Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick met at Phoenix Country Day School in Arizona; Wernick would transfer to another high school but the two kept in touch.

Now, after a four-year journey in which it went from a possible TV show to a TV movie to a feature film, "Zombieland," for which they wrote the script, was tops at the box office last week. A hit with critics as well, there is already talk of a sequel. The two answered questions by phone this week.

Q: How did you decide to make a zombie movie? There have been so many.

Reese: We wanted to make a movie about people first and zombies second. To us, the crux of the movie was the relationship between Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) and Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), and the fact that they used very different survival strategies to get by. You mix those two diametrically opposed characters together and suddenly the sparks start to fly. Once we felt like we had the characters, the zombies were gravy. Then you had all the thrills and chills and spills that accompany every zombie movie.

Yeah, it's kind of scary in parts, but we were much more focused on making people laugh and making them care about these people and feel for them.

Q: There are lots of movie references.

Reese: We didn't really set out to do that. But I think when you really do love movies, it leaks through without you even realizing it.

Wernick: We borrowed a little bit from (Quentin) Tarantino. Tarantino is so huge into pop culture, as are we. What it does is it grounds the movie. It's what people talk about, references to movies, pop culture. It's conversations that happen every day at the grocery store and the dinner table. We feel like injecting that into the script isn't so much an homage to other movies as it is real life.