After a military experiment in Tasmania goes horribly wrong, Ava (Daisy Ridley Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens) desperately searches for her husband in the aftermath. Hoping to find him alive, Ava joins a “body retrieval unit”, but her search takes a chilling turn when the corpses she’s burying start showing signs of life, and are growing more violent with every passing hour.
WE BURY THE DEAD is a terrifying yet moving story about enduring grief, loss and the undead, offering a refreshing take on the zombie genre. Written and directed by Zak Hilditch (1922, These Final Hours), the film also stars Brenton Thwaites (Titans) and Mark Coles Smith (Mystery Road: Origin). As We Bury The Dead prepares to release in cinemas from February 5, Nick L’Barrow spoke with Zak Hilditch about bringing Daisy Ridley on board, the importance of the films needle-drop songs, and the inspiration of Danny Boyle’s films.
Nick: I worked in a Blockbuster as a teenager – and I tell everyone that it was and probably will remain the best job I ever had- and one of the trailers I vividly remember on the loop-tape we played was for These Final Hours! And back then, that loop tape and being in a video store was how I discovered so many new films, so it’s safe to say that trailer and watching your film made me a fan of your work!
Zak Hilditch: That’s like your movie origin story! My wife worked in a candy bar at a cinema for seven years, and she told me it was the best job she ever had! Everyone who worked in a video store or cinema always say it was the best job they ever had!
Nick: It’s hard to top it! But watching so many movies, for me, was a way for me to explore and analyse themes in interesting, creative ways. We Bury The Dead is very much so about grief and humanity, but you explore it through the lens of a zombie film. What did genre filmmaking as a device serve for you when it came to creating a really human, grounded story?
ZH: Yeah, well, speaking of video shops. I was never lucky enough to work in one – not that I didn’t try! I knew it was going to be a sick job, I could just never get it over the line! But, I spent a lot of time in video shops at a very young age. My mum was a massive cinephile, and she would let me and my sister stay up later and watch TV – mostly inappropriate stuff we probably never should have been watching! But, at the video store, it was all of the evocative covers that really got my attention when I was eight or nine.
And not knowing it at the time, through osmosis, I got that genre was this great, big canvas in the back of my brain. You know, you go through film school, you become a bit of a film snob. You want to make movies worthy of Cannes or Sundance. But, with These Final Hours, it was great because I tried to make those Cannes-worthy short films, but it was my love of genre films that made me go I can smash art-house and genre films together, which is what I wanted to do with These Final Hours. It’s basically Paper Moon and 28 Days Later!
When I first saw 28 Days Later for the first time at the cinema, it absolutely blew me away. It was poignant, personal, an intimate character study that just so happens to take place during a zombie outbreak. And we were using the same camera – the Canon XL1 – at Curtin University at the time. Then I find out that Danny Boyle – of which I’m a huge Trainspotting fan – is using this same, shitty camera to film his zombie movie, it just blew me away double! But it perfectly fit that gritty aesthetic he was going for.
Nick: It really is the character study elements of films like 28 Days Later and We Bury The Dead that I think make people so much more invested. What did Daisy Ridley bring to Ava that maybe wasn’t initially in your scripted creation of the character?
ZH: Oh, she brought absolutely everything. She was the first actress that we went out to, and I didn’t expect her to do it. I was thinking it was never going to happen. And within one week of her receiving the script, we were on Zoom and she was saying that she wanted to be a part of the film! Then we spent the next nine months before we shot just checking in every now and then. She really saw what I was trying to do on the page, and that’s exactly why I had gone after her. It really was planets aligning. Right place, right time.
Daisy was the perfect person to portray Ava. What she delivers exceeded all expectations. My job is really just to get out of her way. Most of the time I’m just watching the movie through the split on set, and just seeing her deliver her lines flawlessly every time. She’s just got such an x-factor. She inhibits the characters in a way you just hope and pray that an actor will. It’s the same with the guys too! Mark [Cole Smith] and Brenton [Thwaites] just arrived and did their thing and crushed it.
Nick: You have two fantastic needle drops in this film. The film opens with Kid Cudi’s ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ and then later in the film you feature ‘Hertz’ by Amyl and the Sniffers. At what point during your creative process does music before an integral part?
ZH: That’s such a great question. I went into this thinking we weren’t going to be able to afford a song, let alone the seven that are in the movie. This was the first time that I’ve really been afforded the chance to play in that sand pit, and at no one time did anyone tell me we couldn’t afford something.
But, really, it’s a process of elimination. It was death by a thousand paper cuts. During the edit, we used temp music and then towards the end of the edit, we had to start getting serious about what songs we wanted to use. The two songs in particular that were important to me were the Kid Cudi song, and the PJ Harvey song at the wedding, because they were both actually songs at my wedding. During the vows, our friends who were musicians, did an acoustic cover of Pursuit of Happiness, which was a surprise for my wife. And then our wedding waltz was to ‘You Said Something’ by PJ Harvey. So just getting one of them would have been good, but I got both of my wedding songs in the movie. They mean so much to me.
Then getting the Amyl and the Sniffers song was great. We got that song literally the day before it blew up and were winning awards. We knew they were going to be big, but I didn’t want people to know our secret before we paid for the song [laughs]! I just wanted something that rocked, something that was raucous, for that scene. And it was meant to be.
Nick: Between you and The Phillppou Brothers, horror films doing nasty things with teeth is just becoming too common! The grinding and chattering of the zombie teeth in this film really got under my skin. When you’re thinking of gross things to put in your film, how much of it is doing things that make you feel uncomfortable and hoping it hits audiences the same way, and how much of it is watching how audiences react to different things when you watch films, and capitalising on what affects them?
ZH: Travelling with the film over 2025, it’s been amazing to go to these festivals and screenings, and the one thing that seems to be a universal language is people reacting to that teeth sound! No matter what country you’re in, people just can’t handle it. That was in there very early on from a script point of view, and it came from the idea of what agitated zombies would be doing as they grow increasingly agitated over time. And I landed on teeth grinding.
But then, my sound team went above and beyond. I am personally one of those humans that can handle that sound. Maybe I’m one of the rare ones! But for me it’s dreams. I am the guy who has dreams about his teeth falling out. It’s a recurring one, actually. So, there is definitely something about teeth embedded into my psyche.
Nick: I want to close by asking about a similarity I noticed between this film and These Final Hours. Both feature climatic scenes that take place on a beach. I’m curious to know what the symbolism of beaches means to you in those moments of each film?
ZH: Wow. No one has really ever pointed that out. That’s interesting to hear. Even I haven’t put that much thought into it. The beach was very important to These Final Hours. Sometimes, it’s just constraints of where you are. And the resort we shot at had this lovely lagoon and beach, and it just made sense that was going to be where we filmed that scene. It was just a good bit of happenstance, I guess. But, it is interesting that these moments of catharsis going on in both films take place on the beach. One is pretty bleak, and I hope the other one is filled with a bit more hope.
Thank you so much to Zak for his time, and to Umbrella Entertainment and NixCo PR for organising the interview. We Bury The Dead is in Australian cinemas from February 5.
