Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner recently spoke to me about their longtime labour-of-love Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead, and discussed the many roles they played in its production, the particular challenges of low-budget filmmaking, the addition of darkly comic touches to intense material, and just what it takes to convincingly play a zombie in this undead-infested day and age.
So what exactly did each of you guys actually do on this movie? You guys’ names are all over it, so Tristan?
TRT: To be fair everyone who worked on this production should have their names all over it as everyone did multiple roles. But personally I produced it, I did a lot of the production design and the project management, and I was the production manager onset, and [I did] the health and safety on the set – and some of the catering even. I did some of the crew stuff too so, on the whole, a really wide variety of roles, but that’s the way it is with independent filmmaking: everyone jumps in and does what they can, and you end up with 30 or 40 people doing the work of 100.
And Kiah? You’re listed as director, of course…
KRT: Yes, and I also edited the film, I did some of the sound design, I did the first pass on the digital effects, and I worked on the grading. It’s what you’ve got to do with a production like this – like what Peter Jackson did with his first film Bad Taste, a movie I love! He made that movie over a five year period and he was his own DOP, he made all the rubber alien heads in his own oven, I think, and he was his own focus puller, and he worked on the sound design and a lot of the post[-production]. And that’s just what you’ve got to do when you’re working like that, and on a production like this, and with our budget – which was basically no budget! I mean, we didn’t have any of that studio or government support or money until right at the end, so we wound up actually pretty much finishing the film and then getting funding, which is really arse-backwards! We paid for most of it ourselves with a little bit of crowd-funding, and when you’re doing it like that and over a three and a half year period, you know, you can’t pay someone to do all of that stuff, so you’ve got to learn how to do it all yourself and be a jack-of-all-trades.
TRT: It was a labour-of-love and of passion too. Everyone who was involved just had this love of filmmaking, and I think we were lucky as it is rather an original sort of project, and there haven’t really been many projects like this done in Australia. I think that the people who got involved did it because they believed in the project and really wanted to do it. They really believed that they were working towards making a very cool film.
The only other zombie-ish movie made in Australia was Undead in 2003, which was created by another pair of brothers, Michael and Peter Spierig [before Daybreakers and Predestination]. And that one got a bit too crazy with all the aliens and everything, but your movie is more an Aussie take on the pure zombie movie – and it’s funnier too. But how hard is it to come up with something fresh like this in a zombie-saturated market?
TRT: We grew up watching these sorts of movies from a very early age and obviously we’re influenced by George Romero’s movies and Sam Raimi and Evil Dead and Peter Jackson especially. When I saw Bad Taste as a kid I absolutely loved that movie! And we knew that zombies have been done lots and lots of times, but we also knew that with the zombies and the methane gas and the zombie-powered truck, you know – that hadn’t been done before! Even if people don’t like it they’ll nevertheless be pretty intrigued by it.
And the comedy and the sheer Australian-ness of it are also plusses…
KRT: The comedy certainly helped the Spierigs’ movie… And sure, there is a rip-off aspect here, and we are ripping off George Romero and Dawn Of The Dead – but we’re also ripping off George Miller and Mad Max! If you’re going to rip anything off then you might as well rip off the best! And George Miller was ripping off Death Race 2000 and George Romero was ripping off I Am Legend and The Last Man On Earth and Invisible Invaders… Yes, the zombie genre is a disgustingly oversaturated market and if you don’t have a hook then you’re stuffed. You want to make a straight out redo of Dawn Of The Dead? Forget about it as it’s been done! You want to do a straight zombie comedy? Forget about it, because Shaun Of The Dead had that down 10 years ago! You can’t make a zombie comedy as the funniest people in the world have already done it and you can’t do a straight one as Zack Snyder did the new Dawn Of The Dead and Danny Boyle did 28 Days Later. So we had a look at what we’d need to do to have a crack and do something different and we decided that what we had to do was mix subgenres. So we took the zombie-powered truck idea sort of from Mad Max, and when we put the teaser trailer up on YouTube suddenly we had 100000 hits in a week and 200000 hits in two weeks, and we knew that people liked the idea, that people would be waiting and that they liked the aesthetic… You’ve got to have the hook!… And we took a lot of the exposition out of this and kept it tight and lean and unapologetic. It’s 95 minutes long, it’s action-based, it’s character-based and it’s a fun ride. It’s not going to win any screenplay awards – but that’s okay with me!
TRT: And yeah, the Australian thing is important too. All the way through the production we were very cautious about not going overboard, and we wanted to have that Australian feel without ockers and bogans and meat pies and everything… The comedy was important too. We did a screening of about three or four scenes that we’d completed maybe three years ago, and this was before we added the Benny character [played by a very funny Leon Burchill], and people were coming out of that screening with just blank looks on their faces as, at the time, it was pretty harrowing stuff. People liked it and they loved the production values but there was a guy in the movie who was forced to kill his wife and daughter and it was all of a bit of a downer, as they said. And so after that me and Kiah thought that we needed to spice it up and make it more enjoyable and entertaining, and so we decided that Barry [Jay Gallagher] needs a friend in this movie, a sidekick, and that’s when we wrote Benny in. And we were lucky to get Leon to play him, as he’s just a legend.
And I’ve always wondered: how do you ensure that the extras who play zombies do it convincingly and don’t ham it up too much? Apparently on the set of TV’s The Walking Dead they all have to attend special workshops…
TRT: We had a pretty set way that we wanted our zombies to act onscreen, yeah. Me and Kiah went to great pains to make sure that the actors had ‘zombie lessons’ to make sure that they knew how particular zombies were supposed to behave, and that went on pretty much all throughout the production. One of our stunt guys, Jesse Rowles, became our sort of professional zombie trainer, and any time that there was going to be a bunch of zombies onscreen he’d shout, “Right, everyone, round up! We’re going to have a bit of a zombie lesson!” And he’d take them all through it and he was just great.
And what do you guys do now that Wyrmwood’s done and ready to go? I take it that you’ll continue to work together and in the horror-ish field?
TRT: We will definitely be working together and we’ve got another script up and running, and we’re about halfway through it at the moment. It’s a really kick-arse ghost movie idea: if you can imagine an R-Rated Ghostbusters crossed with a science fiction film and with real hooks… Watch this space as it’s going to be great!
KRT: Yeah, it is going to be a bit like an R Rated Ghostbusters, but with sprinklings of [HP] Lovecraft and Clive Barker, and with a bizarre sort of Steampunk aesthetic. It’s going to be mental!!!
I Wake Up Screening 