Zombieland Director Ruben Fleischer on Woody Harrelson, Pez Dispensers, and Breakdancing Animals

The last time I talked to you about projects, you were trying to get a movie with Jonah Hill and a Pez dispenser off the ground.

Yeah, Psycho Funky Chimp.

How did you get from there to here?

Psycho Funky Chimp was a terrific script at Paramount that Todd Phillips was producing. Basically, Paramount said they weren't going to make it. We jumped through every hoop they presented us with, and at a certain point they made the decision that no matter how great we got the script or how low we brought the budget down, it just wasn't a movie that was a priority for them. As a first-time director, I really wanted to make a movie, so I was kind of stuck reading scripts again and I was looking for that perfect first opportunity.

I met on a few films that I was considering, but there really wasn't anything I was 100% committed to until I read Zombieland. Even upon first read, I wasn't convinced it was the one, just because of the zombie component and my insecurity about the genre, but when you think about the movie and take out the zombies, it's really a classic hero's journey about a kid that's afraid and then becomes unafraid and gets the girl. There's a lot of comedy, it's a buddy movie, and it relates to a lot of films I like, like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Ferris Bueller's Day Off...Midnight Run's my favorite example to use about these two unlikely people who are paired together and go on an adventure.

So how do you think you won the project over the other directors who were interested?

The movie was originally a television pilot and it didn't have an ending. I think it was deemed too expensive to do as a television show -- it just wasn't realistic to accomplish that -- but as a TV movie to set up a series, it didn't have a climactic ending. It kind of ended with the natural ellipsis that would lead to the next episode. When whatever network it was decided they didn't want to do it as a show, the producer Gavin Polone took it to Sony, set it up as a feature, and that was the script that it was -- it has the same characters and sensibility, it just didn't have a third act. So when I went in to meet with people, I pitched the idea of the amusement park and giving them a destination for their journey. In Wizard of Oz they have Oz, or they have Wally World in Vacation. There's a place they're going to that the road trip ends at, so I used those as examples and thought it would be fun from a directing standpoint to have a zombie showdown in an amusement park.

How did casting go? None of these actors is necessarily who I'd expect to find in a big-budget zombie movie.

It all became real once we got Woody on board. We were searching for "the name" that would get the studio excited and Woody was kind of my first idea of someone who was unconventional and quirky and funny and could pull off the action, but he's not totally what was scripted. Definitely, the way he ended up bringing the character to life is not at all what was scripted.

How so?

Originally, the guy was written as kind of the comedy version of Michael Douglas in Falling Down: a normal dude, but then when the shit goes down, he becomes a zombie-killing weirdo. To me, of the scripted version of that character, the next closest thing I could think of would be Walter, John Goodman's character in The Big Lebowski. He was a guy who was amped up and ready to go, but actually got a chance to use his guns. Woody turned him into this cowboy, this High Plains Drifter zombie killer, which I loved. I saw No Country for Old Men and he came on the screen, and he had that cowboy hat and Texas drawl, and I really thought he'd be so fun.

I had to sell him on the movie, because never in his wildest dreams would he want to do a zombie movie. He wasn't a fan of the genre, he was afraid of it, in a way. I had to convince him, but once he got on board, the studio got on board.

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