The World Health Organization has been
tracking the recent outbreak of rabies
that began in Taiwan and has now been reported in over 12 countries.
Responding to allegations he hasn't done enough...
I think the opening sequence, where the zombies first strike, is so scary to us
because we're reading in the news about emerging diseases,
for example there are viruses emerging from Saudi Arabia or from China,
where we have never really seen these particular viruses before,
and we don't really understand how they work,
and people are getting sick and people are dying,
and you don't know what you should be doing,
because these viruses can spread as quickly as these zombies spread.
If someone is sick and gets on a plane,
they can be in another country, on another continent in a matter of hours.
That's how real viruses spread around the world.
So, these zombies are spreading kind of like viruses do and it's very scary.
No, we're not really in Philadelphia, here we're in the center of Glasgow,
the center of town.
And Glasgow was generous enough to basically close down
the whole part of their center, and we have several streets here
blocked for ourselves, to do the opening of the movie.
It's been really exciting to be here because they've been very cooperative,
and it really gave us the scale we were looking for.
Once you change the street signs, and you put some cabs in,
and you also use some digital plates from Philadelphia,
their city really will look like Philadelphia.
Glasgow was kind of an unbelievable discovery as Philadelphia,
and largely unfilmed in,
so they received us very generously and let us take them over for two weeks.
Rolling, rolling!
We first talked about shooting the sequence in six days,
and then people sat around a table and realized,
"Hang on. This is much more complex. We need more days."
So, I approached the council and asked for an 18-day closure of this area,
which is enormous, it's never been done in England before,
a city center shut down for 18 days.
So, back there, you start running and slightly further up
there's gonna be a camera there, looking at you.
Simon Crane has been in charge of the second unit direction,
and he's got a terrific team around him as well.
Marc had a real big passion for the whole project,
and really what he wanted to bring was scale.
We wanted to do as much practically as possible,
but to give a huge scale to the film, which we're doing.
Gerry?
Get back in your car right now!
In the opening sequence,
we have a truck that does some damage to a main high street.
We've done a lot of stunts,
where we had a big snowplow mounted on the front of the garbage truck,
so, as the truck is driving through,
you get cars literally flipping around all over the place.
One of the things we are trying to do is give it a documentary kind of style.
But on this one, we really want to tie Brad and his family into the action.
So, what we did, within the Volvo,
we actually mounted four different cameras,
which gave us an overlapping tile background,
and then Brad we can shoot green screen,
and actually have him driving and being part of the action.
Brad is a great driver, great mover, great fighter, he'd do it all if he could,
and we try and give him as much as we can,
'cause, with him doing it, it's great screen value
and it looks fantastic.
Brad Pitt is a wonderfully generous actor,
he brings a lot of laughter onto the set,
and you can see that he's always thinking
about the story that we're trying to tell, and the best way to tell it,
and he's always bringing ideas to the set.
We crashed over 40 different cars, we then crashed the garbage truck,
and then we crashed Brad's Volvo into an ambulance.
We've had 150 cars,
of which we have crashed I think about 80% of them.
I think half of the cars have come from America in containers, shipped in.
And they're, of course, not legally allowed to drive on the roads,
so, they all had to be on transporters,
getting them into the square, into our enclosure zone.
- E mark. - Action!
And action!
Keep moving!
The military are coming in, doing road blocks,
trying to channel everybody away from where all the action ls.
The main reason I'm here is to go through the script,
make sure that they're keeping as realistic as possible.
Don't bring them all the way down. Stop them at the signs right here.
Then we'll go ahead and move them in groups.
I'm helping them with the progression of the breakdown of the military
to tell the story.
Why don't you take charge of the situation
and yell some stuff to him, and he yells something...
I trained Mr. Pitt on a film called Spy Game years ago.
He's very particular about everything.
If I have a National Guardsman here,
he wants to know exactly why he's there,
what are they doing, why are they doing that,
what's the weapon, what's the weapon doing,
why does he have that weapon?
He's very particular about every small detail.
The National Guard have been called out,
I think you see some of them behind us.
We've got M16s, we've got M4s,
we've got SWAT teams here with shotguns,
we've got MP5s,
we've got the police with GLOCK pistols,
and slowly we'll start to see the guns coming into use.
We've been firing a lot of weapons this morning to get the crowd motivated.
In terms of crowds, some days when we're in smaller streets
in the beginning of the sequence,
we were getting away with 200 crowds to make the streets look full.
Now that we're moving into the square for the mayhem,
we're bumping up to 700.
- B camera. - Action!
