By Cara Nash
With numerous filmmakers trying and failing to bring Pride And Prejudice And Zombies to the screen over several years, how did Burr Steers’ take finally get the project greenlit? “I made it a musical. You did know that right?” the director says on the line from LA, sounding slightly exasperated over yet another journalist who hasn’t done their research. FilmInk can’t tell whether Steers is serious. But given we’re talking about a film that reimagines the drama of Jane Austen in a world swarming with zombies, adding a few musical numbers to the mix doesn’t sound too far-fetched. We start to apologise. “Yes, well I always knew it had to be a musical with fabulous hats…I’m kidding!” he laughs, though it’s more of a dry chuckle than a belly laugh.
So it’s not a musical. So back to the question. What made Steers’ version unique? “I approached the title literally: Pride And Prejudice And Zombies. There was this alternate world where this zombie plague had hit and everything was altered in Regency England specifically because of the plague. Then I just inserted Pride And Prejudice straight into this alternate world. I went back to Jane Austen and used more of her material. I was conscious of thematically getting back to her. My mantra was to play the story straight. The big wink to this was that there was no wink.”
An adaptation of Seth Graeme-Smith’s smash hit graphic novel of 2009, Pride And Prejudice And Zombies provides the now ubiquitous undead with a killer new setting in which to wreak havoc: a suffocating society of courtship rituals and manners. “I thought what better place to have these agents of complete chaos than in this incredibly repressed society?” Steers says. “The other thing that made it seem possible was that structurally in all of Jane Austen’s books, you have the Napoleonic Wars going on and they’re never explained. They just are. You just have some handsome English officer riding out on his black horse and removing that and inserting a zombie plague actually worked from a structure standpoint.”
Seeing the potential in this world was a host of top-tier actors including Matt Smith, Sam Riley, Lena Headey and Australia’s own Bella Heathcote, but it’s Lily James who tackles the iconic character of Elizabeth Bennet. It’s a smartly subversive piece of casting given James is best known for her roles in the period drama series Downton Abbey and her wholesome lead turn in Cinderella. “She’s a badass in both her wit and fighting ability,” Steers says of his heroine. “Lily had the acting chops to get through the Austen dialogue while being athletic and capable of physically smashing the undead. I don’t think they teach kung-fu in drama school but she had it.”
As for the zombies, how has Steers distinguished his undead? “I was really influenced by the novel I Am Legend,” the filmmaker says. “The zombies have evolved and are thinking of themselves as a competitive race at this point, and they can pass amongst the living now.” Was Steers anxious about directing his first action film of sorts? “Going in, I had trepidation about it, but ultimately you approach it with the same process of what’s the scene about, and then the style comes out of the process.”
Still, Steers seems like a slightly surprising choice to be directing this clash of genres given his body of work. He got his start as an actor with small parts in Pulp Fiction and The Last Days Of Disco before writing and directing his first feature and a cult favourite in Igby Goes Down, an autobiographical coming of age tale set in the privileged world of New York’s rich and unhappy. “Igby was something I needed to write. It was just coming out of me,” the filmmaker says. “When you write a script, and it’s that personal and clear, and you’ve put everything of yourself into it and in some ways you’ve directed it on the page, the idea of handing it to someone else isn’t appealing. I had previously worked as an actor and screenwriter so [directing] was all part of the same thing to me.”
While the 2002 film starring Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum and Kieran Culkin proved a critical hit, Steers didn’t direct another film until 2009 when he helmed the comedy 17 Again with Zac Efron. He collaborated again with Efron on 2010’s supernatural drama Charlie St. Cloud, another surprising offering from this eccentric filmmaker. “There was a passion project after Igby that was close to getting made but fell apart at the last second,” Steers says. “The thing is you know as a writer and director, if you’re not manically pushing your project, it’s not going to get made. But after four or five years, you’ve also just got to make a movie and I reached that point and made 17 Again. It wasn’t from a lack of trying to get other things made. I forget the exact line, but someone once said, ‘Judge me by the scripts I did not get to make, not the scripts you see.’”
Pride And Prejudice And Zombies is released in cinemas on February 25.
