Woody Harrelson & Jesse Eisenberg - Interview
Woody Harrelson & Jesse Eisenberg - Interview
From the set of Zombieland.
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Staci Layne Wilson reporting
Oddly enough, the zombies are more lively than the men on the set of Zombieland. I'm in Georgia on a warm day in a hollowed out ex-supermarket where, amongst the real and fake foodstuffs, actors are in a various states of heat punchiness and zombification.
Horror heroes Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg are so laid-back as to seem half-dead at times, while the psyched up "undead" are practically frothing at the mouth (for real) when the cameras start to roll.
In between shots, myself and a few of my colleagues caught up with the starring duo to ask a few questions… and now, months later after having seen the movie -- the amount of running these guys do throughout the film make the famous Flying Finns look like loafers -- I can certainly understand why they were so tired.
But not too tired to juggle chainsaws…
Q: So Woody, I must say: I have seen everything now. Were you really just juggling two chainsaws outside?
Woody Harrelson: Yeah. It comes from a voice-over that Jesse has after he meets me and he says to my character Tallahassee's in the ass-kicking business and then you see me with the chainsaws and I say, 'And business is good!' There's some great lines in this script.
Q: I imagine so. The writers are really funny. Is that what made you say yes to this project?
Woody: Yeah, I thought the script was phenomenal. And then I met Ruben [Fleischer, the director] and really liked him. I thought, 'This guy is a go-getter. He's really going to make a terrific movie.' and so far I'm really impressed with him.
Q: Have you always hoped and dreamed of starring in a zombie movie?
Woody: No, I never thought about it honestly until I saw and read the script.
Q: Woody, you and Jesse seem to have a real camaraderie going on here. I like what I've enjoyed what I've heard of the riffing between your characters…
Woody: Well, we generally try to warm up each other.
Jesse Eisenberg: Yeah, shout out the last line in the scene.
Woody: We drag this thing out. We'll have a 45-minute improv over…
Jesse: Regardless of we're on camera or not.
Woody: It's weird, but it's fun.
Q: You guys have a multitude of weapons, just from what I've seen here today. A baseball bat, a banjo, and what's it like carrying that badass shotgun around?
Jesse: Oh, it's good. They make me carry the real one. I want to carry the rubber one because it makes me look stronger. And there's four characters in the movie, and we all have names for our real guns and then for our rubber guns.
Woody: So yeah, his real gun is named Farmer.
Jesse: The Farmer.
Woody: The Farmer.
Jesse: The rubber gun is The Baker.
Woody: The Baker.
Jesse: What do you have?
Woody: That's too private.
Q: Jesse, how about you? Why did you want to do a zombie movie?
Jesse: The same as him. The characters are so well-defined and done in a multi-dimensional way, which is rare in a movie like this which is so fun and theatrical to have characters that are also really great and real.
Q: Well, let's be honest. It really is about fighting zombies, too!
Jesse: Again, I'm only really into the soliloquies and… I get somebody else to do the other stuff.
Woody: I just say personally it's very cathartic. Zombie killing.
Jesse: My mother was a zombie and so it also feels cathartic to finally get that stuff out.
Q: Jesse, you did a werewolf movie, too. In fact, we [Horror.com] talked to you at that junket — Cursed. So who's more evil? Werewolves or zombies?
Jesse: I guess we'll find out, if we survive or not. Yeah, no werewolves are much more aggressive but zombies come en-mass.
Woody: And they're persistent.
Jesse: Yeah, and they're persistent.
Q: You guys filmed for a few weeks at the amusement park, we heard. And I just realized, Jesse… Adventureland, this… amusement parks, what's going on?
Jesse: I have limited range.
Woody: The primary challenge of shooting in that amusement park, actually, was the cold.
Jesse: Yeah, it was freezing even though we were in South Georgia shooting, that amusement park it was strangely freezing.
Woody: They were saying like in 700 years it's never been that cold, so we were privileged to be there at that time, but it's kind of fun in that amusement park. It really was. It was odd to shoot because a lot of that is in the end of the movie, so it was weird shooting the end of the movie first…but in the end, it was kind of cool.
Jesse: All like the various plotlines that happened there are so creative. Like he's swinging from that thing with the chairs shooting zombies…that chair thing that flies around and swings in a circle. He's like shooting zombies hanging off of that thing, and I run through a haunted house and I don't know if the things are zombies or if they're the fake skeletons that are coming out. Everything was so creative and specific and funny, so they really utilized the park to their great advantage.
Q: Jesse, from what we've seen here today it definitely seems like you're letting Woody do more of the zombie killing. Is that true? Did you kind of hang back a little bit or do you eventually jump forward and try to do a little bit of it yourself?
Jesse: Yeah, I do towards the end as our arcs….but he's kind of like an older brother and maniac.
Woody: Thank you for saying that.
Jesse: Yeah.
Woody: I'm glad you didn't say father figure.
Jesse: Yeah, yeah. Like a step-brother wherein the father is so old that the step-brother can be so much older. Even older than a father naturally would be just based on the age gaps in America.
Woody: Almost like older than the grandfather.
Q: Where do your characters first meet?
Jesse: We all assume we're like the last kind of people on Earth because the world's been over-run by zombies so we kind of run into each other hitchhiking and he picks me up.
Q: We know that you have a number of rules or your character has a number of rules, we saw an animatic of the 4th one. Could you talk a little bit about what those rules are?
Jesse: Yeah, yeah they are. Like my character is obsessed with like sticking to the rules and if I do that I'll survive is his logic. So they're like very like specific and practical things like check the back seat when you get into a car because you never know if somebody's hiding in the back seat. Or wear your seatbelt because you're already stopping short and you'd go through the windshield or stretching because you have to…and the funniest one is cardio. Just do a lot of cardio because you're always running from the zombies.
Q: Can you talk a bit about your relationship with the girls in the film—the ladies? [Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin]
Jesse: It's good.
Woody: It's a little terse at first.
Jesse: Yeah, they're kind of like con-artists and… I forget what I was going to say….
Q: What were they conning in the post apocalyptic wasteland? What can you be conned out of that's valuable?
Jesse: Well, the limited resources that exist to [the living].
Woody: Yeah, they're not trusting so they don't want to trust us and they want to take what we've got, like our vehicle, our weapons.
And with that, it was time for the chainsaws to rev up, and the cameras to roll.
= = =
I saw the movie a couple of weeks ago, and it was not exactly as I'd envisioned it from what I saw on set, but I'm not allowed to elaborate just yet. Stay tuned for the review!
More on Zombieland:
- 47 Things About Zombieland - Part 1 of 2
- Zombieland - Screenwriters Interview
- Zombieland - Emma Stone Interview
- Zombieland - Ruben Fleischer Interview