The idea behind live action photography with actors and stunt people was,
have real people on the street that were panicked,
most of the shots have real actors,
acting like they've been bitten, being taken over, becoming a zombie.
Then we intermingled with that certain shots
where it was a CG character or a CG herd running across,
because, now, this entire city has been engulfed,
starting with a bite and a bite and a bite,
suddenly, you don't know... Who do you trust?
You better just move,
because it's nothing but this driving wave of zombies that's coming at you
and it's a mix of computer graphics, animation, animated characters,
as well as great performers.
- Action. - Come on. Let's go.
I think our biggest production challenge was getting the right level of chaos,
and yet chaos that can be understood,
and having that be with the family, and with them enough
that you're emotional and connected to them emotionally.
And yet also understanding...
Gerry!
...the insane things that are going on around them.
Rachel?
It's a very challenging movie because we have huge crowds.
Cut!
There are very few scenes where we have two people sitting around a table,
it's mostly hundreds and hundreds of extras every scene and big setups,
it's a challenge, but everything we're getting so far is really, really special.
Roll video.
Containment is a fail.
How do we know they're coming?
They're coming.
In this particular action sequence,
it was a building rooftop created, surrounded by green screen,
and when you extract the green, you can replace anything you want.
And the nice thing is you can do
what would be, incredibly dangerous shots otherwise,
you can do safe shots with the actors and with the stunt people
with this sort of a setup.
One of the things that we see in the movie
when faced with this massive pandemic,
which is an epidemic on a global scale is this idea of utility.
If you're helpful, we'll keep you as part of the group.
And if you're unhelpful, we'll throw you out of the group.
Not dissimilar from the large ship that we see floating off into the Atlantic.
And that's what happens in the case of the Brad Pitt character.
I can't leave my family.
He may be strong-armed into helping the larger group,
but his main interest is in his family.
Each and every one of these people are here because they serve a purpose.
Let's figure out how we stop this.
So we're here on the Argus, which is basically a British Navy ship.
In the film it's supposed to be an American Navy ship.
And it's basically this landing deck we're here on
is sort of the landing platform where Gerry and his family all landing down
as they're dropped off, as they just escaped the zombies.
And they're landing here and they are in a safe spot,
it's like one of the last safe places in the world.
It's really great to work on a real aircraft carrier
instead of doing it all on stage, because you still get the real feeling
and I feel like always in a real location, it just gives you a palette
that it's much wider, which is really great, what we want for this film.
Because it is World War Z, so the scale is really important.
They had a ship in dry dock, and it's far easier to shoot people on a ship,
next to a dock, where you can get all your equipment and all your people
on and off as needed instead of taking this out to sea and shooting
at the whims of the weather.
So they just patched in green as needed
depending on where the camera is looking.
And you replace all that with the sky that you want,
and the sea and helicopters taking off and landing in the background.
Obviously with the flotilla being as it is and this ship being in the center
of the flotilla, we've got aircraft arriving, we've got stores being unloaded,
the Constitution being taken out of the planes,
we've got troops, we've got all the refugees milling around,
it's a very, very busy place.
Good to see you, my friend.
Is this worldwide? Is anyone doing better than we are?
This is at an international scale,
where you have people from all over the world.
There must be at least 500 actors who have come on as extras on the set,
and it's amazing because then it gives you a real feeling of the magnitude.
B Marker.
- Hold it. - At ease!
We're in the bottom of a British Naval vessel.
And this is a huge space that they have made
into this war room.
We got so many people working in here with us,
the wardrobe, we got Navy guys, Marines,
we've got the guys decked out in SEAL stuff,
we got all these hardbooks that they use in the military for laptops,
it is decked out completely.
You all read the same email I did,
and it said "zombies."
This boat has become the central office for what is left of the U.N.
And there's a briefing room where they are trying to gather
as much information as possible and then make decisions
based on that information.
I want to send you in. With a team.
And it's that room in which Gerry gets invited to go on this mission.
You think we're gonna find anything?
Yeah, we're gonna find something.
Mother Nature is a serial killer.
No one's better.
In the movie, he talks about nature being a serial killer.
And this idea that death is a common part of the natural world.
Of course it is, many organisms have evolved
to take out other organisms.
In some cases it's outright death, they'll kill the host,
in other cases, they'll just castrate it.
So, is nature a serial killer? Yes, absolutely.
Take two.
Let's go.
Who was it? Who fell? Who was it? Who fell?
Skilken.
I need an ammo count, then you reload your mags!
My boy out there who died.
He was 23.
Twenty-three years old.
You want to tell me why?
Gerry Lane comes to Korea to investigate what could possibly be
the origin of the virus.
