded Attacks for the graphic novel, I wanted to see how people in other cultures and other times fought zombies. How we deal with crisis, what does that say about us?
AT: Which was your favorite zombie attack set in the past?
MB: Maybe Rome. In Rome, it shows what happens when you do work together. It’s sort of the anti-Romero story, where instead of people imploding and fighting amongst themselves, you suddenly have a culture that’s based on working together and being rational. It shows what we could accomplish if we did the right things.
AT: Right now, is there a nation or group of people who could best survive a zombie attack?
MB: Well, in World War Z, I would say that Cuba’s in a pretty good spot. North Korea is probably pretty well situated to survive a zombie plague.
Honestly, I think we are. I think Americans are at our best when we recover from a crisis. We’ve suffered some blows that other countries would have never recovered from. Any other country would have been knocked on its ass after Pearl Harbor, and that would have been it. We survived 9/11 and eight years of Bush and look what we dealt with. There have been many times in America’s history where people have said, “We’ll America’s finished.” They said that post-Vietnam.
Look at Obama and the fact that we live in a nation where a group of people went from slavery to the White House. No other nation has been able to do that. Suck on that, Europe.
Oh yeah, you think you’re so superior to us? When was the last time Spain had a Basque president? Or Britain had an Indian prime minister? Or France had an Algerian president? Or Germany had a Jewish chancellor? We’re really able to bust through our social taboos and get stuff done when it needs doing.