Sundance 2015: Peter Travers Talks to Cast of Z for Zachariah

The snow-covered streets of Park City, Utah, would hardly give a radioactive postapocalyptic landscape a run for its money. But when the stars of the hit Sundance film Z for Zachariah Chiwetel Ejiofor, Chris Pine and Margot Robbie show up to Off the Cuffs outdoor set to talk to Peter Travers about adapting the 1974 cult sci-fi novel, none of them can handle the cold. A toxic environment? No problem. A temperature below 30 degrees? Its time to move things inside.

Like the book, the film takes place in a ruined future in which exposure to the outside world without a hazmat suit results in a slow, painful death. Robbies character, however, lives on a farm located in an area thats blissfully unaffected by the fallout. After nursing Ejiofors sick engineer back to health, the couple start to form a romantic attachment. Everything is blissful until Pines mysterious stranger shows up causing a love triangle that disrupts everything.

After teasing Robbie for being a Sundance virgin, Travers grills the trio on how filming in a remote part of New Zealand affected the dynamic among the actors and why festival audiences have responded to the film. I think when youre looking at a situation [like this] and you see a character deliberating, you start to ask yourself, you kind of think, what would I do? The Rolling Stone film critic also finds out that Ejiofor and Pine hang out a bunch with each other which doesnt sit well with their left-out co-star.

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