Yesterday, we talked with Max Brooks about the news that Brad Pitt has agreed to star in the film adaptation of World War Z, Brooks’ best-selling zombie novel. It’s good news in the midst of more good news. Brooks, now a leading zombie authority, just sold one million copies of The Zombie Survival Guide, after an initial print of just 17,000 copies when it was published in 2003. A million books and Brad Pitt? Like we needed any other reason to be impressed.
Here is part three (Read parts one and two) of our epic nerd chat with Brooks who graciously stopped by the office a few weeks back. We talk creature features, the plight of the modern remake and why America will always win.
Allie Townsend: Are you a big fan of any other horror genres?
Max Brooks: Giant monsters. I’ve always been a fan. When I was a kid I watched Them once a week.
AT: I loved Mothra. I don’t know why. I just liked Mothra most.
MB: Oh yeah. All of those Godzilla movies are great. Godzilla’s Revenge with the little kid and then the one before that in black and white where they just dubbed in Raymond Burr and edited him in.
AT: Yeah, that was so bad.
MB: Then there was Gamera. There was a movie called Empire Of The Ants with Joan Collins. Giant ants, but in color. It’s cheesy now, but as a kid, whoa.
AT: Was there one about giant rabbits?
MB: Yes. Night Of The Lepus. I have a library of all those movies. Night of the Lepus was a big one. Food Of The Gods was giant rats. There was a line in it that I never forgot – I directly put it in The Zombie Survival Guide – as he’s opening the shotgun shells to make a bomb. And one guys says, “Why are you ruining those shells? It’s all we have to save us.” And the guys says, “Look, Thomas, count the shells we’ve got. If we’re lucky enough to knock off one rat with each of those shells, there’s still enough of them to hold a people barbecue.”
That’s why in all of my zombie lectures when people tell me which gun they would use I say, “Yeah? Well, guns don’t kill people. Bullets kill people. How many bullets are you going to stuff in your pants? There are 300 million Americans, even if half of them are zombies, are you going to carry 150 million bullets?”
AT: Good point. I feel like creature features don’t get some of the credit they deserve for being so creative about defense in that way.
MB: Snowbeast is another. It’s one of the best Sasquatch movies there is. It just ripped off Jaws. Snowbeast is the Jaws story in Aspen. And, it’s shot from the point of view of the monster.
AT: Aww, that’s tender.
MB: Ha. It’s literally the monster’s POV and a hand in the brush.
AT: Do you ever see the beast?
MB: For a half second. It terrified me as a kid. I was a monster-watching fool.
AT: I think they’re actually remaking one of the Godzilla films. (Editor’s note: It’s true. Warner Bros. announced it in March. Yippee skippy!)
MB: Oh, I hope so. I hope it’s good. I think the problem with most remakes is that they don’t know why they’re remaking it and they lose a lot. Like Romero’s movie, The Crazies. I like Brett Eisner’s work, but there’s an element of The Crazies that was completely lost, showing how truly evil and crazy you can get. There’s a scene where a dad tries to molest his daughter. That wasn’t in the remake.
AT: He actually does it, I think.
MB: And then he’s so racked with guilt when he as a moment of sobriety that he hangs himself. That’s the most terrifying moment, when you think, “Oh my God, what if that were me? What if I lost myself and woke up and thought I had done something horrible t my own child?”
AT: I think in that movie it’s so interesting how disunited everyone gets so quickly. I think it’s a classic Romero move, but even the young lovers are separated. The guy just leaves her. “Stay here. See ya.”
MB: And that horrible scene where the scientist finds a cure and he runs out and he gets caught up with the crazies, but the guards can’t tell him from the crazies. There’s nothing scarier than that: than being sane, but no one believes you. How many of us have thought about getting locked in a mental hospital and trying to tell the guards, “I’m not crazy.” There going, “Sure, you’re not.” They took all that out in the remake. Instead, they had that cliché, “You stay here, I’ll go investigate. And while I’m investigating, you, who is staying here, is attacked.” I think that happened like five times in the movie.
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.
AT: I feel like that’s interesting because most would probably argue that Americans don’t have the mindset to work together and tackle something as big as a zombie attack.
MB: I was in New York on 9/11 and I think we were amazing. The whole idea of a terrorist attack was to sow terror. New York wasn’t terrorized. I spent the whole day going from hospital to hospital trying to give blood and the lines were out the door. The whole city was looking for ways to help.
They were evacuating calmly, nobody was running around screaming, “Oh my God, we’re all going to die.” And if there was ever a time to do it, that would have been it. Instead, the city came together and said, “Okay, what do we do now?”