They start sifting through information that they had before trying to figure out
what this is and where it came from and they come across
an email that my character, Captain Speke had sent.
And it's the first known recorded evidence of this virus,
the zombies, the Zeke, whatever you want to call them,
nobody knows what it is yet.
One of the incidents happened there,
but they don't have more information for him.
So he's literally, suddenly stranded, that he doesn't know where to go.
And he then encounters one of their prisoners there
which is David Morse's character.
You're with the C.l.A.?
But they're not with me.
He shows him that there are different theories that exist,
that the North Koreans basically pulled all their teeth,
because there is no teeth, no bite, no spread.
They pulled the teeth of all 23 million
in less than 24 hours.
I mean, essentially, what you want to do is you want to break the chain.
So however it is that some pathogen is spreading,
you want to stop that. Now in the case of this movie,
it's people biting each other, so take out their teeth.
- Roll cameras, please. - Rolling.
Why do you have to burn them to ashes to get them to finally stop?
Why do they move like a plague?
Why is Israel winning?
How is Israel winning?
Well, I tell him that things may not have begun in North Korea,
and that there were people who prepared for this
before anything happened here in Korea,
and Israel is a place where he might wanna make his next stop.
We're going to Jerusalem. I'm your co-pilot.
It was important to me that all the attacks feel different
and are different experiences and should have a different impact
and this one in Korea, the idea was that they have to get in a silent way
back to the plane, because we established very early
that they're drawn by sound.
So we chose bicycles, which on one hand, you can say,
"Oh, this is ridiculous," but I thought the best way to get back to the plane
in the fastest fashion instead of walking...
Just pedal your ass off.
And as I would like this entire scene should be backlit at night in the rain,
that you only see silhouettes, and almost that the zombies
and the humans are both silhouettes.
That they almost become one.
I'm gonna clear a path through Zeke!
You pedal like hell.
My character, Captain Speke can see the ridiculousness in all of this.
But he's someone who's just trying to do his job
and it's important to him to get that man on that airplane.
If he can do anything he can do that.
And Speke does pay the ultimate price for that.
And makes sure he meets his end as a human.
And not as a zombie.
Make it steep.
Jerusalem tower, Reach 394.
Pan, pan, pan. Request immediate landing.
It was very important as we were on this journey that we're going through
these different cultures and these different worlds almost,
and every place should feel different
and every place should have a different palette.
It was important in Israel, for instance, to make it warm
and feel like everything is safe.
Yes, you feel the heat, you feel the warmth,
life is as usual and you feel almost nothing has changed.
Until, obviously, it does change.
The choice of Jerusalem itself, which is the birth of humanity,
the birth of all civilization, and then to mirror that in the fall of Israel,
which is sort of the end of civilization.
We're shooting in Malta for Jerusalem.
Malta has very similar architecture and really is very practical to shoot at.
That's why we chose Malta as a location for Jerusalem.
We started shooting this particular sequence first in the movie,
and we shot for three weeks in Malta, every day with 1,400 extras,
helicopters, cameras, and it was like a constant battling with the elements
'cause there were so many people and creating the frenziness,
and the Maltese extras were fantastic and the costumes had to be made
and all of that was really great.
Two people are working on a hijab. Amazing.
This is a Hollywood production.
We make many costumes, we source many costumes,
the movie was prepped in London.
London has a very big Islamic community.
So that was really easy.
What we have to source is a lot of the Israeli costumes.
Which we have to make and source out of Israel, straight.
The zombie plague keeps spreading, and we do what we can.
These are the Jerusalem Salvation Gates.
Two of 10 portals
through the security perimeter into fortified Israel.
The best land is the in gathering place.
It's just behind the wall which is supposed to protect the country
from the zombies,
who are amassing by the tens of thousands outside.
And in this wall there are Salvation Gates,
through which the refugees who are in the zombie territory
and who have not yet been attacked and bitten by zombies
and therefore turned into zombies, they are allowed in.
You're letting people in.
Every human being we save is one less zombie to fight.
The Israelis have decided that there is a common enemy.
And they join together in this fight against the zombies.
And, as you will see, there are Israeli soldiers
fighting side by side with Palestinian soldiers.
And when you're on the set and you see it,
and of course when you see it in the film, that's an amazing
and sometimes a very moving thing to see.
Jurgen Warmbrunn.
High-ranking official in the Mossad.
Ludi Boeken is actually... He plays Warmbrunn and he's not an actor.
He's an acquaintance of mine, a friend of mine.
