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COVID Zombies in the Fire: Meera Menon on Didn’t Die

Kiran Deol and George Basil in Didn't Die

Three weeks before the Sundance Midnight Madness premiere of her zombie dramedy Didn’t Die, director Meera Menon (whose credits appositely include episodes of The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead) and her partner Paul Gleason (who co-wrote and shot the film) lost their home in the Eaton fire that devastated Altadena, Los Angeles. Not only that, the film’s producer Erica Fishman and her partner Geoff Boothby, who edited the film, also lost their home in the fire. The irony is that Didn’t Die centers on a group of five in the zombie apocalypse, trying desperately to hang on to their family home even as one doggedly continues her podcast aimed at an ever-shrinking audience.

The film is personal to Menon: everyone on the skeleton cast and crew is friends and family, the dog and the baby in the film are her own (“The baby came cheap,” quips Menon in the press notes) and the film was largely shot in Monroe, New York, near where Gleason and Menon grew up. Even the first zombie seen in the film is played by the county’s sheriff, who is a huge Walking Dead fan. To top of it all, Didn’t Die is a delightfully desi zombie film—probably the first of its kind?—with characters enjoying dosa in the apocalypse, sipping “chai tea” and joking about the wackiness of having a Hindu wedding in July.

Filmmaker: First of all, I’m extremely sorry for the loss of your family home in the Altadena fires just a few weeks ago. How does it feel like being in Park City now, a day before the film’s premiere? I can only speculate that the film’s themes and genre speak to your current experience.

Menon: Zombies are a metaphor for anything, right? People always said they’re a metaphor: for a virus, for capitalism, for climate change. I always wondered if our movie is really touching on that last part, then we experienced this wildfire. So much of the movie feels so relevant to how we experienced it.

We were obviously going to come to the festival; that felt like a no-brainer. People kept asking us, “Are you still going to go?” And we were like, “Of course. First of all, we have nothing else to do. We know where to stay, we have a place here booked, so we’ll come here anyway.” But also, the movie has this messaging in it that’s healing us in some way. I don’t know what other people get from it, but it’s kind of everything to us, so we’re grateful to have it.

Filmmaker: You have directed episodes of The Walking Dead and Fear The Walking Dead. How did your experience directing those episodes and being familiar with The Walking Dead canon and world influence your approach and process on Didn’t Die?

Menon: Like, almost entirely. Paul Gleason and I are huge fans of The Walking Dead [TWD], huge zombie film fans in general. Working on Fear The Walking Dead is really what sparked my love of the genre. I realized the potential of emotionality in the subject matter, especially in feature films which are so action-focused. Because of the breadth of television, TWD was able to explore more the emotional corners on the map when you’re talking about people that have lost everything.

For example, in my episode of TWD, there’s a storyline where people in the Kingdom are searching for a light bulb in an abandoned movie theater filled with zombies. They need this light bulb to be able to make a film projector work and show the children in the Kingdom a movie for the first time. Because it was the ninth season of TWD, zombies started to become less of the problem and the question was more, how are we gonna rebuild civilization, how are we gonna create meaning? Those are the questions I really wanted to explore in a movie, and I also wanted to make a movie that was more of a throwback to those original zombie movies, like Night of the Living Dead.

Filmmaker: In terms of directing the action scenes with the zombies, were you more inspired by watching the George Romero films or your experience directing on Fear or TWD?

Menon: I’ve worked on a lot of stunt-heavy shows like TWD and Westworld, and it’s really taught me how to approach [action]. For our purposes, our movie was so small, sometimes just five people on set, so we wanted to keep the stunts manageable and simple. We started the zombies from where Night of the Living Dead sets them: They’re not that threatening, they’re pretty slow-moving versus the fast moving zombies of World War Z or Train to Busan.

