Miss Flicks

We Bury the Dead’s Zak Hilditch on casting Daisy Ridley and making a zombie movie on a low budget

Daisy Ridley has been choosing an interesting variety of roles since her most recent Star Wars movie, 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, and We Bury the Dead is no exception.

In this movie, which Zak Hilditch wrote and directed, she plays Ava, an American who flies to the Australian island of Tasmania after a U.S. military experiment goes wrong and wipes out the entire population. Ava volunteers in the body retrieval team, collecting the dead to be buried (hence the title), in the hope of finding her husband, Mitch (Matt Whelan), who was there for a business trip. She sneaks off with her volunteering partner, Clay (Brenton Thwaites), and heads down to the south of the island. The only problem: Some of the dead are waking back up.

Describing We Bury the Dead as a zombie film doesn’t feel accurate; it’s more of an emotional drama about a grieving woman trying to find closure. There just so happens to be some zombies in it.

Ridley and Hilditch shot the film in Western Australia in February and March 2024 and premiered it at SXSW last March. It is now coming to the U.K. on digital, Blu-ray and DVD this month.

Here is my conversation with Australian filmmaker Hilditch about his new movie.

When you look back at the finished film, what scene or sequence are you most proud of?

Oh boy (laughs). I mean, just the fact the movie was made at all is a miracle upon miracles. Movies of this size, you know, they’re getting increasingly hard to make in the modern era. The fact that this even got greenlit is like the win, so when you give birth to a baby that is your film, it’s hard to then pick favourites within the piece itself. Every day was so challenging, as the most cliché answer you could probably get from a director (laughs). They really are all so challenging; every day, every minute, every hour on set is just so stressful, and boy, did we have some doozies on this one, the zombies especially. Having never made a zombie movie before, just day-to-day with that and hoping that it didn’t look like s**t was also pretty terrifying. But let’s just say in a nutshell, yeah, (I’m) happy with how the zombies look on-screen, given that that was a huge concern. I surround myself with people like Daisy Ridley so I knew I was going to be fine there; it was more the unknown of the zombies themselves.

Speaking of Daisy, I was so impressed with her performance. It’s so emotional – more emotional than you’d expect to find in a film that has zombies in it. How did she come to be involved?

She was the very first actress we approached once we were ready with the script. I prepared myself for the horrible game that is waiting for an actor to not read your thing or to just string you along before ultimately a big fat no, but within one week, she had read it and we were Zooming and within that Zoom, she said she loved it and wanted to jump onboard. It really was like lightning striking and it will probably never happen that quickly or that succinctly ever again. Again, I’m just pinching myself that she said yes to my words on the page. Getting her was one thing but then just seeing her live through the split on set, I was basically just an audience member by that point, just being blown away with what she was delivering from moment to moment. I can’t wait for people in her home country to now finally see her work on the big – or the little – screen, whatever screen they’re watching on.

I’m a big fan of Daisy and I thought she was so fantastic in this. When you were writing Ava, what made you think of Daisy?

When I write a character, I honestly don’t really think of an actor. I sort of think almost like a mysterious fever dream – you’re imagining many faces and many archetypes. But essentially, given it was, you know, it was written on the page as a 35-year-old woman from America, I was like, ‘OK, here’s all the actresses that can help us actually greenlight this movie. Here’s all the people I think are great.’ Just chatting to the producers, we identified that this is kind of perfect for someone like Daisy and so she just happened to be the first one we sent it out to. It also was someone that we knew could handle themselves in a fight with zombies on-screen but have the acting chops and the X-factor on-screen as well, when it came to all the emotional stuff. It’s a really tricky thing to balance both of those but I just also can’t wait for people to see her in a new light that they probably haven’t seen before on-screen. Again, she just absolutely tore it a new one.

Once she said yes, did the ball get rolling really quickly to get into production?

You’d like to think it would, but again, as I said, we won the Lotto, we got Daisy, but it was close to a year of then figuring the rest out, raising the money, jumping through hoops with like Screen Australia and Screen West here, the film funding agencies. Basically, we cobbled just enough money to finally tell Daisy about the start date that we were going to be doing. We stuck to it and we finally got there. On day one, when we first started filming, I was just thinking, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe we actually pulled this off, surely nothing can stop us now!’ But yeah, it was a wild ride.

I love the zombie genre and it’s very popular; there have been many films that have come before. So, how do you go about trying to do something new and different?

That is the million-dollar question on a movie like ours. We knew that we didn’t have all the money in the world but if we were going to do it, we needed something specific and something new to say. When, thematically, this idea of unfinished business with Daisy’s character and the zombies themselves sort of overlapped, I thought I was onto something from a script level. I only wanted to make it a zombie movie if we did have a new sort of left-handed turn to take, offering the zombie lore that people are so accustomed to, which you kind of have to honour, but then you also want to be doing something fresh within those goalposts. I think we found a fresh way to really offer an audience, for people who don’t like zombie movies and people that do like zombie movies, something that they’re not expecting either way, going into a Daisy Ridley zombie movie. The exciting thing about this movie is you don’t really know what you’re getting yourself into, just like Daisy’s character.

View this post on Instagram

I saw an Instagram roundup from Brenton Thwaites (see above) and he revealed that his sister played one of the zombies and I was just curious how that came about.

Again, we didn’t have all the money in the world (laughs) so everyone and their mother or their sister was allowed to partake in this film, even down to things like that. It was a real family affair. It was just great because everyone who worked on this movie were just so excited about the script and about doing something fresh as a zombie movie so everyone gave it their all and everyone just gave so much of a s**t about leaving nothing on the field. We definitely wrenched every last inch of a zombie movie that we could out of our oily rag that was the budget of this film.

How long ago did you start working on the script or the ideas that would become We Bury the Dead?

I started writing the very first draft of this towards the end of 2019 when I was living in Los Angeles. It was a very different movie back then. I finished maybe two drafts and then Covid happened and then just bit by bit, with each passing year, I realised how very omnipresent this script of mine that I started writing many moons ago has become now that it’s out with all the images and horrors of the world that we’re all witnessing. This movie has a little bit of all of that weirdly embedded through it as well so that’s all been very crazy at the same time, to see the movie with different audiences and people sort of like thinking that maybe it was inspired by this or that but it all just originated from something in my demented brain that just happened to then cross over the real world in certain sequences.

What movies, if any, inspired or influenced this one?

It’s an interesting question. I’m a big lover of all kinds of cinema, from kitchen sink drama to big, big genre, and when movies clash together like that. They’re films I like trying to make and films that I like watching. I would say that the granddaddy of all of them was the original 28 Days Later. When I first saw the film, it was like my love of both things – intimate character study, kitchen U.K. drama, but it happens to be a zombie apocalypse. I was such a Trainspotting fan and just knowing that Danny Boyle was making this movie and shooting it on the XL1, which was the same camera I was using at film school, thinking, ‘Why is he using such a s**t camera?!’ So obviously, the DNA of that movie, if I had to choose one, you can very much see its roots coming through We Bury the Dead.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

We Bury the Dead is available on Digital HD 2 February & Blu-ray & DVD 16 February. Read my review here.