In a new interview with GQ Magazine UK ahead of the release of his latest directorial effort “The Killer,” David Fincher expressed a bit of relief over his “World War Z” sequel never getting off the ground. Why? He revealed the sequel’s storyline was a bit too similar to HBO’s wildly popular, apocalyptic video game adaptation.
“Well, it was a little like ‘The Last of Us,'” Fincher said when the “World War Z” sequel was mentioned. “I’m glad that we didn’t do what we were doing, because ‘The Last of Us’ has a lot more real estate to explore the same stuff. In our title sequence, we were going to use the little parasite … they used it in their title sequence, and in that wonderful opening with the Dick Cavett, David Frost-style talk show.”
The original “World War Z” movie was inspired by Max Brooks’ 2006 book of the same name and starred Brad Pitt as a former UN employee who travels the globe to find a cure to stop a massive zombie pandemic. Marc Foster directed the action film, which Paramount Pictures released in summer 2013 to a decent $540 million at the worldwide box office. The film carried a lofty budget upwards of $190 million and had a notorious reshoot process in which the ending was overhauled, but Paramount still thought a sequel might be worth it by pairing Pitt with his “Fight Club” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” director Fincher.
The “World War Z” sequel was supposed to start filming in June 2019, but reports surfaced in February of that year that the project was dead due to budget-related issues. Fincher was apparently willing to direct the sequel for less than the $190 million price tag of the first movie, but the money required to pull off his vision for the film was still too high for Paramount.
Given Fincher’s tease that his axed “World War Z” sequel was similar to “The Last of Us,” it’s safe to assume the storyline would’ve teamed up Brad Pitt’s character with a younger co-star as the two form a makeshift father-daughter relationship amid another terrifying zombie outbreak.
Elsewhere in his GQ interview, Fincher addressed concerns of AI disrupting Hollywood. He called AI “a really powerful tool” but expressed doubt that it can ever replicate art created by humans.
“I have not heard an AI Beatles song that compares to ‘Eleanor Rigby,'” Fincher said. “So until somebody plays an AI song that knocks me out … maybe that’s just where we’re at now, and I may be eating my words in a year, but I think ultimately, the thing that we respond to in poetry and writing and songwriting and photography is the personal bent. The thing that’s making it … [human].”
Fincher said that AI technology was useful as a production tool during the making of his Michael Fassbender-starring assassin thriller “The Killer.”
“Look, we had a few lines of dialogue that we had looped but we couldn’t get right, with Michael, so he said it into an iPhone in an environment that was not conducive to being used as a voiceover, and we could take it and process it through the hours of voiceover that we had, and spit back out, and it was clean, and it was the music of his voice,” Fincher explained. “And that’s incredibly handy to have.”
Netflix is opening “The Killer” in select theaters on Oct. 27. The film will begin streaming Nov. 10 on the platform.
