After coming into contact after our preview of Zombieland, we had the opportunity to host a phone interview with Zombieland writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. Both were incredibly gracious to speak with and we hope you enjoy the first of many filmmaker interviews here at The Film Nest. Below, we discuss the writing of the film, their time in television, how they began and what they’re up to in the future. Enjoy.

PRODIGAL SON: First of all, I want to say, congratulations on the movie. I had a great time with it and being number one in the box office has to feel good. Because you came from TV, how did you get into writing Zombieland?

RHETT REESE: We actually wrote it as a spec television pilot and sold it to CBS. So, it was intended to be a television series from the beginning. When they passed, we took it around to the rest of the town and they also passed, so we never got a television pilot made and Sony Television ultimately paid us to turn it into a made-for-TV movie. Which we did, but when we finished it, it was too expensive to become a made-for-TV movie, and so Gavin Polone, our industrious bad-ass producer, took it to Sony Pictures and convinced Rachel O’Connor to make it. If you watch the movie, it’s got a lot of elements of the television show in it, like the “Zombie Kill of the Week” and cliffhanger ending and things that were reflective of the fact that it used to be a TV show.

PS: When you were writing the script and conceiving the story, did you have any particular inspiration in mind that helped you develop it?

RHETT: Well, the zombie genre had just been invigorated with 28 Days Later and the new Dawn of the Dead, when zombies got fast. So, that was exciting and it felt like the genre had new life breathed into it. We always start from a place of character and we thought we had two really fun characters. A big scaredy-cat and a really big bad-ass and we thought wouldn’t those two be fun foils in a world of zombies? Wouldn’t it make sense for each of them to survive by virtue of their own personality? And we ran with it.

PS: I think Jesse Eisenberg is great in the movie and he seems to be a perfect fit for the character of Columbus. Did you have any specific actors in mind when you were writing the script?

RHETT: No, because we wrote it for television and when you do write for TV, you don’t get access to those movie star types. You end up generally with a little bit more accessible cast. We did think of possibly someone like Seth Green to be in the lead, but beyond that, we didn’t really too much into specific stars, just because we figured we wouldn’t get any. It wasn’t until it became a movie that we had access to some of these folks and suddenly we had three Academy Award nominees [Woody Harrelson, Abigail Breslin, Bill Murray] in our zombie movie, which is just crazy when you think about it.

PS: Now that the film’s been number one and even though I know this has essentially been the first day since those things had become official, has Sony spoken to you about the possibility of a sequel and even if there was talk, would you be interested in such a thing?

PAUL WERNICK: Because it started as a TV show, this idea of creatively pushing forward and advancing the characters and seeing what they do next week was always in our minds. We have a brainstorming document that we open nearly weekly and drop ideas into with respect to Zombieland. So, creatively, we would love a sequel. I would think everyone involved, creatively, would love a sequel. The actors. The studio. It’s just now a matter of box office performance and how it does next week and so on and so forth, whether the studio pushes forward. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.

PS: I’ll continue to do that for you as well. Now that most people, we’ll assume, have seen it, because it’s done so well and being that Roger Ebert has spoiled it, as he’s wont to do anyway, talk about the cameo in the film, with regards to Bill Murray and how that came about.

RHETT: Absolutely. We came to Bill Murray, late. We originally wrote the part for Patrick Swayze. We weren’t able to offer it to him, by virtue of him getting sick, so we had to re-write it to try to attract other actors. We went through a long list. We went through Joe Pesci and Mark Hammill and The Rock and Jean-Claude Van Damme, Matthew McConaughey. It was a pretty long list. Every single time, for one reason or another, the actor could not or would not do it and we were down to the eleventh hour. We were pretty close to shooting and we walked up to Woody Harrelson on set and we said, “Woody, is there anyone else you can think of, that you know, who might want to do this, that you could call?” And he said, “Well, I could call Dustin Hoffman and Bill Murray.” And we were like, “Yes, and yes.” Dustin couldn’t do it, because of a schedule issue, but Bill got back to Woody and it was all a question of just, “did Bill like the script?” And thankfully, he really, really liked it, which was enormously gratifying to us. We had to re-write it for him in a hurry, in about a two-hour span, because he didn’t think there was quite enough for him to do, so we expanded his part and two days later, he was on the set. It happened within about three days. About 72 hours, it all came together and it’s one of those things where we’re still pinching ourselves. It was a Christmas miracle.

