by Dov Kornits
Writer/director Zak Hilditch (These Final Hours, 1922, Rattlesnake) puts his own very distinctive spin on the oft-trod zombie genre with his compelling Tasmania-set horror-thriller We Bury the Dead, a poetic treatise on grief and loss headlined by Star Wars breakout Daisy Ridley.
“I’ve got some construction going on inside the house,” Zak Hilditch says on the line from his home in Perth. “I’ve had to come out the back in 36 degree heat and hopefully you don’t hear too much jackhammering going on. That jackhammering is usually my kids actually, but I have an actual jackhammer in the house today.”
Zak Hilditch’s apocalyptic-sounding home situation is strangely appropriate given the nature of his new film, We Bury the Dead. Like the filmmaker’s first major release feature film, These Final Hours (2013), it’s an end-of-times genre piece. But whereas that finely realised first film envisioned a Western Australia awaiting contact with a world-ending asteroid, Hilditch’s latest sees our demise coming through the detonation of a weapon of mass destruction on Tasmania, followed by a potential zombie outbreak.
Virtually destroyed and awash with the dead and some undead, the Apple Isle is a wasteland. Into this violent, desperate environment arrive body disposal volunteers and army troops, including American Ava Newman (Daisy Ridley), who has her own very personal reasons for being there. Ava’s husband Mitch (Matt Whelan) was staying in a Tasmanian resort when disaster struck, and she’s using the grim task of disposing of bodies as a means to ascertain his fate. When Ava teams up with the enigmatic Clay (Brenton Thwaites), the duo eventually abandon their respective posts and head off into the shattered, post-apocalyptic landscape of Tasmania, unsure of what awaits them…and whether Ava’s husband may now indeed be one of the undead…
We start by asking Zak Hilditch about the spark that gave life to We Bury the Dead? “The whole thing goes back to 2019. I was living in Los Angeles just before COVID. Just a year prior, I’d dealt with the death of my mum. It was my job to go through the family home. I was going room to room making discoveries. I actually found the whole thing of going back to my childhood home and being thrust into that in such a terrible way, very cathartic. I thought there was something to explore about that. It’s an exploration of grief. When it comes to grief, there’s nobody there to guide you through it. There is no rule book, and you’ve got to figure out your own way to do it. I never in a million years thought that would translate into a Daisy Ridley zombie movie, but I started chipping away at this idea of grief just to protect myself from the process. I’m not a very interesting guy, so I had to create an exciting character. I love genre films, and arthouse cinema too, so that came into it as well.”
So, you created the character of Ava, played of course in the film by Daisy Ridley from the Star Wars movies…
“Ava is dealing with her own grief. It’s maybe 15 degrees removed from my own, but we’re still going through grief. She was a way for me to have a protective blanket to start delving into this idea of grief. Ava has to find a way to push through it on her own. Bit by bit, I created this event that had caused such mayhem. Then came the idea to set it in Tasmania, and to make it a stranger-in-a-strange-land story…I love those kinds of movies. There’s also the element of an ordinary person dealing with an extraordinary situation. All those ingredients were thrown into the bowl in the very first draft. I had this woman whose husband happened to be in Tasmania when this thing happened and off she goes, not realising what she’s getting herself embroiled in. It all started from a very personal situation, but it’s very much a bigger film. It’s a bigger idea, but one that’s probably the most personal film I’ve made.”
What’s with Tasmania? Did anyone get the shits with you doing that? You didn’t even shoot there, right?
“If Tasmania got the shits, it was probably because we didn’t actually shoot there. It’s very hard to go there and make a film. I wanted to shoot Tassie for Tassie, but we just couldn’t do it. It was always just a bridge too far, five hours directly south at the bottom of the continent. We shot in Western Australia. Whenever I talk to someone from Tassie who has just seen the film, they say that they wouldn’t have had a clue. We did everything possible to make it look like the real thing.”
Tasmania just worked for the story?
“Tasmania is an island with a population of half a million. It just made so much sense. It’s a cataclysmic event, but one that I think people can get their heads around. I didn’t want it to go into the millions and millions and millions, but I also needed it to be a spot on a map where barely anyone really knows outside of Australia what Tasmania even is. It just made so much sense visually and narratively, and I’m glad we were able to pull that off.”