AT: That’s funny, because in every movie, New York falls instantly.
MB: Right. It’s the first city to go. Look at the black out that happened a few years later. Everyone was like “Oh my God, here it comes: riots, looting, race wars.” No, but it was little bodegas handing out ice cream because it was going to melt. And maybe our greatest weakness is that we don’t see a threat coming. While Al-Qaeda is plotting and planning, we’re listening to Oops, I Did It Again. So we’re not good at foresight, but when we actually do get punched in the face, we get up really quickly.
So yeah, if there was a zombie outbreak, we probably wouldn’t be so good on the uptake. We would probably let it get out of control. We’re not good at prevention. But once it did get out of control and once we were kicked, we would get it together. The first third of every war we’ve ever fought, boy did we screw it up. Oh every level, military, political, home front, but then we get it together.
AT: How do you think different parts of the country would react?
MB: It’s interesting because you would think that certain areas of the country would do better because there aren’t a lot of people and they have more guns, but I’m not 100% sure because it really depends on the cities. I lived most of my life in LA. We wouldn’t do as well as New York because we’re not a city. We’re a loose confederation of communities. We’re wrapped around our cars and our homes and our freeways. We don’t know our neighbors as well. Look at the Rodney King riots. LA just exploded. There were riots all over the country, even in Canada. But in New York? Peaceful demonstrations.
AT: Then, I’m staying here.
MB: I really think New York would do well. There’s a reason in World War Z why I call it the Hero City. It’s not just because of 9/11, it’s anything that happens. New Yorkers, they rally.
AT: I think another thing I really liked about World War Z was that it didn’t have one of those “Give me a break” action heroes who doesn’t stop running for four days.
MB: You haven’t taken a drink of water. You haven’t had to take a piss.
AT: Right. I love Tolkien and I grew up reading him, but that was always my issue. You’re telling me that they’re literally running across a continent?
MB: That’s the fantasy world. You can run without having to take a drink of water. You can drink from a stream and not get diarrhea.
AT: I feel like those stories have been poached a little bit too much elsewhere. Even The Road was a bit that way.
MB: There’s an Oh, Come On factor in a lot of that. For me, I’m not coming from a fictional point of view – history is where I get all of my ideas – so I look at the WW2 generation. There weren’t a lot of super human dudes. There were a few craz-o’s who could kill 30 Japanese soldiers with a rock, but that’s not how we won. We won because the average schmuck was put in a uniform and sent out to war and he did his job. And the average woman who has never been out of the house was suddenly riveting together battleships. It’s the idea that normal people could do extraordinary things. I think that’s where the idea for World War Z came from.
You don’t want the one guy doing everything. You want everyone doing a little bit because we have before. We stopped Hitler. We stopped the Japanese. When we get our act together, it’s amazing what we can do. And I want people to identify with that. You don’t want to have the difference between Superman and Batman. I love Superman. He’s probably my favorite superhero, but I can never be Superman. I’m not from Krypton. But Bruce Wayne is just a dude.
AT: He does have a lot of money though.
MB: But if he didn’t, he’d still be Batman. He wouldn’t have a Bat Mobile, maybe he’d have the Bat Moped, but he’d still be Batman.
AT: He’d be Kick-Ass.
MB: He’d be Rorshach. I look at the uber-man, alpha male heroes and know that’s not me.
I’m a huge Tom Clancy fan and I think that’s why he’s had such a successful career. You look at Jack Ryan and think he’s a regular guy. Where as someone like James Bond is so suave, so successful and has sex with millions of women without getting a single disease. I could never be James Bond, but maybe I could be Jack Ryan.
AT: And I think that’s why The Zombie Survival Guide is so popular. It’s a book for the average person.
MB: I make it a point to say that you’re not going to be a zombie hunter. It’s not a book for the professional zombie hunter.
AT: Would a professional zombie hunter work?
MB: No. The problem with being proactive is unless it’s a zombie pandemic, how do you tell a decapitated zombie from a decapitated person?
Let’s say there’s one zombie in all of New York and he happens to wonder into this room. We grab him, wrestle him to the floor and smash his head in with a chair. Then, the cops come in and all they see is a dead body with a smashed head. And we say “No, officer, that was a zombie.” That’s not going to work.
AT: So let’s stick to being average Joes?
MB: I think a zombie hunter better get a really good lawyer. If you roll up on your bike, chop off a head and say, “My work here is done,” you may be in trouble.