The UK cover of Warm Bodies
Despite being stupendously busy, and with Christmas on the way, Isaac took some time to answer a few questions I’d put to him, about zombies, vampires, and his year in general…
With the release of Warm Bodies, and the subsequent movie adaptation, it seems as though 2011 must have been like some sort of Wizard of Oz style whirlwind for you. How’s it been?
That describes it pretty well. Hanging out on set for a week in Montreal and getting to know all the cast and crew while watching my daydreams come to life was definitely the height of surreality, culminating in the moment at the wrap party when they showed a blooper reel and the room was full of laughter and camaraderie are based around this story I wrote… I’ll treasure that experience for the rest of my life.
2011 seems to have been a year in which we’ve been besieged by vampires. Would that be a topic you’d take on for a future novel? If anyone could give us a new take on vampires, then I’d put money on you being able to do it!
Haha, not a chance. Zombies were the trend that arose after vampires were played out, and now even zombies are played out. Vampires have already had every conceivable story told about them. They’ll need to cool off for at least a decade before anybody can innovate with them. But regardless, I’m done with monsters. Warm Bodies was a one-off thing; I don’t normally write about pop culture stuff like that and my next several books are going to be a lot harder to pigeon-hole.
One of the things I most like about Warm Bodies is that it takes a mindset we’re familiar with, and turns up upside down, and the delight in unexpectedly hearing the zombie narrative is something that certainly sets this story aside from others in this genre. What made you decide to make R the protagonist?
Having him as the protagonist is the only thing that makes this story remotely interesting to me. If Julie was the protagonist, it would just be another story about a girl falling for a dangerous dude. And if R’s slowly developing personality wasn’t the focus, it would just be another assembly-line zombie apocalypse story, which I have no interest in.
In the book, R is surprisingly eloquent in his internal dialogue. Were you worried how this would translate into a film?
In the film this is expressed with voiceover narration. They tone down the eloquence a bit, which is good; eloquent prose dialogue always sounds wooden when translated to film. But you still understand that he has a definite intelligence trapped behind his monosyllabic mumbles.
Your short stories often have first person narratives from unexpected sources (a t-rex, a pixel on a screen). What attracts you to this style of writing?
I guess I’m just fascinated with putting myself into extremely foreign perspectives and imagining what these people or things would think about if they could think. I’m continually surprised by what comes out of these experiments. Imagining the world from the perspectives of creatures or objects that we take for granted provides some unexpected opportunities to comment on the world from a fresh angle.
Isaac Marion
I don’t really have any singular literary heroes. I rarely read more than one or two books by the same author; there are too many out there to discover, so I’m usually eager to move on. A few books that really inspired me recently: Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” Ron Currie Jr’s “Everything Matters!” Paul Harding’s “Tinkers,” David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas.”
What are you most looking forward to in 2012?
I would have to have a pretty amazing life for anything to top the release of the Warm Bodies movie in August.
Warm Bodies is available on paperback, and the film is scheduled for release in August 2012.
You can follow Isaac Marion (@isaacinspace) on twitter, and read some of his short stories here.