And we were in Israel and we were looking for an actor
and we couldn't find someone and coincidentally I met him in London
to discuss something and he's Israeli
and I was sitting there and looking at him and I said,
"Have you ever acted before?" He said, "No, I'm not an actor."
I'm a film director and a film producer and also because he knew in the past
I had been a war reporter and I had been a lot in the Middle East,
not only in Israel where I have lived for a long time,
but also in other places, and I've been around people
who are like the character that I'm supposed to portray.
And so he went in and he read for the role,
and I looked at the tape and the casting director actually told me,
"You know your friend is really good."
So I looked at the roll, and I sent it to Brad and I sent it to the studio,
and together said, "We love this guy, he's so good." And he got the role.
And you were that tenth man.
Precisely.
Even before I went for the reading, I understood that it's a big movie,
it's an action movie, but it also has a very strong message
about solidarity and the way people all unite in a big fight against evil.
And I felt that it was something also important to do,
and it was something in line with things that I would like to participate in,
so, here I am.
Camera mark.
It was interesting, once he started shooting, suddenly there's this man
who has been in a lot of life and death situations,
and suddenly he was with Brad Pitt
and he was slightly nervous and shaking
and I said, "Look, you did so well in the reading,
"let's just take a deep breath." And then he did, suddenly,
he just found his way and just hold his own and just played his character,
which was amazing.
- I need answers... - I don't have answers.
All you can do is find a way to hide.
They're coming over the top!
- Camera mark. - Action.
If the movie was going to be a legitimate representation of a global outbreak,
and therefore populated by people from around the world, let's get that right.
While you couldn't go shoot Israel for Israel,
you could certainly cast an Israeli actress, so we've done that.
I play Segen, which literally means in Hebrew, "Lieutenant."
So, she's called Lieutenant.
She's an Israeli soldier for the IDF.
And she gets assigned to protect him in this journey.
What I always thought every time I was in Israel,
is if you see a lot of the kids there in the army, they're very young.
And I wanted to choose someone who had a very innocent face,
and was a female and she has her hair cut.
She almost looks like a young boy.
And has this very innocent face but still is a woman.
There hasn't really been a tough stunt,
it's been trying to make the stunts not look like stunts.
Trying to make this wave of zombies, this tsunami effect,
this complete river rush of zombies and this domino effect it has
on people as they're running is to get as much real acting
out of the performers, stunt wise, extra wise and acting wise.
And just get this performance.
We have a few wire assists and the normal stunt wire rigs,
but generally it's getting them to simulate fear.
Gerry Lane sees this little boy that has a shaved head
and this herd of zombies comes vaulting down this walkway
and they part around him just like a wave.
You could never get stunt people to quite run this way
where their balance would go in and out in quite the way
that would be, frankly, manipulated.
So we thought it was best that it be a boy on a ramp
with 100% computer graphics animated zombies running around him.
Ready, and action!
The zombies are horrifyingly well made.
It's like your worst fears and nightmares giving shape and form.
She gets bitten in her hand
and Brad suddenly out of, again, it's one of these instinctual moments,
cuts off her hand and then does a countdown
to see if she turns into a zombie and she doesn't.
One thousand four.
One thousand five.
One thousand six.
That's exactly what happens in rabies.
You have a bite on your hand,
it takes a lot longer for it to creep up your central nervous system.
But creep it does.
In the movie it's a lot quicker contracted,
but in the case of rabies it's exactly the same process which is happening.
You're not gonna turn.
We got to move.
I'd like to see the mass that we're talking about.
Because when we're filming it, it's like hundreds of zombies,
but with CG! and with everything built together,
there's gonna be thousands of them.
The shot going over the wall, that was a big old darn deal.
A shot like that takes over a year to make.
Because there's so much difficult animation.
You might lay clown a basic animation climbing up the wall
and they're climbing on one another.
And then you sprinkle in all these custom characters
and you keep doing that until it looks better and better.
And we had one live action shot of zombies hitting the wall
and trying to climb up on top of one another.
And we did clever camera tricks like leaning the wall over in actual fact,
roll the camera over so actually the actors could climb up further
than they'd normally do. Then on top of that, we put in a few CG zombies
also climbing up on the real people.
So it's a mix and match deal again to try and enhance this zombie behavior.
We built the cabin of the plane on a sound stage.
And then we basically just shot it in order,
like once they boarded the plane to him wrapping up her hand,
to getting his epiphany to making the phone call,
dealing with the pilots to ultimately
the zombie attack.
And the audience knows, once the dog starts barking,
you know at this point of the movie what's gonna happen,
but the suspense is still there, how it's gonna happen.
