Dogfighting In Space with "Earth Versus Moon"

We chatted with Zombieland writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who revealed a few spacey bits about their next project: An epic war movie between the Moon and Earth, titled Earth Versus Moon.

I'd love to hear more about Earth Versus Moon if that's possible.

Reese: Yeah we can talk about that a little but there are a few things that we need to keep secret. It's about a civil war between the Earth and a colony on the moon about 400 years into the future.

Wernick: It was originally conceived as a video game.

Reese: And we thought it would be easier trying to sell a movie over a video game because that was our job. So we changed it into a movie. We've personalized the movie by establishing a family and then splitting them up. Some of the family members have gone to the moon and the others are on the Earth. So they are a fractured family that finds themselves on opposite side of a civil war. It's big it's grand it's much more serious in tone than a Zombieland. It's much more like a Braveheart or a 300, movies like those. But it's also, as big a spectacle as it is, it's also a personal story. And that's important to us in any movie we approach. In Zombieland you can make a huge apocalyptic world, but to make people care about the characters you have to focus on the people and the small things.

So here's my question, where do they fight, on Earth on the Moon or in the space between in the big black space?

Reese : All over, you just named three places they fight.

So is it in space WWI dog fighting kind of plane versus plane style?

Reese: We've got ships, we've got ground combat, hand to hand combat everything you can imagine you name it, we've got it.

Was there some sort of crisis that made Earthlings move to the Moon?

Reese: That we can't talk about. It's definitely engaged our imaginations. It's a high concept title where the concept of the movie is embedded in the title so it will hook people. But it's also very complex and has depth. It's trying and about humanity and society and differences among people. We're trying to embed a message within a much larger entertaining movie.

Wernick: It's very grounded, we like to keep our characters real besides the fact that it's 400 years in the future, it's our world, a world you can imagine it becoming.

Are any directors looking at it right now?

Reese: We're not there yet, we're writing a second draft right but we'll be ready to go out to directors now.

Wernick: And then Will Smith.

Send an email to Meredith, the author of this post, at meredith@io9.com.

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