3. Classic mistake #35 was going into production with a third act that no one was satisfied with.
“The script felt good, maybe not great,” Paramount Film Group president Adam Goodman told the magazine. “You have to figure out the third act,” Pitt is quoted as telling someone. “We started shooting the thing before we locked down how it was going to end up, and it didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to,’” Damon Lindelof, brought in to rewrite the third act said, quoted Brad Pitt saying to him.
Maybe green lighting a $150 million dollar tentpole without an ending that no one loves is not the wisest decision on earth — how does this still continue to happen? Paramount contends the movie cost $175 million with reshoots ballooning the budget to around — $200 million (no one wants to commit to a final figure obviously). But sources and rival studios say the actual cost is anywhere from $210 million to $250 million. Slapping promotion and advertising on top of that (say $50 million conservatively) 3D conversion ($8-15 million), this movie is going to have to be a huge global hit to just break even (in the plus $400 million mark).
4. So other than the script problems what else went wrong? A little bit of everything: inexperience, poor communication, and bad accountability.
Pitt, his production company, and Forster had never mounted something this big and ambitious and with too many cooks, and not enough leadership and accountability, the film spiraled out of control. One day of filming was lost because the caterers didn’t have enough food to feed 750 extras. Another half day was lost when one restaurant refused to close in a Malta-square that was otherwise totally shut down. Costumes for extras playing Hassidic Jews didn’t account for the massive numbers and last minute costumes had to be flown in from another country or created on the spot. Several other minor mishaps like this lead to a film already way over-budget upon leaving its first major location (Malta, which doubled for Israel). Paramount began to see numbers and got nervous. One of the key location producers was then replaced in favor of Ian Bryce, a guy who has managed to keep Michael Bay‘s runaway epics on schedule and under budget.
“Wow, The ending of our movie doesn’t work.” – Paramount exec Marc Evans said.
“It was quite a logistical headache,” Winston Azzopardi, the location manager for scenes shot in Malta said. “Truthfully, I don’t think we were fully prepared.” Goodman freaked out when he saw the budget overruns out of Malta. “It was literally insane,” Marc Evans, President of Production, Paramount Film Group said. “Adam [Goodman] and I believed we’d gotten out of Malta good and I found out we weren’t. That is a nightmare.” He called the overages an “unthinkable action.”
Breakdowns in communication and lack of leadership were key too. This Forster quote is pretty…interesting…to say the least. “No one came to me and said, ‘You are fucking up here,’” the director said. “So if there are any budgetary issues, they are not my issues.” He said producers hid problems from him to boot. “You don’t know the shit going on behind closed doors,” he said. “You are having a meltdown while working. So I don’t usually know what is going on. Of course, I know what is on set, If you look at directors, they are always protected — the producers only let you know so much.”
5. The ending didn’t work and had to be scrapped, and Damon Lindelof had three weeks to come up with a new ending.
The Russian section had to be tossed out entirely. The room was silent after the first screening, “I was in my own head for a minute,” Evans said. “It was like, ‘Wow, The ending of our movie doesn’t work.” Goodman liked the first hour, but then became concerned because it became, “a) less suspenseful than I would hope for a movie that is basically a horror premise and that b) it didn’t allow for a sense of a triumphant ending, something you could get behind.” Pitt, Plan B’s Dede Gardner, everyone felt the same. Forster agrees too. “Yes, we all thought it was going to work… but I think this movie is more original and bigger and more special than I have ever done before.”
They screened a 72 minute cut for Lindelof, purposefully excluding things they didn’t want in the movie, but he eventually asked to screen that version regardless as the shorter version was abrupt and incoherent. “The thing we really need right now is someone who is not burdened by all the history that this thing is inheriting, who can see what we’ve got and tell us how to get to where we need to get,” Pitt told Lindelof. And the screenwriter laid it out with clarity.
“I said to them, There are two roads to go down here. Is there material that can be written to make that stuff work better? To have it make sense? To have it have emotional stakes? And plot logic and all that? And Road Two, which I think is the long-shot road, is that everything changes after Brad leaves Israel,” Lindelof explained, noting the second option would require dumping footage that had already been shot. “I didn’t think anyone was going to say, ‘Let’s throw it out and try something else.’ So when I gave them those two roads and they sounded more interested in Road B, I was like, ‘To be honest with you, good luck selling that to Paramount.’ ”
But Paramount bit, and Lindelof repositioned Pitt’s character from an everyman that “shifted… into a calculated zombie killer” and give him a clearer goal. “It has to be an emotional task,” Lindelof said.
Vanity Fair says, “absent from the reshoot were the huge action spectacles.” Of the additional shooting, Forster said, “It was a different setting. The maximum amount of actors or human beings on that set were 20.”
It’s a 5,000+ word piece and this is just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s a pretty fascinating read and interesting anatomy of how an expensive studio piece gets derailed. If anything, the big take away feels like the difference between, “Iron Man 2” and “Iron Man 3.” The former is a louder, bigger-is-better dud. The latter is a surprisingly small-scale character piece that’s not as big and ambitious, but way more effective and satisfying as a movie. Will it work? Who knows. This new issue of Vanity Fair is on stands now.
“World War Z” opens on June 21st, check out a new featurette below