INTERVIEWS

Life After Beth: Our Wild Fascination with Zombies

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By Shanee Edwards.

Jeff Baena

Jeff Baena

Life After Beth isn’t just a zombie comedy. It actually plays out as a powerful metaphor for grief and loss that’s somehow unexpectedly moving. We sat down with writer/director Jeff Baena (I Heart Huckabees) to find out what it’s like to direct his girlfriend, Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Rec) and why zombies are so darn crazy about smooth jazz.

Jeff Baena, a graduate of NYU film school, co-wrote the 2004 indie hit I Heart Huckabees with David O’Russell but stands alone with the new horror-comedy, Life After Beth. The film is about what happens when a young woman, Beth, returns from the dead and is embraced by her family and boyfriend, Zach (Dane Dehaan), despite her violent mood swings and rotting flesh.

It turns out Baena’s screenplay had its own zombie resurrection. He wrote the script 13 years ago, tried to get it set up but ultimately couldn’t get the film off the ground. But it was actually Plaza’s agent who mentioned it to the actress, having read it previously for his other client, Joseph Gordon Levitt, who was originally attached.

“Aubrey mentioned it to me and it all clicked. I was like, oh, my God! It has to be you! I can’t believe I didn’t think of that! It’s almost as if I wrote it for her, but it was written eight years before I met her,” said Baena.

We asked Baena if he rewrote the script to customize the character of Beth for  Plaza, but he said, “No. I made a couple of tweaks, had to cut out a couple of scenes because we couldn’t afford to do them, but that was it.”

Aubrey Plaza as Beth, with Dane DeHaan as Zach

Aubrey Plaza as Beth, with Dane DeHaan as Zach

When we asked what it was like to direct his girlfriend, Baena said, “It was easy. She’s an incredible actress, so talented and professional that if anything, it was helpful knowing her and having that shorthand to be able to communicate. We already had that trust so we didn’t need to build it up from scratch. It was a lot easier to articulate thoughts and ideas. I also knew her on such a deep level, it was easy to motivate her and help her find places inside of her that I knew were there.”

In the film, Beth and the other zombie characters are immediately calmed when they hear smooth jazz. As funny as it is in the movie, it wasn’t a random choice made by Baena.

“I read an article about how smooth jazz is really beneficial to your health and it boosts your immune system on a deeply unconscious level. Even if you hate the music and you think it sucks, it’s still working wonders for your body. I thought that was pretty funny because I personally don’t like smooth jazz. I think since it’s working on such a basic human level I could see how zombies could connect to smooth jazz as their brains are deteriorating, almost barely functioning.”

In a traditional horror film, the audience expects a certain amount of camp. But after the success of 2013’s Warm Bodies, horror-comedy has become a legitimate genre. We asked Baena why he thinks “zom-coms” are growing in popularity.

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“I think horror films lend themselves to comedy because there’s such heightened emotions. The situations are so absurd that if you ever stop for a second and look at what’s happening, it’s hard not to take it with a grain of salt and kind of laugh at it. It’s the level of absurdity, the panic and manic energy it’s so easy to cross that line and go to comedy.”

Of course, we wanted to know Baena’s theory on why Americans love zombies. His answer may surprise you. “The reason why we like horror films in general is that they reenact our birth trauma as a catharsis. When you’re first born, it’s terrifying. There’s blood and viscera, screaming, agony and that we’re deeply imprinted by that experience considering that’s our first experience in life. By revisiting it in horror films, we’re able to sublimate it. I don’t know if that’s true, but I read about that. So we have an innate ability to seek out these things that are horrifying because it satisfies that void that’s inside of us because of being born. We’re drawn to monsters because they also exploit that. Obviously, human beings are the scariest monsters because they’re us. Zombies are even more scary because they are us but also simultaneously not us, they straddle that line between life and death, which is something that most people are fixated on.”

We asked Baena how he knows when a script is finished. “When someone tells you. You can keep working on it forever, but at some point, if it’s meant to be made, someone’s going to have to take the computer away from you. Most writers, if left to their own device, would just keep working on it and never feel that it’s ready.” But for Baena, he said the process never ends. “If it was up to me, I’d be editing this movie right now. I would have kept writing it, kept shooting it forever until I got everything perfect. I guess it’s a function of money and time, that’s what stops you.”

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The inspiration for Life After Beth first started with the idea for the scene where Zach sees Beth alive through the window at her house, after attending her funeral. “That incident was the impetus for the rest of the movie. I built it out from there, backwards and forwards. That tension and hesitation between explanation, between being something marvellous or being something uncanny, I wanted to maintain that hesitation as long as possible. I built a story around it and also thought about how I would amplify the protagonist’s emotions.” He said that instead of focusing on the physical gore, “I wanted to explore the emotional carnage that one would go through in a situation like this.”

Life After Beth opened in theaters on Friday, August 15. 

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Screenwriter Shanee Edwards lives in Los Angeles, where she is also the film critic for <a href="http://www.sheknows.com/authors/shanee-edwards/articles"><i>SheKnows.com</i></a>. You can follow her <a href="https://twitter.com/ShaneeEdwards">@ShaneeEdwards</a>.

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