These days it is not unusual for a film’s cast to be reassembled for additional shooting months after the production had originally wrapped. It is often a good way for a director to add some shots he has discovered while editing that he still needs. However, a reshoot period for a film as long as this is virtually unheard of.
The Daily Mail is reporting that director Marc Forster’s adaption of Max Brooks’s zombie novel World War Z has just scheduled seven weeks of worth of reshoots in Budapest.
To give you an example of how unusual this amount of time is, some smaller films are shot entirely in seven weeks. But the last time that there was a series of reshoots this extensive was for the Exorcist prequel nearly a decade ago and you may remember how that whole fiasco turned out.
I have to admit that although I enjoyed the book, at this point I don’t have high hopes for the film. The book was considered a tricky adaption due to the its story being told through a collection of government documents and eyewitness accounts of a zombie uprising. J Michael Straczynski managed to structure a screenplay that received a lot of good buzz as well as praise from Brooks himself. However, after director Marc Forster signed on to the project, a new writer in the form of Matthew Michael Carnahan reportedly gave the film a more straightforward narrative structure. It was a move that Brooks appeared to be unhappy about.
As a director, Forster has never shown much facility for onscreen action. I found the action sequences of both Quantum Of Solace and Machine Gun Preacher to be muddled and at times downright confusing. And there is no doubt that this film will need a strong action director at its helm.
This latest news does not do much to instill confidence, but perhaps the reshoots are to move the film back to its original structure. Could we be that lucky?
World War Z hits theaters in June 2013.
