Zombieland Exclusive: Insider Spills Gory Details on Double-Barrelled Woody Harrelson and Zombieriffic Action Finale With 250 Rabid Zombies! (Part 1)

Zombieland Exclusive: Insider Spills Gory Details on Double-Barrelled Woody Harrelson and Zombieriffic Action Finale
With 250 Rabid Zombies! (Part 1)

Share on Facebook posted 09-28-09 by Julina Tatlock

If you’re squeamish about bodily fluids, Zombieland, the new zombie splatter comedy premiering on Friday isn’t for you. The movie swarms with rabid, spitting, vomiting, blood-oozing, foaming-at-the-mouth zombies that are so juiced up and desperate to feed that they can leap effortlessly atop cars, run faster than any human, and scale roller-coasters by the score. How do we know? We talked to Kim Winther, the first assistant director of Zombieland. Kim stands at the crucial nexus between the creative effect that the director wants to achieve and the tight time-is-money schedule the producers want to maintain. He knows exactly how long it takes to prep a zombie for its gruesome close-up (three hours) and the precise moment to swap out the real-children zombie princesses for the midget stunt-double zombie princesses. On Saturday, Kim gave 30 Ninjas Editor-in-Chief Julina Tatlock the blow-by-blow of hundreds of zombie executions, the inside scoop on why Woody Harrelson is a Natural Born Zombie Killer, and what happens when the McDonald’s counter guy becomes a flesh-eating member of the Undead.

Woody Burns Rubber, Mows Down Zombies

30 NINJAS: Tell me something that surprised you about Woody Harrelson on this shoot.

KIM WINTHER: What surprised me most about Woody was his car driving. He was a very good car driver, and he would always land on his mark without even really rehearsing. He would look at it, double back, and you would think that he’s really not got it nailed down — performance, car, gunshot, whatever — and he just hits it right on the mark every time. That’s what was surprising, just how good he was with lining up a shot and doing action, and right on the mark all the time. He’s very thorough before he does the shoot, with his gun, with his car driving.

30 NINJAS: He looks to me like an actor who improvises a lot. But it sounds like he’s also very specific and very technical at the same time.

KW: Yeah, he’s technical on the parameters of the camera; he makes sure that the camera knows what he’s gonna do, and then he gives himself room to improvise, and his improvisations are very good with the dialogue and with mannerisms. But when you get into the action stuff, he knows he can’t go too far because the camera wouldn’t pick it up, or there’d be a safety issue.

So Many Zombies to Kill, So Little Time

30 NINJAS: What was the most challenging action sequence to shoot in this movie?

KW: The most exciting and most challenging was the end sequence at the amusement park. One, it was [director] Ruben Fleischer’s first major movie, and we had to shoot the end of the movie and all the action stuff [before the rest of the film], and establishing the characters with the end first was the biggest challenge. We had to do that because that was the only time the park was available and the weather would work for us. So we had to set up a ten-day plan, with Ruben and a second unit. So we had maybe 250 zombies, and we had to shoot in sequence, and also the challenge was we were working with a young girl [Abigail Breslin], who could only work a few hours a night, and there was a ride she had to get trapped on. We had to find a way to choreograph that without hurting anybody, and obviously have the girls actually work on that ride, which was the Blast Off ride. The girls had to run, shoot blanks, shoot zombies, get in the Blast Off and take off, and then have the zombies climb up and try and eat them, and they would shoot them and they would have to fall off. We’d have zombies on wire gags, and they’d have to shoot them. We’d obviously have the stunt doubles do the actual ride a couple times and then have a small set piece on stage for the girls to run their dialogue. But what we didn’t realize was that the ride, even though it blasts off, it also comes back down on a timer, and you can’t really change that time too much. Once you push the button the ride is preprogrammed to do all of its cycles, and to do that and fire guns and have zombies climb up and have two young girls, particularly a minor, up there, was a challenge.

So we had to choreograph three different aspects of the sequence: One was obviously having the girls take the ride themselves; we understood it and shot that, and they were fine with it. Then we had to have them get up halfway and we locked off, put the Blast Off on manual, and the girls had to fire weapons from there, and they were great at doing that too, luckily. And then we had to do the next piece with doubles, where you have zombies flying off the rig, and that was challenging, and there’s a lot of it in the movie.