PS: Is there anything from the script and I know that you originally had it as a pilot, but is there anything that didn’t make it to screen that you wish had?

RHETT: What you’ll find when you watch the DVD extras is that there were a fair amount of scenes there were in themselves entertaining, but that were cut for pacing reasons. One of the things people universally say about the movie is that it’s really paced well. It moves quickly. There’s no real lag. It’s an 82-minute movie. Something like that. It really goes by nicely in that sense. So, we can’t argue with any of the cuts, they all helped the pace, and yet we did lose some things that everybody genuinely liked. Things from Woody Harrelson taking a shower and using up all the water and getting the girls pissed off at him, to the girls leaving the guys behind one extra time in the desert and then going back for them. Things like that, that were fun and that were in the script at the time and that we all enjoyed when we shot them, but just seemed to, not slow the movie down, but just overall didn’t keep it quite as snappy, so they had to come out. But, again, all that stuff will be available on the DVD, so anyone who’s interested will be available to see it.

PS: That’ll be fun to see. One of the other things I love about the film was the rules, and I loved that they popped up on screen whenever one was heeded. How many rules did you write and what were some of the unseen ones?

RHETT: Originally, we just wrote the ones that were in the movie, but then Sony Marketing came to us and said, “You know what, we’d really like more rules. We’d really like to go out into the marketplace and on the Internet with some more fun rules. So, we wrote a lot more. We had a larger brainstorming document with all these possibilities. Things like, “Pack your stain stick,” and “Always bring another change of underwear,” and “Save the last bullet for yourself,” and “Don’t go down to the basement” and a lot of different, fun rules we wrote subsequent to the fact, but at the time we originally wrote the script, we just thought of four or five and figured it was a television show, so we’d have plenty of time to think of more as we moved forward.

PS: Will you both be recording a commentary for the DVD or have you already?

PAUL: Yeah, we just did actually. It was the five of us. It was myself, Rhett, Woody, Jessie and [director] Ruben [Fleischer]. We sat in a room on Saturday night of opening weekend, with a bottle of champagne and watched the movie.

RHETT:  You hear some very drunk people talking.

PS: That’s the way to do it, I’ll bet.

RHETT: We got much more honest, by the end of it.

PS: I know both of you essentially hailed from TV and “The Joe Schmo Show” specifically, which I have to tell you that I loved.

RHETT: Thank you.

PS: I’m so glad that the second season has finally come out on DVD. Do you know what was holding up that release?

PAUL: The DVD market has grown so tight over the last several years for a distribution company to push forward on it has been a much more difficult process. It had been shopped around. Rhett and I owned the rights for several years and had been looking desperately to get it out and even with the franchise and the title and rave reviews, it was a struggle and we were happy to find Mill Creek. It’s Mill Creek, right?

RHETT: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

PAUL: …to distribute it. We loved the second season. Season One was obviously very special to us, but Season Two, upon watching it again after many, many years of not having seen it, it  just *garbled*. We’re happy this year, with it becoming a matter of public record when the DVD came out. That was this summer.

PS: I haven’t had a chance to see it just yet, but I know that Bryce “The Stalker” carries the same name as me, so I’ve always been curious to see how that turned out. Season One was great. Especially, I will say, the canine feces.

RHETT: Oh, my gosh. At the end of “Joe Schmo,” when we premiered it for our crew, I got up on stage and said, “You know, we’ll all go on to bigger and better things – not better – but bigger things in the future, bigger paydays on bigger networks and things like that, but I think looking back we’ll say to ourselves ‘this is as good as it gets.’” And that’s exactly how we still feel. We don’t think in some way it’ll get as good for us as it was on “Joe Schmo” just in terms of that sheer rush and joy.

PS: I’m sure there are some aspiring writers reading this interview, or will be reading this interview and I will say that one of them is conducting it. I was just told that there were probably as many stories about breaking in as there are writers that are involved. I was wondering if you could tell me how each of you broke into this business.

