STACK NZ May Issue #62

DVD & BD

FEATURE

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Guy Pigden talks to John Ferguson about his first full length feature, the Kiwi splatter comedy

money and creatively working around that was one of the most difficult things.” He is full of praise for the work of his effects team and his game cast, a number of whom had to endure a fair few indignities on screen. They include Harley Neville – actually a partner in Pigden’s production company – who plays the hapless hero, and former Shortland Street regular Reanin Johannink (last seen in All Cheerleaders Die ), the spoilt lead actress on the fictional zombie film. “The cast were amazing,”

I Survived A Zombie Holocaust . W hen it comes to mixing gags and gore, New Zealand filmmakers has always punched above their weight. From the early films of Peter Jackson, through to the splatter- stick of Black Sheep and onto last year’s hits Housebound and W hat We Do In The Shadows , our gift for horror comedies have won over many genre fans, both here and abroad. It’s a heritage that filmmaker Guy Pigden is very aware of – and one he is keen to uphold on his full length feature I Survived a Zombie Holocaust . “I am a huge fan of Peter Jackson as a filmmaker,” Pigden enthuses over the phone to STACK. “ I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, and someone gave me a copy of Bad Taste, and I remember it blowing my mind. Then I watched Braindead and have been a huge fan of his ever since. My intention for this film was to try and make a film in the same spirit of his early films.” For I Survived a Zombie Holocaust – not to be confused the BBC reality TV series I Survived a Zombie Apocalypse – the fledgling Kiwi filmmaker has certainly come up with a cool new riff on what has become an overly- familiar genre. Here, a film crew shooting a low budget zombie flick in a remote location find their set over-run by the real undead from a nearby town – how do you tell the real zombies from the extras in their make-up? A cheerfully gory splatterfest that also pokes fun at some of the conventions of the genre, Pigden first came up with the idea when writing another zombie flick.

Pigden says. “I was looking for people who were completely invested in the characters and were prepared to go the extra mile. On a low budget film, you have to have everybody on the same wave length, giving it their 110 percent and prepared to go further than what would normally be asked of them. I think every single cast member did that and I think that is reflected on the screen.” I Survived A Zombie Holocaust premiered first at London’s Fright Fest and in a New Zealand, it will be one of the first local movies to be available simultaneously at the cinema, on DVD and online. However, Pigden would like to release a special DVD edition of the film further down the track. “Our original cut came in at well over two hours, so there is a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor,” he explains. “The scenes that were taken out were mainly for timing purposes and what ended up being trimmed away were scenes that were not particularly relevant to the central stories. This version for me is the best version of the fim. But I would love to come back to do another edition with an in-depth

“It was a completely different story but there was one scene where the characters bumped into this director and assistant director who were shooting a zombie film and didn’t understand that real zombies were attacking them,” he says. “That script got put on the backburner but I went back to that little seen and expanded on that concept of having real zombies attack a zombie film set.” Shot in and around Dunedin – apparently it’s the first feature to be shot there since Scarfies (1999) – the movie was funded through the New Zealand Film Commission’s Escalator scheme and he and his team have worked wonders with a limited budget. However, Pigden admits it was hard-going. “I think our biggest challenge was working within the budget of $250,000,” he reckons. “It was very tight. Obviously, when you are doing a zombie film, you are having to do a lot of special effects and make-up involved, there is a lot of action and spectacle that you are trying to get across. All of those things are very challenging when you have a small amount of

• I Survived A Zombie Holocaust is out on May 22

documentary detailing the shoot and including a lot of deleted scenes.”

MAY 2015 JB Hi-Fi www.jbhifi.co.nz

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