We recently were granted the incredible opportunity to speak to writers of the film Life – Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick. Rhett and Paul are the hottest duo in Hollywood right now, with hits such as Zombieland and Deadpool under their belts and with upcoming projects: Zombieland 2 and Deadpool 2, it should come to no surprise that the sci-fi thriller, Life turned out so well. In our interview, we discuss the film and scrape the surface of Zombieland and Deadpool 2. This interview contains devastating spoilers for the film Life, so please keep that in mind before reading on. Enjoy!

Interview With Writers Paul Wernick & Rhett Reese.

 

Both: Hey Ryan!

Ryan T. Cusick: Hey guys, how’s it goin?

Both: Good, how are you?

RTC: I’m good, good. Thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Rhett Reese: Thanks for taking the time, Our pleasure.

RTC: I just want to tell you first and foremost this movie was brilliant, I absolutely loved it.

Both: Thank you.

RTC: I think for me, it was the fact that it had that constant feeling of tension and it felt very real, and we could see Earth most of the time made it feel very real because we were not in deep space.

Rhett Reese: Yeah that was kind of the mandate of what makes it feel like this could happen today on the International Space Station which actually exists, you can go out and look at the sky and see, that was the plan from the beginning, and I hope that it paid off.

RTC: Oh yeah, it most definitely did, and I thought that was the selling point, that and Calvin. Calvin was crazy, just the fact that it felt so real and it was so sophisticated it was one of the main characters.

Paul Wernick: Yeah, you know were inspired by Alien and that was a great movie. You know it was a sentimental movie of our childhood and yet it is a 38-40-year-old movie. We really wanted to make our generations Alien where it was not many generations into the future it was today, rovers on Mars probing for soil samples as we speak here today, this makes it even scarier than science fiction because this is science faction and it makes it all the scarier.

RTC: Most definitely. It was very terrifying, for me if Calvin did make it to Earth it really made me think of what would or could happen, and obviously, it did make it to Earth at the end.

RR: We have always pictured a sequel being possible, just trying to contain the thing could play out on a much larger scale on Earth, so that would be very interesting to us if we could find the audience.

RTC: I know that after people see this, I feel that you guys will have an audience for something like that. When you guys were writing this film, did you reach to any biologists or anyone outside of the production team to help with your research?

PW: Research when writing it was mainly a lot of internet research, there were a lot of NASA and astronauts on board the ISS, they had Twitter feeds and such basically a chronicle of life on the ISS and what that would be like. We did do our fair share of research on that. Once we finished the script and got it into the hands of astrophysicists and microbiologists, that is when we really got into the nitty gritty of how this creature would function, what it would be made up of and so forth. We started moving forward with real specialists once we had 115 pages written.

RTC: That is great. It feels like there is so much more behind this and so much backing to this story, more so than just a simple idea, with the relevance. Like I said, it really felt so real.

RR: We wanted to make it feel like these were smart professional people who had both the best interest for both the station and Earth in mind that were trying to do the right thing and were making smart decisions, but things just kept spiraling out of control. One problem led to the next, led to the next. What we didn’t want to do is fall for some of those Hollywood tropes where there is one bad guy on board who is trying to smuggle things down to Earth to make it a weapon, that feels very written. With this, we wanted to feel as if these were real astronauts that we were watching.

PW: The only villain in the piece is Calvin, again there is not one of the astronauts on board who is sabatoshing the efforts of the other astronauts. Calvin is our villain, and we really wanted to run with that idea because that is what would happen, these are well trained, intelligent, you know the best of the world, and so we wanted to portray that on screen.

RTC: You guys definitely captured that and when writing Calvin how close did production get to your portrayal with how you wrote it?

RR: Yeah, it is tough because you can only communicate something so much of something that is visual on a page. Calvin does not look in the movie how I pictured him looking in my head. There is only so much you can communicate with regards to what he looks like on the page, and then you bring in a team, you bring in a creature designer, you bring in director, and you build it in a computer with the effects people. It does look different from what you had envisioned, not better, not worse, just different. Even Paul and I have a different vision in our head for what Calvin would look like.

RTC: Do the two of you have any creative differences with each other? What is the writing process for the two of you?

PW: Absolutely we do have creative differences

RR: [Jokingly] No We don’t!

Both: [Laugh]

PW: We have been partners 17+ years, we have known each other since High School in Phoenix, so we have tremendous respect and love for one another, and I think how we resolve those creative differences is we have a rule which is, “whoever cares the most wins, whoever is most passionate about the idea wins.” 9 times out of 10 we are one pipeline, we like to finish each others….

