Brad Pitt Opens Up About Production Problems With World War Z

World War Z has made headlines for bearing no resemblance to Max Brooks' book of the same name, and while it looks amazing, Brad Pitt has revealed that it was quite a struggle to get the film where it is today. Pitt chats with the new issue of Entertainment Weekly about the problems he overcame while producing the film, whose budget went from $125 million to over $170 million over the span of a few months.

Not only were there money issues, but it took six years to develop and shoot the movie, and there were numerous re-writes, the last of which took place after principal scenes for the film were already shot. The changes made by writers Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard called for five weeks of re-shoots and for an "extensive portion" of scenes shot in Budapest cut out of the project entirely. Yikes!

“These movies are very intricate puzzles, and you have to keep winding the mechanisms,” Pitt tells the mag. "We give so much more credence to the end-of-the-year dramas. In these movies you’re triggering emotions, too—a thrill response—but they are far more calibrated. You’ve got to be a bit of a technician."

When asked about the cut Budapest scenes, Pitt said, “Well, you remember that at the time I was really interested in a more political film, using the zombie trope as a kind of Trojan horse for asking: ‘What would happen to sociopolitical lines if there was a pandemic like this? Who would be on top? Who would be the powerful countries and who would be the most vulnerable?’. We wanted to really explore that, but it was just too much. We got bogged down in it; it was too much to explain. It gutted the fun of what these films are meant to be.”