Zombieland: Double Tap
WRITER-PRODUCERS RHETT Reese and Paul Wernick on the best bits of their zany zombie sequel.
LOGO A-GO-GO
Ten years may have elapsed since the original Zombieland took a devil-may-care approach to the zombie genre, but the sequel very quickly establishes that nothing has changed by having the Columbia logo lady use that torch of hers to best some undead assailants. “That was the idea of our visual-effects supervisor, Paul Linden,” admits Reese. “We actually wrote it even crazier than it turned out. We had the woman setting a zombie on fire with her torch and wrapping it up in her sash. Discretion was the better part of valour.” The duo, and director Ruben Fleischer, were unsure whether Sony would give them permission at first. “Sony is pretty protective of that logo,” says Wernick. “Fortunately, they let the inmates run the asylum.”
NEW THREATS
The movie begins with Jesse Eisenberg’s Columbus, via voiceover, introducing us to three new strains of zombie that have emerged-slashmutated over the decade-long hiatus: the dumb Homer, the smart Hawking, and the silent and deadly Ninja. “It allowed us to have some fun with the idea that not all zombies are created equal, which led us in the direction of the Homer,” explains Reese. “We wanted to give the zombies a little more personality.” Interestingly, you might wonder why the Ninja is given such a big build-up, only to never appear again, but Reese says it does. “There’s one Ninja under the RV that grabs Madison’s ankle,” he says. Maybe the Ninja will get its moment in the spotlight in the next sequel. Just ten years or so before we find out.
PISA PISS
“We always try to ground our stuff in reality,” says Wernick, the man who co-wrote Deadpool and 6 Underground. “This one pushed it a little bit, but I think it’s fun.” He’s talking of the sequence which upgrades the original’s fun Zombie Kill Of The Week to Zombie Kill Of The Year, with a hilarious moment in which a not-atall-stereotyped hotheaded Italian gent dispatches a bunch of zombies by, well, toppling the Leaning Tower of Pisa onto them. “There was a Dave Callaham draft where the Washington Monument fell over,” says Reese. “We were looking to give it a little more international flair. And the Leaning Tower of Pisa is already leaning.”
DOUBLE TROUBLE
Halfway through the movie, our heroes take refuge at an Elvis-themed hotel run by Rosario Dawson’s Nevada, where they encounter Albuquerque and Flagstaff, a pair of zombie
killers who are basically mirror images of Columbus and Woody Harrelson’s Tallahassee. “It stretches believability a little bit,” admits Reese, “particularly the resemblance between Thomas Middleditch [Albuquerque] and Jesse Eisenberg. We did approach Michael Cera first because he and Jesse are often confused for the same person.” Luke Wilson plays Tallahassee’s ‘twin’, Flagstaff, but that role was originally earmarked for someone Reese and Wernick have worked with before. “He [Ryan Reynolds] read the script and loved it,” says Wernick. “But he was off shooting Free Guy. We were bummed out to not have him, but Luke was amazing.”
KILLING THE ZOMBIE KILLERS
If you were expecting these new special guest stars to stick around, bond and bicker with Eisenberg, Harrelson and Emma Stone, you thought wrong. In the film’s standout sequence, Albuquerque and Flagstaff are bitten, try to cover up their bites, and then transform into drooling mega-zombies before being dispatched. “It was a little bit of the Bill Murray pattern,” says Wernick, referring to Murray’s legendary cameo in the first movie, which ended with him biting the bullet. “We wanted to inject a little bit of fun and new characters into the world, then kill them off. This was a fun pit stop on the way. It worked for us last time!”
GORE BY GORE
It’s hard to top squashing zombies with one of the world’s major landmarks, but Reese and Wernick still come up with an unorthodox ghoul-killing machine for the film’s finale: a giant monster truck which Dawson drives with an abandon that would win the approval of Clarkson and Hammond (but perhaps not May). “I think in our first version it was construction vehicles,” recalls Reese. “Zombieland is basically wish fulfilment,” adds Wernick. “So we thought, ‘What cars would we drive?’ We all pushed around our Tonka trucks as little kids. What better way to spend life with zombies than behind four wheels of absolute awesomeness?”
MURRAY MINT
You could make the argument that Murray’s droll appearance as himself in Zombieland is one of the greatest cameos of all time. Maybe even the greatest. But it gave the Double Tap creative team something of a headache: how do you top it? Do you even bother? “Our feeling is that there is no Zombieland without Bill Murray,” says Wernick. “When we approached the second one, we thought, ‘Is he a zombie now?’” Instead, they decided to end the movie with a sequence in which we see Murray at a ‘Garfield 3’ junket on the day of the zombie outbreak, killing various film journalists (Empire is not included; hopefully we make it) as they try to snack on him. “At one point that was in the middle of the movie, but it felt better at the end. And Bill was a much easier get the second time. We weren’t hanging by the thread at the last minute waiting for him to show up!” Truth be told, it doesn’t hit the heights of the first movie’s cameo, but if you’ve ever wanted to see Bill Murray beating seven shades of shit out of entertainment journalists, this is the scene for you. ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD