STACK #136 Feb 2016

CINEMA FEATURE

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EXTREME PREJUDICE Director Burr Steers takes on the challenge of introducing the walking dead to the world of Jane Austen in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES . He tells Scott Hocking how he did it.

CINEMA

I t is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” declared Jane Austen in her 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice . It’s also a truth universally acknowledged that “a zombie in possession of brains, must be in want of more brains.” That’s the gist of Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies , which adds a liberal dose of the walking dead – and some martial arts mayhem – to the 19 th century polite society depicted in Austen’s literary classic. Whilst screen adaptations of Austen’s book have been plenty, the film version of Grahame- Smith’s parody rotted in development hell for a number of years, passing through a

Director Burr Steers.

revolving door of directors (including David O. Russell and Craig Gillespie) before rising from the grave and landing in the lap of Burr Steers. “It didn’t land with me so much as I hijacked it,” laughs Steers. “The screenplay had gone through a few incarnations and had lost its momentum, so I came in and rewrote it and

things started rolling and we were able to get it made.” It wasn’t so much the cheeky mash-up promised by the novel as the book’s

cover art that attracted Steers to the project.

“That portrait of a Regency lady with half her jaw ripped off was

FEBRUARY 2016

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