Marc Forster is clearly keen to capitalise on the career bump he’ll receive when his Bond flick, Quantum Of Solace, demolishes the US box office this weekend.
For the German-born, Swiss-raised director has just signed on to call the shots on World War Z, the long-gestating adaptation of Max Brooks’ epic novel about a global zombie outbreak, and the human-led fightback that follows.
J. Michael Straczynski has been at work on the screenplay for a while, piecing together a structure and pulling together the disparate stories from a book that’s told entirely in flashback, with each chapter representing an interview given by survivors to the main character, a researcher for the UN.
Straczynski remains attached to the movie, which is being produced by Brad Pitt’s company, Plan B. There’s no word yet if World War Z is being developed as a vehicle for Pitt.
Forster, though, is keen to get cracking and already has a unique take on the material. "The genre always fascinated me, and when they pitched it to me, it reminded me of the paranoid conspiracy films of the '70s like All The President's Men,” he told Daily Variety.
Last week, Forster also lined up the action movie Die Bad, so we’re not sure which movie he’ll move onto next. But after a career of low-key character-based dramas, clearly Bond has given him a taste for something bigger.
For our part, Empire would love to see World War Z come to the big screen as it's simultaneously a fresh take on the zombie genre and also a compilation of the genre's greatest hits (favourite bits: the space station, and the Japanese sections, with the old blind guy), so we wouldn’t be entirely upset if Forster sent that to the top of his to-do list.