It's all about the journey in that moment, the journey of suspense.
Marc was very concerned, is the audience gonna understand
that there's nothing else that these people could do
other than throw a grenade to try and save themselves.
And ultimately the side of the cabin was just rigged for an explosion
for the grenades, that that can be exploding, that was all shot in camera.
You have so much spectacle and so much scope
in the first two acts of the movie that we thought it would be
really interesting to make it much more intimate and suspenseful.
You now know what the zombies are capable of
and now you can't get any bigger and make it even a bigger spectacle
so now you bring it all back
to the suspenseful moment between the Z and your hero.
I think these things have a weakness.
And him trying to prove the theory.
I think they're spreading a pathogen,
and that pathogen needs a healthy host.
But even if you're right, I mean, infecting the populace
with a lethal illness is not exactly a cure.
It's not a cure. It's camouflage.
Gerry pitches us this idea
based on what he's witnessed around the world.
And the idea that these zombies, like all predatory animals
will avoid people who are diseased.
Deadly pathogen. With a high mortality rate.
But curable.
In nature these parasites will actually control their hosts
to go in certain directions so that they can infect a new host.
And there really isn't often a point in trying to infect
a host that is already sick.
Do we have what we need to try it?
We have all he could want.
The problem is,
they're all stored in B-Wing.
What's the matter with B-Wing?
B-Wing is out of bounds. It's completely taken over by zombies.
But in order to engage in this experiment,
we have to get him in there and get him out.
Again you're playing that building very much on suspense.
You constantly want to create suspense around every corner.
Action.
Zombies!
- Action! - Clear.
- That's it. - lnto the vault!
Run!
In, in, in!
The scene we're shooting today really comes at the climax of the film.
And it is the moment when Gerry's theory
about how to defeat the zombies
is put into practice, and the guinea pig that he uses
to try this out on is himself.
He's gonna inject himself.
And he is confronted by a killer zombie,
it's just the two of them and there's no way out.
They casted him specifically,
and his name is Michael, he's a theater actor
but he did a lot of pantomime,
a lot of movement, and he just has incredible expression with his face.
And I thought that you felt there was a human being once in there,
and now it's all gone.
He was alive, too, he had a life and that's why I put a wedding ring on him.
And it's very subtle but he bangs the wedding ring against the window.
That you feel like there's a whole history to this man.
There was a family, there might have been kids.
And now he's just this zombie and you feel the loss of humanity
in that moment between them.
What I think this movie does really well is it draws from biological inspiration.
Do we imagine because we see this movie that there are threats
from emerging infectious diseases?
Well, that's already a given. 60% of our diseases
are from things which have jumped from animals into humans.
Of course we have to go on and ask
whether those parasites would be controlling our behavior,
but if it's gonna kill half of all our society,
that itself will control our behavior.
Zombies are often associated with dystopia.
And a dark vision of the future.
And this film is scary, it's thrilling, it's realistic,
but at the end of the day there is something very optimistic about
the ingenuity of human beings.
I'm an optimist and I always believe there is hope.
And that's what I feel Gerry Lane's character is. He is someone
who has seen so many places that have been in crises,
but ultimately came out of it and he's still hopeful and positive.
"How can I solve this, how can I change it,
"how can we, as human beings come together and survive?"
The war isn't over, the plague isn't done yet.
We're still battling disease.
But now we have found a camouﬂage, now there's a way to beat them,
now we can all work together and end this war.
Approaching target. Permission to engage.
All clear. Light 'em up. Light 'em up.
It's not just a horror movie, it touches on many layers of thematic stories.
I think it deals with the human story, it deals with political issues,
so you will have that cross factor in terms of your audiences
who'll want to come and watch it.
Because they see it from very different perspectives.
Action.
I think the most enjoyable part about filming this movie has been
that it's such an environment of collaboration.
We show up and if we have a scene to do
and we all pitch in to figure out the best way of telling that story.
And that's an actor's dream,
is to feel like we're all making something together.
I think the biggest challenge of this movie was
to stay true to the original ambition of making a great, entertaining,
enormous, satisfying, original film.
And it's meant to show how the entire world is affected,
so, by definition, you have to go to a lot of places and show a lot of people.
World War Z is definitely the biggest movie I've ever done.
The scale is enormous, it's a worldwide, global journey we're on.
And if you're making a movie on that scale,
you just need to be surrounded with the best people you can,
who understand the vision you have for the movie,
and are also able to support that, because ultimately you can't do it alone.
Ready, and action.
And most of them have done big movies,
so they were all really incredible support,
and I'm really thankful to all of them.
Cut.