We also wanted to track a progression. Our movie explores this idea of mutation: what happens if the zombies start to evolve? As we got deeper into the movie, we brought in a wonderful stunt coordinator out of New York, Sam MacIvor, and she helped us craft some of the climactic fight sequences, make them a little more aggressive and physical, with hand-to-hand combat, because we wanted to just show that the zombies have become stronger.

Filmmaker: Was it always your intention to begin the film with a change in the rules of the world, where the zombies are now coming out during the day and are faster and more focused? Or did that idea come about later on, since you said the pre-production script was just 40 pages, and a lot was improvised?

Menon: It was always something we considered, because we were really interested in how the zombie metaphor could extend to COVID, a more contemporary experience that we had just had. Part of what was interesting to us is how our experience with COVID never really ended, it just evolved. Variants resurfaced new fears, and this idea that both the threat, but also the grief and the loss created by this threat—neither of those things ever really end. They just kind of continue and people adapt around them. I feel that’s the epidemiological metaphor of zombies that we were going for.

Filmmaker: I love the setup in the beginning. Just as the rules of the zombie behavior are changing, the two main sibling characters are returning from their traveling podcast to celebrate its hundredth episode at home. Did you and Paul at any point consider making a movie about the traveling podcast, or was it always about the homecoming?

Menon: The traveling podcast would be another movie that would be fun to make as a spinoff. We’ve talked about it with Kiran Deol and Vishal Vijayakumar, who play Vinita and Rish, as we discussed their backstory and how they have been on the road with the traveling podcast for two years. But this movie was always designed as a homecoming, because we were inspired by Night of the Living Dead and wanting to make something super low budget. Night is largely a chamber piece, if you look at it; it’s a couple of actors and a house. I have this quote from St. Thomas Aquinas that’s always been hanging over my desk. Aquinas says that the art of sailing is governed by the art of shipbuilding. I think that that about movies. A movie reflects the process that you outlined for its making. For this movie, I really wanted it to be a tiny kind of indie movie in the same scale and model as the way I made films when I was in film school. It was really a gesture of honoring a more playful and almost childlike approach to filmmaking that I had lost. So, the idea was always five actors in a house.

Filmmaker: From a script standpoint, how do you see the role of the baby in the film—which I read is your baby. Very cute! Is the baby a means to an end or the end itself? I ask because with the introduction of the baby, so much happens plot-wise which affects each of the five characters. Vinita gets to see that George Basil’s character, Vincent, is a coward. The two brothers—Hari, played by Samrat Chakrabarti, and Rish—finally enter their deceased parents’ room. Katie McCuen’s Barbara gets a goal of fostering community. So how do you see the role of the baby in the film?

Menon: I see the introduction of the baby as the end of the first act, what sets forward the main problem and journey of the movie. In some ways, by the end of the movie, I want the audience to feel like the baby was really the hero. Paul and I were watching Tarzan with our kid the other day and we’re like, this baby is the origin story for every Disney movie: a baby that’s orphaned by some kind of catastrophic event and has to find their way in the world. [Didn’t Die] is so much about: do you focus on how to rebuild or constantly live in fear of what could happen again? I think having a baby and the presence of new life is what allows these characters to engage with that question.

Filmmaker: Could you speak more about your collaboration with Kiran Deol and how you came to conceive of Vinita? In a way this is a movie about five people. It can also be seen as a three-hander, the story of the three siblings, yet Kiran as the podcast host feels like the main character. She is such a gifted comedic actor and comedian, but there is a slight pathos from the very beginning, in her line delivery, in her expressions. How did you two work together to find the character?