RR: [Jokingly] Sentences.

RTC: [Laughs]

PW: ..it really is a pretty magical partnership.

RTC: It shows in all of your films that you have done, they have all been absolutely stunning, it really does show that relationship that you have together.

RR: Thank you so much.

RTC: When you guys met in high school, is this what you knew that you wanted to do? How did that start?

PW: No. I graduated high school, and I got into local news producing around the country. Rhett came to Los Angeles as a screenwriter for mostly kid stuff for many years. I jumped from news to reality TV, and I got Rhett booked on a reality TV show I was working on called Big Brother. We were sitting around one day, and we said, “you know we should come up with our a reality show, ” and we came up with the Joe Schmo show which, I don’t know if you saw, but it is a combination of the scripted and non-scripted element. That was our first collaboration, and that was in 2000ish, 2001. We were both in LA at the time, and one thing led to another, we jumped from reality into TV, more scripted stuff and then Zombieland came about, and it has been blue sky’s ever since.

RTC: That is really awesome! Speaking of Zombieland, are you in the process of writing the sequel right now?

RR: We are, yeah. We have a script now that everyone is happy with, and we are hoping the budget numbers come together that the studios want, so that is what is happening right now, it is being budgeted, and they are looking at actors deals and things like that. So we really do hope that it comes together and there is a very good chance that it will.

RTC: That’s great. That is really the buzz right now, is Zombieland 2 and it has been like that for quite some time. I know that you guys are also doing the Deadpool sequel, is there anything else that you are currently working or going to be working on in the future?

PW: Deadpool is our primary focus right now, it has been our focus for the last 18 months or so. We are in pre-production right now, and we will shoot the movie in a couple of months, and then we will be on set every day up in Vancouver, it is going to be our life for the next year and a half, almost exclusively.

RTC: Are you guys pretty much on set every day?

PW: Yeah we are. On Deadpool for sure, we were on set for the first one every day and will be for the second one, and that’s the testament to Ryan and our director David Leitch and just being collaborative, embracing us as creative voices that are not threatening, simply just trying to make the movie as good as we can.

RTC: I am sure that it will be, no doubt about that. Back to Life, with Ryan Reynolds did you guys receive any Flack for killing him off so quickly?

RR: [Laughs} We may have a lot of woman getting pretty pissed over that, but I do think that people who go into horror movies tend to expect people to get knocked off, the question is just when? Hopefully, that is something that just comes with the territory.

PW: That is another thing that is like to have Ryan be the first to die felt like a really bold choice much like the ending of the movie where Calvin comes down on Earth. As predictable as movies can be, we wanted to keep the audience on the edge of their seat. The idea of one of the biggest movie stars in the world is the first to die, felt to us like we are setting the tone that anything can happen in this movie and that to us is thrilling to take the audience on that ride.

RTC: I definitely agree, and it was a bold move for that at for the ending, but I think that it was needed, for me the payoff was great.

RR: You are a pretty big horror fan I assume.

RTC: Yes, yes.

RR: How do you think this is going to fit into the horror landscape. We are curious because horror is rarely done at this budget level. Does it feel like it is kind of classic horror? Different somehow? I don’t know. I am just curious because we do watch some horror movies but we are not the biggest horror fans on Earth.

RTC: You know I am not a big Sci-Fi, so I was kind of worried going into it. For me it felt straight out like a horror film, it was terrifying. Almost in a way it kind of had that slasher feel to it, just because you had your villain knocking everyone off. I think it will appeal to the science fiction community and to the horror community for sure.

RR: Hopefully, yeah because we have not talked to a lot of real horror aficionado people that don’t come from a sci-fi world but come more from a horror world.

RTC: It was great, and I am going to see it again. Going back to what you were saying about films being predictable, my wife is a good one for trying to figure out a film, and I told her, “Good luck with this one because I know that you are not going to get it.” Let see if she is going to figure out the ending.

RTC: Well, that is all I have for today.

RR: Thank you, Ryan, so very much.

PW: Thanks, Ryan.

RTC: Take Care and just keep doing what you are doing. You guys are the hottest thing out there right now. Keep doing it; we love you guys.

Both: Thank you.

 

 

-About The Author-

Ryan T. Cusick is a writer for ihorror.com and very much enjoys conversation and writing about anything within the horror genre. Horror first sparked his interest after watching the original, The Amityville Horror when he was the tender age of three. Ryan lives in California with his wife and Eleven-year-old daughter, who is also expressing interest in the horror genre. Ryan recently received his Master’s Degree in Psychology and has aspirations to write a novel. Ryan can be followed on Twitter @Nytmare112

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