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Yet he’s never been party to what might be termed a “Michael Bay” movie, a nonstop orgy of digital smithereens. In fact, his most notable achievement of the season was that hushed conclusion of World War Z, a rewrite he helped design and oversee. (If you haven’t seen it, and still want to be surprised, stop reading now.)
As has been widely reported, Z originally climaxed in a giant zombie battle in Red Square, with star and producer Brad Pitt leading the charge in full Troy mass-murder mode. The scene was so off-key—what was Pitt’s character, a family-oriented U.N. fixer with no special combat abilities, doing waist deep in gore?—that its makers scrapped it, at great expense, and brought in Lindelof, Goddard, and McQuarrie (doing on-set rewrites) to create a new conclusion: a suspenseful, near-silent infiltration of a zombie-crammed medical lab in Wales, capped by Pitt injecting himself with a deadly pathogen to test a hypothesis: Will the zombies ignore a diseased person? They do! Pitt wins! Humanity triumphs! By being discreet. It’s Story Anti-gravity.
Still, Lindelof isn’t triumphal. “I can honestly tell you that, I think, if Drew and I had been hired to write the first draft of World War Z, if we had had Matthew Michael Carnahan’s job, we would have written exactly the same movie that Carnahan did, with the same third act. We were able to come in and say, ‘Let’s scale it down, let’s make it the intimate zombie experience’ only because they’d shot the other version and it didn’t work.”
Lindelof and Goddard also had the full support of a powerful producer-star, Pitt, who cared about his character’s integrity. Few movie stars and even fewer writers have that sort of prerogative over their creations these days. Even the almighty director isn’t operating in a vacuum. The Gravity is the only constant, and if you want to fight it, you’d best come heavy.
As has been widely reported, Z originally climaxed in a giant zombie battle in Red Square, with star and producer Brad Pitt leading the charge in full Troy mass-murder mode. The scene was so off-key—what was Pitt’s character, a family-oriented U.N. fixer with no special combat abilities, doing waist deep in gore?—that its makers scrapped it, at great expense, and brought in Lindelof, Goddard, and McQuarrie (doing on-set rewrites) to create a new conclusion: a suspenseful, near-silent infiltration of a zombie-crammed medical lab in Wales, capped by Pitt injecting himself with a deadly pathogen to test a hypothesis: Will the zombies ignore a diseased person? They do! Pitt wins! Humanity triumphs! By being discreet. It’s Story Anti-gravity.
Still, Lindelof isn’t triumphal. “I can honestly tell you that, I think, if Drew and I had been hired to write the first draft of World War Z, if we had had Matthew Michael Carnahan’s job, we would have written exactly the same movie that Carnahan did, with the same third act. We were able to come in and say, ‘Let’s scale it down, let’s make it the intimate zombie experience’ only because they’d shot the other version and it didn’t work.”
Lindelof and Goddard also had the full support of a powerful producer-star, Pitt, who cared about his character’s integrity. Few movie stars and even fewer writers have that sort of prerogative over their creations these days. Even the almighty director isn’t operating in a vacuum. The Gravity is the only constant, and if you want to fight it, you’d best come heavy.