The second challenge was for George Aguilar, who was the second unit director shooting the Woody side of the chase. You had the two girls being chased by the zombies ending up at the Blast Off ride, and then you had Woody taking the other lion’s share of the zombies over to two other rides, where he had to hang himself from an airplane ride, fire automatic weapons and kill zombies, and then run over to a mini roller-coaster. And then he’d be shooting the zombies on the roller-coaster and they’d be falling as well — and these three big action sequences had to be shot in these two weeks and it was very challenging and rewarding. And when we sent the all the footage to the studio after the first two weeks they were extraordinarily happy and said, “Wow, we have a great thing going.”

Hundreds of Extras Sent to “Zombie School”: No Zombie Left Behind

KW: So we got off to a good start, and between Ruben, George and our planning and the help of Michael Bonvillain (our director of photography), who [had] a very clever way of lighting with balloons, we were able to move fast and shoot as much footage as possible. And then our last two days we decided to shoot as many zombies as we could — and I mean with guns — and we killed about 150 zombies in two hours. It was great! It was almost like watching the movie Zulu; it was wild, and we shot from dusk till dawn. And by the end of it all, Ruben sat down and said, “My God, we did it!” I’ve done that many times before, where you multitask, where you have three things going on at once at three different parts of the park, and they got so much footage that the ending is funny, it’s scary, and there’s a lot of action.

30 NINJAS: That last sequence you had, you said, 250 zombies?

KW: I think we made about 150 zombies in real [without CGI], and the other rewarding thing we did was zombie school, where we did a big old open call — three in a row — where we had had everyone videotaped and interpreting themselves as zombies. So you’d have a professor from a university show up and say, “Hi I’m Professor So-and-So” — just off the street — and the casting director would say, “Give us your interpretation of what you think a zombie should be.” We gave them specific guidelines, very similar to 28 Days Later, where they’re more like rabid dogs. They’re not slow-walking, Frankensteiny zombies; these are, you’re hungry, you’re thirsty, and you just want flesh and you’re almost rabid. And you have tremendous adrenaline, you can jump higher, run faster, ’cause you’re just totally juiced up to get what you need — very addicted, rabid movements. And some of these people just did amazing things. So we had almost 1,000 people come in and do their interpretation, and we picked the best. And then we’d give them zombie themes, like, “You once worked at McDonald’s, you were once the car wash guy, you worked as a baker,” so they even had a personality, which was great. And they had their own interpretations. I mean, we have some tapes that are some of the funniest I have ever seen in my life, of people playing zombies. It’s hilarious, [and I don’t mean that] in an evil way; it’s just that you see that the quiet ones are the wildest ones, and there were a couple of zombies that would actually be spitting, and throwing up, and crawling on the floor and jumping up on the table — I mean, it’s just some wild stuff. One guy actually jumped right out of frame and almost hurt himself. And then we had this guy from Atlanta who gave them zombie school lessons and just gave them the mannerisms that they would inherit, so it was a lot of fun.

The Rule of Double-Tap: You Always Gotta Shoot the Zombies Twice

30 NINJAS: So there were certain rules, essentially. Once they had interpreted their own zombies, you came up with movement rules or character rules, trying to have each one have an individual character at the same time, so that there was nuance and difference between them.

KW: Right, exactly. And that was the fun of it all. And then you have, for Woody’s character, he being sort of the zombie slayer, he could assess the enemy very quickly, and he’d decide what device to use. So, for instance, we had the overweight zombie in the grocery store, and it was hilarious, so we were able to have fun with that.

30 NINJAS: Can you kill a zombie any old way? Can you just bust a cap in a zombie’s ass or are there particular ways you have to go about it?

KW: No, it’s pretty loose. I mean, what you have to do with a zombie is shoot it twice; it’s the rule of double-tap. You can kill it once, but it’s still gonna be alive, so you’ve gotta kill it again. So like this one guy gets shot in the chest, and the police officer thinks he’s done, but he’s still alive and he bites, or rips out, her Achilles tendon, and now she’s done. So that’s the double-tap rule. No matter what you’ve done, you’ve always gotta hit them twice.

And for the zombies themselves, they all had contact lenses on; it’s this rapid eye movement, twitching, salivating, and they’re moving very quickly. And then growling and grunting and spitting up stuff — we always put drool in the zombies; it’s almost like a rabid dog, a lot of saliva. It’s just pure animalistic instincts that you have to deal with. And, you know, you live as long as you feed, which is cool.