It’s no secret in Hollywood that Brad Pitt and Paramount’s World War Z has been a nightmare behind the scenes. A new expose details the trouble that went on between the star, the studio and the writers and why it’s being released this summer instead of last year.

Vanity Fair spoke with several key figures in the film’s production, including writer Damon Lindelof and Paramount executive Marc Evans, who knew the film was trouble the moment they saw the first cut.

Lindelof reveals that Pitt was very positive about the project, which is based on Max Brooks’ novel, but reveals that shooting began before the script was finished. That’s a problem that has doomed many films countless times in Hollywood history and it looks like World War Z didn’t reverse that.

“‘But when we started working on the script, a lot of that stuff had to fall away for the story to come together. We started shooting the thing before we locked down how it was going to end up, and it didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to,’” Lindelof remembers Pitt telling him. “The thing we really need right now is someone who is not burdened by all the history that this thing is inheriting, who can see what we’ve got and tell us how to get to where we need to get.”

Lindelof said that the ending Paramount execs saw last year was a mess. Executives told Vanity Fair’s Laura M. Holson that the film needed as much as 40 minutes reshot and that the production costs hit $200 million.

“It was literally insane,” Evans said about the production’s time in Malta. “Adam [Goodman, president of the Paramount Film Group] and I believed we’d gotten out of Malta good, and I found out we weren’t. That is a nightmare.”

Evans knew the moment the first screening ended that it was in trouble. “We were going to have long, significant discussions to fix this,” he thought after he first saw it.

Lindelof remembers that a new ending required them cutting an entire expensive battle scene in Russia. He said that they could either add new scenes to make the current ending work or just make an entirely new ending that would require up to 40 minutes of new material. “I was like, ‘To be honest with you, good luck selling that to Paramount,’” Lindelof told the magazine.

World War Z was first scheduled for December 2012. but it will not be released on June 12. Paramount’s last trailer came out in March.

image: Vanity Fair