Menon: The character was entirely based on Kiran. When Paul and I were spitballing ideas of zombie movies, we were like, what if Kiran was at the center of one and she just kept trying to do her show, despite the fact that everyone was dying from the zombie apocalypse and the audience was quickly disappearing? Kiran is so tenacious. She needs her art as a way to navigate and engage with the world. I saw this during the pandemic—she’s always finding a way to continue performing, finding that microphone and having something to say. I find that so inspiring that she has that tenacity. So, her spirit was always what we wanted to design the movie around. We asked her to do this before we ever wrote anything, and she was completely a part of the writing process. I’d say that 99% of what Kiran says in the movie is entirely improvised, and I wanted to cast her across George Basil because he’s the best improviser that I know as well. I think people always associate improv with comedy, but I was just talking to Samrat about this last night. I think improv is a powerful tool with drama too. I always use paraphrasing exercises with actors, because I am a director first and then a writer. I feel you always end up workshopping and reworking the scenes with actors anyway. So, why not bring them in the process from the very beginning? Kiran was where we started.

Filmmaker: How did the rest of the characters and cast take shape?

Menon: I knew I wanted Kira to have a right-hand man, like a younger sibling who really was helping her put the show on the road. Vishal is someone I’ve known since he was a kid—he’s kind of my little brother in many ways—and he’s also of a generation, like in the movie, that had their young adult life cut short by COVID. So, I knew he’d bring a lot of lived experience and a wonderful energy to this character.

Once I put the two of them together, it just felt like they needed [someone else]. We wanted to make the story about loss, about losing their elders, their parents, so I wanted to have some figure that could help them still feel safe. The older brother character came to mind; for me, in my life, that person has always been Samrat. Samrat was the first actor I ever worked with. He was in the first short film I ever made, and he’s always an actor that can help me do anything because he can do anything. So, the three siblings really came about in that way, both because of wanting that dynamic, but also because of these three actors, my personal relationships with them and feeling like that would all kind of come together really well.

In terms of that process, the way we approached Kiran is the way I approached every actor. Before we wrote anything, we had long conversations about these characters, long Zoom sessions which I’ve recorded and archived, of different pairings. The writing process happened entirely out of this collaborative group think when we cast it. I want to carry this forward as a practice in the future. Cast the movie first and build the script around your actors.

Filmmaker: That’s fantastic how you channeled your experience of the pandemic with your personal relationships with all these actors.

Menon: That’s the other thing: We’ve never seen South Asians in this genre, and even Kiran was like, “I’ve never seen a contemporary South Asian movie in black and white.” She was looking at dailies of Samrat one day, and she said it was so incredible to see him in black and white, filmed in a classic way.

Filmmaker: I had the exact same thing written down. The use of B&W, the framing of individual actors like Samrat and Kiran in their key character moments—especially when Samrat does the final deed—and even the evocative three-shots of the siblings in the car driving back and forth to the lake, were all giving a classical ’60s feel. How did you work together with Paul to come up with this cinematographic approach toward characterization? I must add that the B-roll in this film really helped me get into the story world.

Menon: With the B-roll, it’s funny because for so long we didn’t have that stuff. You’re shooting the main body of your film before you get any of those kind of pickups. The minute we put the pickups in, a lot of the questions that we kept getting about the movie kind of went away because people understood the tone a lot more. So, I’m glad you kind of picked up on that too.

The movie is so much about regeneration and finding beauty and life reemerge after destruction. That’s connected to coming out of the film’s wintry landscape. We shot the main body of the film in the township of Monroe, which is in Orange County, New York. Paul’s family is from there; his grandfather was the mayor there. I grew up about 20 minutes from there and my parents came to set every day, made us lunch, watched my daughter. It was a real family-powered effort. That place was so meaningful to me and Paul that I think it was photographed with that kind of love, attention and understanding of its beauty.

In terms of the framing [and the three-shot scenes], we were very much looking to make like an expressionist, classically-framed movie. Regarding the siblings, I’m always interested in threes. Every movie I’ve made has had a triangle at its center. Triangles, I think, are the strongest shape in terms of creating tension and form, like Knife in the Water, where everything’s composed in triangles. That was always the intention.

