How World War Z Author Max Brooks Feels About The Brad Pitt Movie

I'm not breaking any new ground here when I say that authors tend to have a bit of a tricky relationship with adaptations of their work. J.R.R. Tolkien famously had issues with the earliest BBC radio version of "The Lord of the Rings," while his son Christopher shared similar feelings regarding Peter Jackson's classic movie trilogy adaptation. Likewise, the war of words between Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick over the latter's "The Shining" film adaptation is the stuff of legend. But where those projects more or less hewed closely to the outline of their respective source material, the big screen version of the globe-trotting zombie novel "World War Z" is another thing entirely.

You remember the 2013 Brad Pitt-starring blockbuster, right? Directed by Marc Forster (until third-act problems required Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard to step in with some major revisions, that is), "World War Z" takes the barest bones of Max Brooks's original book and does its own thing entirely. Those who've read the novel know that this exceptional story takes on a more episodic tone, laying out an oral history of the fictional apocalypse told through the perspectives of several different individuals recounting events well after the fact. The movie ... doesn't do this at all. Generously described as a "loose adaptation," this action film is much more of a straightforward, boots-on-the-ground thriller that, well, any fan would tell you pretty much strips much of the nuance and novelty out of the entire premise.

I'll give you exactly one guess as to how Brooks felt about the movie. To his credit, though, the author took a refreshingly candid and self-deprecating approach when he addressed this to a room full of fans at 2013's San Diego Comic-Con. His full response is both amusing and as honest as it gets.

It can't be an easy thing to spend so much time developing an original story of your own, receive all sorts of commercial and critical acclaim, and then hand your baby over to a big Hollywood studio ... only to see the final results turn out to be nothing like what you expected. Of course, that's just the nature of the movie business since time eternal. Max Brooks wasn't the first author to stand by helplessly as other writers put their own fingerprints all over his work, and he won't be the last. (Just ask George R.R. Martin how that's currently going for him with "House of the Dragon," for just one ongoing example.)

But not just anyone would've handled it the way Brooks chose to, however. In a video posted on YouTube from his Comic-Con appearance in San Diego that year (barely a month after the film's theatrical release, no less), the writer opened up about his complicated feelings regarding "World War Z." After opening with some crowd-pleasing statements about how the only thing the book and the movie share is "They got a great title," he admitted that, "It didn't suck. And I didn't hate it. And I specifically thought I would hate it because it was so different from the book." He went on to say:

"But what shocked me was, it was exactly because it was so different from the book that I didn't hate it. Because it was just somebody else's movie. It had nothing to do with me. So, I was completely emotionally divorced from what I was seeing on the screen [...] Once the title sequence passed, I was like, 'Oh ... this is fun. Okay.'"

From the tone of Max Brooks' entire off-the-cuff speech about "World War Z," it's easy to tell he would've preferred a more faithful translation of his book — and rightfully so. The film went on to become the biggest zombie movie ever made in terms of box office receipts, but it could've been so much more had it taken more inspiration from the novel it was ostensibly adapting. Brooks clearly felt that pain, but here's the surprising thing: He found himself appreciating certain moments that, while invented for the film, captured the tone of his original story.

After lightheartedly poking fun at the fact that only one character in the movie was taken straight from his book (and, no, it's not Brad Pitt's lead character, Gerry Lane), Brooks revealed why he came away impressed by one scene in particular: 

"I gotta be honest, there were actually moments in the movie that p*ssed me off because they were actually good. And they were stuff I would've written." 

He then described a moment where a character with no knowledge of firearms accidentally shoots himself during a tense standoff with zombies:

"I would have totally written that scene. That's everything I stand for. Those of you who've read my books, you know that's like everything I write about, is those little moments that we consider to be boring, but can change everything in a heartbeat. So, when I saw that, I was like, 'Wow, that's totally in the spirit of what I would've done.'"

As far as these situations go, "World War Z" could've been a much more awkward experience for Brooks. Instead, he saw the positives, and even more love was heaped on his book. That's a win-win, folks.