RHETT: Sure. I started as a feature screenwriter a long time ago. I wrote six scripts before my first one got notice. So, that’s either a testament to my perseverance or my stupidity that I hung in that long. I do think that you need to think in those terms as a young writer, that often times you expect it to happen on your first script or your second script and I think the more realistic possibility is that it will take that many or even more to really break through, to become a better writer and to write something that’s saleable and catches people’s attention. I think that the key ultimately is to combine that great piece of material that you’re slowly building, as you build your library of scripts, with a contact base, because ultimately you’ll need to get the script to important people and the way you do that is only by referral, ultimately. So, you just need to start, as a young person to just start making contacts and get that into the hands of anyone and everyone who will read it, as I did. And that’s what happened. I wrote a script and there was a friend of mine at the time who knew a manager and one thing led to another and finally that script was in the right hands and it got me my big break. So, perseverance, contacts and really focusing on your material.

PAUL: And I came out of college and I studied political science and got into local news producing. I was a journalist for about ten years, here in Los Angeles, and found myself producing news that looked a whole lot like bad reality TV, as it seems to do here in Los Angeles, and made the transition into reality TV. I produced a couple of big network shows. I produced “Big Brother 2,” “I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here,” among them. Rhett and I having known each other for twenty plus years and having gone to high school, were sitting around one night and thought, “We should come up with a reality show ourselves.” This was on the forefront of the reality craze, back in the early 2000s. We figured a way to combine our skill sets, Rhett’s scripted and my non-scripted backgrounds and so we came up with “The Joe Schmo Show,” which was our first project that we tried to sell for nearly a year before we could get it off the ground. We were told “No,” three dozen times, with people loving the idea, but not willing to take the risk on such an expensive high-wire act and not willing to take a risk on us. We found in Spike TV a network that would, a network that was looking to break out and find something. So, “The Joe Schmo Show,” was essentially our first big break as a team, together. It was such a hoot to make and was such a huge success for Spike. So, we circled reality and this hybrid world for a couple of years and having done a sequel to “Joe Schmo” in “Joe Schmo 2” and “Invasion, Iowa,” which was on a grander scale. A hoax show with William Shatner at its center, where we went to a small town in Iowa and fooled them into thinking he was there to shoot a movie. Then, we tired of reality and decided to make the transition into traditionally scripted stuff, and knew that in breaking into the scripted world, even though we were in TV at the time, and having had great success in TV, the traditionally scripted folks looked down on the reality folks. There’s a pecking order. Feature is the premium. You got traditionally scripted TV as the 89 octane and reality is the regular 87 octane. So, we knew we needed to write Zombieland, which was our first foray into traditionally scripted stuff as a team, as a spec, which we did, and sold it to CBS. So, just persistence and not taking “No” for an answer and talent is what I would tell aspiring screenwriters.

PS: How does your writing partnership work?

RHETT: It’s really pretty simple. We break stories together. We’re in the room together. And when it comes down to actually write it, we split up and we divide up scenes and then we trade those scenes back and forth and re-write each other’s, so that our styles coalesce into one style. That’s basically it. It’s nothing more fancy than that.

PS: It sounds like it works and on screen it shows. I know you both have two projects lined up for the future. One is Earth vs. Moon and then the Venom spin-off.

RHETT: Yeah, we can talk about one, but not the other. Venom, we’re literally not allowed to say a word about, unfortunately. We’re veiled to secrecy, so as much as we would like to talk about it, we can’t. Earth vs. Moon, however, we can. It’s set up at Universal. Scott Stuber’s attached to produce it.

PAUL: It was an original idea we came up with the summer of last year. Is that right?

RHETT: Yeah, we pitched it the summer of last year.

PAUL: Got into a bidding war, amongst several studios who wanted to buy it, and Universal ended up with it. It’s a big sci-fi epic war movie, set 400 year into the future, about a civil war between the Earth and the Moon, with a fractured family on either side of that battle.

RHETT: It’s very big in scope and scale, and we think of it as a really big movie. A tent-pole, franchise kind of movie. We always envisioned Will Smith and Angelina Jolie in the two leads as we were writing it and we still think they would be awesome for it. So, if you’re listening Will and Angelina, you might want to track that script down. It’s that size a movie. It’s not a movie you’ll see unknowns in, probably. It’ll be a pretty big thing if it happens, which would be exciting.

PS: Hopefully Zombieland will kick that into high gear for you.

RHETT: Hopefully. Yeah.

PS: I want to thank you guys so much for participating. As the saying goes, “You never forget your first,” so thanks a lot for coming on.

Everyone that wants to check out “The Joe Schmo Show,” check out Season One here and Season Two here. Be sure to check out Zombieland in theaters now, then read our review of the film here.