That closeup of Samrat when he does the deed, that’s so interesting that it stands out to you, because Paul and I always talk about it. It’s well framed. I think it kind of feels like a Western. What’s remarkable is that the scene was one take. It was freezing cold. We had seconds to get it because the moonlight was exactly right, shining off of the lake, and Samrat is just that good of an actor, just the most reliable person in that situation when you have one take to do something.

Filmmaker: Spoiler alert before this question. The choice that really stood out to me the most in the film is the confrontation scene of Samrat (the Hari character) with the parent zombies by that lake, which is bookended by the classical three-shot scenes I love of the siblings driving to and from the lake. I just found it riveting just how different the confrontation scene looked from the rest of the film, and how you approached shooting the parent zombies. I was expecting a bit more melodrama but the whole thing felt very abstract, decisive, compared to the car rides which were more concrete and emotional. Can you talk more about your thought process for this part of the film?

Menon: That confrontation scene by the lake was shot after the fact. We shot the main body in Monroe, with Samrat, Kiran and Vishal against that lake, which was an important location for us. The parents’ side of that confrontation was shot later, on green screen, because we actually had to have a proper studio setup to get zombie makeup on our actors. We couldn’t just put them out in the elements the way we shot the main body of the film. So, we were able to have a little time to think about how we wanted to execute that. For the longest time that sequence was half storyboards and half live action footage, so that’s also hard to test screen. It is the climactic emotional moment in the movie, and it was very hard to get people to understand what we were doing.

The intention was always to make the film feel more like a ghost story than a zombie movie in that [confrontation] moment. In the original draft of the story, it was something the siblings talked about and I initially thought maybe we would do flashbacks of it. But I wanted the real time moment that we eventually crafted to almost feel like, not a flashback, but a heightened fantastical moment that would feel out of the grounded reality that we had been in the rest of the movie, because it really is a representation of not the closure of grief but at least the acceptance of loss and grief.

Filmmaker: That’s a very helpful distinction, between zombie and ghost films, which makes the film feel novel. I don’t think I’ve seen many zombie films also incorporate the feel of the ghost story.

Menon: We talked a lot about Japanese ghost stories. Kwaidan was among a series of movies that I brought up to our composer. The tone of this movie didn’t feel baked in at all until Sam Jones wrote this music. I’ve worked with Sam on every movie I’ve made and think the world of him. I gave him an impossible task, saying that the movie is doing multiple things at once, the tone is really riding a line between a couple of different things. And he was like, “Got it. Like John Carpenter meets Kwaidan and ‘Beautiful Dreamer.'” He found a way to make all those influences into one thing.

Filmmaker: Two choices are placed close to each other towards the end of the film. One is the needle drop of “Stop the Bleeding” by Baby Rose, which leads into the title card before the epilogue with a quote from a poem that I love [by Clare Harner, written in 1934], which goes, “Do not stand on my grave and cry. I am not there. I did not die.” I loved how the two choices worked together to make the end of the film quite meaningful and moving. Could you talk about them?

Menon: The song was suggested by my editor Geoff Boothby, who really made this movie a movie. I gave him a lot of dailies that had no continuity. Again, we shot this movie with five people. I didn’t have a script supervisor and all the things that I’m used to at this point. But Geoff has made gold out of nothing before, and he did that with us. I had bits and pieces of the climax, but not all of it. Once he put that song on top, I was finally able to figure out what the rest of the sequence should look like. It just became a North Star for us in terms of how we wanted the ending to feel.

As for the quote, it’s from a poem that Paul kept literally in his pocket while we were filming. I think it meant a lot to us at that time. His family is all buried in a cemetery in Monroe, and he was thinking a lot about this idea that people never leave us. He felt while we were filming that the ghosts of his grandparents were with us, and Paul is like the least woo person I know. He doesn’t really believe in anything supernatural. I’m much more inclined. But he was truly convinced that he felt the physical presence of his grandparents when we were filming, and that quote just kept kind of coming up—as a song of resilience, but also this idea that even when people are gone, they never leave you.

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