This looks like your biggest budget to date. You’ve used a fair bit of CGI…
“A huge bulk of this is in camera too. I’ve got an amazing editor who owns his own VFX company here in Perth. His name’s Merlin Eden…that’s his real name. He’s got a company called Siamese. I’ve worked with him a bunch. It’s great having your editor be your head of VFX as well. You’re basically cutting the film, but also getting to work on shots, all in the same building with such a great team. They went above and beyond with the VFX in this film. We were trying to make a big multiplex film, but we essentially made it on the smell of an oily rag when it comes to multiplex movies. So I needed to surround myself with people like Merlin and his team. They cared about the film as much as I did.”
Could you see the parallels between this and your first film, These Final Hours, which is also post-apocalyptic in nature…
“Oh, 100%. This is the first Australian film I’ve made since These Final Hours, and I really see this as the spiritual successor to that movie in many ways. It’s got the same tone, and it’s got the same vibe. It’s more polished … ten years on. You would hope that my abilities as a filmmaker have gotten better! We definitely had more money, not a crazy amount, but we did have more money. These Final Hours was such a learning curve for me. At the time, it was my most personal film. It was about saying goodbye to your carefree twenties and moving into your more adult thirties. This one is obviously much more personal than that film was, but it’s great to be able to tell stories that are identifying me at a certain point in my life and looking back at that. These Final Hours is like a time capsule of me back then. This is an exploration of grief and how you now start having people in your life start to die, which sucks. It’s been very special being able to make both those films. I want to make movies here in WA as long as I can. We’ve got a studio opening, and this is where I want to be. We have so much to offer here.”
Was it complicated to come up with the mythology around the zombies?
“In the very first drafts, there weren’t even zombies. The film was working, but there was just an element missing. And one day I sat there and I thought, ‘What would happen if some of these people actually came back? Should I do a draft where I just start playing with that idea?’ I only wanted to do it if it was adding something new to the canon, but also if it was reinforcing the whole theme of grief and unfinished business. Once that clicked, I was just off to the races. It was only then that people started really giving a shit and taking note of the script. I’m just really thankful that idea came to me, and I was able to pinpoint what was missing. It added stakes and tension, and allowed me to triple down on that theme in a way that I didn’t expect. I also never expected to ever make a zombie movie. And again, if you want to do a zombie movie in the modern area, you better have something new to say.”
How did you get this going? It’s an Australian movie, but it’s a multiplex movie, which we don’t do a lot of here…
“This was done the old fashioned way, with private money … soft money from Australia. It was the tax incentives, the whole thing. And I’ve just got amazing producers. It was my first time working with Kelvin Munro, and with Grant Sputore here in Perth. Grant’s also a director. He is off doing Godzilla x Kong: Supernova at the moment, so that’s kind of wild. There was money coming in from all different pockets of the world but ultimately, we got just enough together to make it happen. Daisy’s involvement played a major part in everything too.”
You’re always involved in the writing of your projects. Is that always the case?
“It just so happens that the ones that have gotten up are the ones that I’ve written. I’ve written outside of genre, even though all of my completed films have been genre movies. There are other people’s scripts that I’ve worked on for years and then they just haven’t gotten over the line. I’d love for the ‘golden script’ to land in my lap that is so me without me ever having to do the hardest part of all of this, which is the writing! The fun thing about We Bury the Dead is that it really came out of me. It came out of my pores. I was just so driven, given what had happened to me with my mum. I was able to get this down in some form and then really fuck around with it and make it a film that I was hoping people would then want to see. It was almost like the script was telling me what it did and didn’t want. When you get into a flow and a rhythm as a writer, that’s all you want. With other projects, you can sit there for years, and it just doesn’t click. Or there’s one that was great to write, but it just didn’t go. You’ve just got to keep your fingers in so many pies in this crazy caper. I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone, but I couldn’t think of doing anything else. I love it. It’s all I know how to do. But one day hopefully I’ll work on someone else’s script.”
Does that mean you’ve got ten different projects in development? Anything in TV?
“Oh, yeah, there are lots of things in development, but all in film. We’re edging closer to one of them, which would be awesome to go straight onto the next thing, but we shall see. It’s not through lack of trying with the TV thing, but it just hasn’t gone my way. Again, you get close, but the wind changes this way or that way, or it’s a very fickle place that we find ourselves in. I’d love to do some TV. We’ll see what happens. You’ve just got to be in it to win it.”
We Bury the Dead is in cinemas now. Click here to read our review. Click here for more on Zak Hilditch.
