"World War Z" director Marc Forster said the reported drama surrounding the production of the film was "overblown," as the film debuted to critical success, Deadline.com reported.
In Vanity Fair's June issue cover story, the magazine profiled Brad Pitt and chronicled the various hardships "World War Z" had to go through before eventually being released. Pitt and his production company, Plan B, produced the film with Forster at the helm.
The film was originally due out in December 2012, but was delayed six months for reshooting of the action-packed and expensive finale did not impress studio executives.
"I was in my own head for a minute," Paramount's Marc Evans told Vanity Fair. "It was, like, Wow. The ending of our movie doesn't work."
Paramount reportedly spent $20 million on the reshoot of the ending and hired Damon Lindeloff and Drew Goddard to rewrite the film's third act.
Forster told Deadline.com in a recent interview that the reconstructed ending was his vision all along.
"The original third act, with its big battle, was like every Hollywood movie," Forster said. "It's that big set piece, and it's all about bigger and louder than everything else that came before it... Damon and Drew wrote what became exactly the movie I had in my head."
Fans of Max Brooks' book of the same name off which the film is based know the written version is an oral history of a fictitious zombie apocalypse. The film follows the main character, Gerry Lane, as the events are unfolding.
Despite the supposed turmoil that surrounded the production, the film was released to positive reviews from lauded critics.
A.O. Scott of the New York Times wrote, "The large-scale, city-destroying sequences come early, leading toward a climax that is intimate, intricate and genuinely suspenseful."
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote, "'World War Z' is still as smart, shifty and scary as a starving zombie ready to chow down on you."
The Washington Post said the film was "anchored by a solid lead performance by Brad Pitt."
Pitt has publicly expressed his desire to turn this into an action franchise and has said he connected with Brooks' main idea as to how global societies would react to such an outbreak. It is not known if Forster will direct any sequels, should they come about, but he was pleased with his latest work.
"So few original things get made on this scale. This isn't a sequel, it isn't based on a superhero in a comic book. We saw it as an opportunity to take a genre and create something new and unique within it," Forster said in his Deadline.com interview. "That challenge excites me, but uniqueness always comes with criticism."
WATCH the trailer for "World War Z," opens today.