By Cara Nash & Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit they deserve. In this installment: Perth-born writer and director Zak Hilditch, who helmed These Final Hours, 1922, Rattlesnake and We Bury The Dead.
In our recent piece on Aussie Unsung Auteur Luke Sparke – the director of commercial-minded genre films like Occupation and Primitive War – we made mention of the handful of other similarly driven local filmmakers (Richard Gray, Patrick Hughes, John V. Soto, Steve Jaggi) in desperate need of greater recognition and celebration. Now we add to that list writer and director Zak Hilditch, whose latest work, the meditative but profoundly gripping post-apocalyptic thriller We Bury The Dead, hits cinemas this week.
Hilditch’s first major work came in 2013 with These Final Hours, a very different take on the apocalypse. Unspooling in the filmmaker’s hometown of Perth, the film opens with a sun-blasted world, which has already been partly wiped out by an asteroid. Perth’s on borrowed time, with a radio voice informing us that there’s an estimated twelve hours before the full force is felt down under. With the apocalypse looming, the world’s moral compass has been well and truly shattered, with streets ripped by murder, looting, violence, and insanity. Amidst the chaos, we meet James (Nathan Phillips), whose plan to lose himself in drugs and booze is derailed when he saves the life of Rose (Angourie Rice), a young girl searching desperately for her missing father.
“The film’s ultimately exploring a universal question – what would you do on your last day on earth?” Zak Hilditch told FilmInk upon the release of the film. “Everyone has their own movie, and this is just one story.” The initial seed for the screenplay was Hilditch’s love for apocalyptic films that stretch the genre and possess a soul. “I love good science fiction movies that make you feel and think. I love films like Twelve Monkeys and 28 Days Later. This is my attempt to make something like that, which tells a very personal story, but within a genre framework.”
While These Final Hours seemed to come from nowhere, that’s far from the case. Hilditch, who studied film at Western Australia’s Curtin University, spent years beforehand honing his craft on a fistful of shorts and a trio of micro-budget features (2005’s The Actress, 2007’s Plum Role, 2010’s The Toll). His efforts nabbed him the Young Filmmaker Of The Year Award at The WA Screen Awards in 2006, and it was around this time that he met producer, Liz Kearney, with the two friends spending years trying to get a number of funded films off the ground.
These Final Hours largely grew out of a response to having those scripts turned down. “The feedback that we got was that the films weren’t working, or that the target audience was unclear,” Kearney told FilmInk. “These Final Hours was written as a response to the feedback that we’d had. Looking back, we were definitely going in a different direction with These Final Hours. We tried to make a film that was a bit bold and different, and the type of film that we wanted to see.”
The breakthrough moment for the pair came when they were accepted into Screen Australia’s inaugural Springboard initiative in 2010, which both Hilditch and Kearney labelled “a game changer” in the development of These Final Hours. The programme provided filmmaking teams with the opportunity to develop and produce a fully funded short drama, which subsequently acts as a calling card for their feature project. The short that the pair helmed – and which would become the blueprint of sorts for These Final Hours – was Transmission, the story of a father attempting to teach his young daughter how to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.
“It was almost a process of working backwards,” Hilditch told FilmInk of the Springboard process. “You knew what ingredients you needed to put into a short as a calling card. I knew that it needed to have a science fiction backdrop, and I wanted it to be the apocalypse. I wanted to have a father daughter relationship, and I wanted to have a really hot looking film. Just being able to make Transmission as a test run was so beneficial, and it convinced us – in our minds anyway! – that we could pull off These Final Hours.”
The short film – sparse, smart, and packing an emotional punch – proved a winner on the festival circuit, picking up praise and accolades, as well as nabbing The AACTA Award in 2012 for Best Short Film. Despite their “fantastic calling card”, a Perth-shot apocalyptic thriller from first time filmmakers remained a tough sell, but Hilditch made it happen, and These Final Hours rated as a stark, visually audacious, and emotionally resonant slice of post-apocalyptica. “Being born and bred in Perth, this was my take on the apocalypse,” Hilditch told FilmInk in 2013. “This is how I truly believe that things would go down in those last twelve hours in Perth. It all came from a truthful place.”
Though These Final Hours was far from a huge box office success, the film was well-received by critics and an appreciative audience, while its wide-scale sense of ambition and artistic and narrative merits saw Hilditch score international representation and a solid path to making more films. The Perth-born director has since stuck with the dark, visionary style of These Final Hours, helming a fistful of impressive films that eschew bright, poppy filmmaking in favour of a bruising lack of compromise.
Hilditch’s first film after These Final Hours was 2017’s 1922, an impressively bleak and unrelenting adaptation of one of horror master Stephen King’s most nihilistic novellas. A darkly burnished piece of twisted backwoods Americana, the films stars Thomas Jane as a farmer who decides to murder his wife (Molly Parker) when she threatens to leave him and take their son with her. Hilditch effectively tapped all of the warped poetry inherent in the story. “I couldn’t let the images of the story escape me,” Hilditch told Horror News. “I was obsessed with it. I inquired if anyone had the rights and no one knew what the hell 1922 even was. So, I couldn’t believe I was able to just swoop in and gave it a crack with my first adaptation. It was perfect to have something that cinematic ready to adapt. Stephen King gave the script his blessing too.”
After the tight, taut, nasty little 2019 horror-thriller Rattlesnake (in which Carmen Ejogo’s single mother is forced to pay a heavy price after her daughter is saved from a rattlesnake bite by a mysterious woman), Hilditch now returns to the apocalypse with We Bury The Dead, in which an American physiotherapist (Daisy Ridley) arrives on the now-zombie-plagued island of Tasmania in search of her missing husband. “If you’re going to do a zombie film in the modern era, you better have something new to say,” Hilditch told Far Out Magazine. “You better make it unique somehow. I love movies that take risks and put you in a situation where you’re getting one thing and then, lo and behold, you’re not anymore. The theme of the film relates to unfinished business and grief, and as long as I was truthful to that, I was allowed a unique look at zombies that I’d never seen on screen before.”
As with all of his previous films, Unsung Auteur Zak Hilditch has indeed put his own distinctive spin on a well-trodden genre with We Bury The Dead, dosing it with the kind of dark-hued cinematic poetry that reverberates through his entire resume.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Luke Sparke, Cyrus Nowrasteh, Morgan Matthews, Tom Laughlin, Diane Keaton, Ed Hunt, Nancy Savoca, Robert Vincent O’Neil, Marvin J. Chomsky, Sam Firstenberg, Jack Sholder, Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
