In 2014, Kiah Roache-Turner directed Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, a micro-budget zombie film inspired by Mad Max that he co-wrote with his brother, Tristan Roache-Turner. Eight years after that film developed something of a cult following, the brothers are back with Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, a gory follow-up to their zombie/road-movie hybrid. Wyrmwood: Apocalypse follows Rhys (Luke McKenzie), a soldier living in an Australian wasteland who is intent on finding a cure for zombiism. Rhys soon crosses paths with some of the protagonists from the first film, who show him that the people he works for are contributing to the current atrocities of their post-apocalyptic society rather than trying to change it for the better.
Kiah Roache-Turner was able to sit down for an exclusive chat with CBR to discuss the upcoming release of his zombie sequel. The director opened up about avoiding sequel tropes, switching central protagonists for the sequel, and the 10-year process that led up to the production of Wyrmwood: Apocalypse.
CBR: In terms of evolving the world of Wyrmwood, what would you say was your main goal when developing the sequel?
Kiah Roache-Turner: The main goal for Wyrmwood: Apocalypse was for the production of the film to be done as close to how we did the original as possible. That's a weird goal because the original was shot on the smell-of-an-oily-rag over a three-and-a-half-year period. Half of it was shot just in our mom's backyard or in our friends' backyards. We didn't want to do it like that again, but we wanted to do it with the spirit of the first one, meaning a bunch of passionate filmmakers coming together with their friends to make something that they believe in and not turn it into some studio version.
When I look at the first Mad Max and the second Mad Max, there is a consistency to the vision across those two films. You look at the first Evil Dead and the second Evil Dead, that's the same world. There's no feeling of the filmmakers selling out the concept. So I knew that we had a pretty cool concept, and I just wanted it to be done the way I knew it should be done.
My brother and I wrote it, and we conceived of it, and we knew how to do it. The most important thing was that we found producers and collaborators who just wanted to let us do our thing. They pretty much said, "You know your world. Let's get you a little bit more money. Let's shoot it in six weeks this time as opposed to three-and-a-half years, but let's pretty much continue what you guys creatively set up in the first one". So I see this process as a miracle of miracles, where the original intention was met.
So in other words, you had a bigger budget for this film, but you wanted to try and keep the essence of a lower-budget film?
Well, we originally went from a tiny, minuscule, micro-budget film to a $10 million studio film called Nekrotronic. Now, it's a fun movie, but it's not my movie. I was like, "I don't want that to happen again." Nekrotronic was a movie that was made with about seven different people making the decisions. Every single creative decision was made by the film committee, which is how most studio films are made because there's so much money involved.
Nobody wants to trust some dude from film school in Sydney who shot his first film in his mom's backyard with 10 million of their dollars. They're going to go, "Okay, well, every single decision has to be financially viable." When you start thinking about a film like that, a lot of the singular vision is cut off. I think I'm a big fan of singular vision. All my favorite directors -- David Lynch and Fellini and Scorsese -- they all had control over the creative decision-making on their films. You can tell a film made by a committee from a film made with a singular vision, and I much prefer the singular vision films. Even in a $200 million film like Dune, you can still see that director Denis Villeneuve maintained his vision. That's the thing that was really important.
So we went into this thinking that if we're going to make a sequel to Wyrmwood, we can't make it in a studio corporate paradigm. It just can't happen. So we made sure that the budget was low enough so that we could maintain creative control and make the film that we wanted to make.
What sequel tropes were you hoping to avoid when making this film?
Well, you can't just make the same film. I look at all my favorite sequels, and they're all different from the originals. I think that's the first trope to avoid, thinking you have to do a template film and make sure that everybody gets exactly what they got in the first one. You have to make a different film, and you have to let the story be what the story wants to be. When you look at the first Mad Max and the second Mad Max, they are two very different films. Mad Max 2 is funnier, it's more unusual, and it has weirder characters. It's the same with even The Godfather and The Godfather Part II; although the themes are the same, they're very, very different films. You've got to let the movie be what it wants to be.
So to me, I think the biggest thing that we wanted to do was to really look at our main influences, which was the Mad Max series. So, Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead is like our Mad Max 1 and Wyrmwood: Apocalypse is like our Mad Max 2. We really wanted this sequel to be bigger, badder, and more hardcore.
A lot of the scenes in Wyrmwood: Apocalypse were actually scenes that we wrote back in 2010 and couldn't afford to do on the first one. We knew that we were going to have a little bit more of a budget, so we wanted to throw in some of our old ideas. We were now able to throw a cyborg zombie into the mix. [laughs] This time, we were able to build the lead character's enclosure, which we wanted to build in the first one. You know the opening scene where Rhys is in his enclosure, where he does his normal daily routine and gets up, does his exercises, kills some zombies, and he's got a barbecue powered by zombie breath, and the zombies are all powering his generators and stuff? I wrote that with my brother in 2010. That was supposed to be the start of Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, but we just couldn't do it. It was too big.
So we decided to go back to the origin story of how the apocalypse occurred in the first film. We figured maybe seven years later or so we'll be able to have the budget to make the one that was originally in our heads, and that turned out to be Wyrmwood: Apocalypse. So Wyrmwood: Apocalypse is actually something that has been 10 years in the making. It's really fun to see a scene that was actually the first scene that we wrote for this original project finally up on the big screen 10 years later.
What caused you and your brother, who co-wrote Wyrmwood: Apocalypse with you, to switch central protagonists from the first film to the second film?
We kind of wrote ourselves into a corner with Barry. Originally, Barry was actually supposed to be Rhys. That's how we started writing the first film. Then we went back and decided to tell the story of the Barry character. In the telling of that story, he could no longer be Rhys because it wouldn't make sense to suddenly have Barry doing the things Rhys does in Apocalypse. Where would his sister be? It wasn't continuing their story anymore. So we decided to just make it a random soldier dude. It wasn't until the very last minute, when we were sort of casting around, trying to work out who was going to play Rhys, that we made the decision that we wanted to work with Luke McKenzie again. Then we realized we killed him off in the first one!
We decided to follow that classic soap opera trope of making Rhys the twin brother of McKenzie's character from the first film. It was great because we were getting to work with our friend again, and we got to have an emotional connection and consistency between the first and second films. So we were able to do a rewrite that actually emotionally connects Rhys to Brooke and Barry.
One of the hardest things with a screenplay is when you've got unconnected characters, and you end up wasting a lot of exposition connecting them through action. This time, when we made that decision to make McKenzie Rhys -- who, spoiler alert, is also the brother of the main antagonist in the first one who Brooke and Barry killed -- they're emotionally connected. It's a deep connection of familial, sibling murder, which is narratively on point. So actually, making the decision to cast McKenzie as the lead character opened up all sorts of things for us in terms of writing and made the piece a lot better. So yeah, I think that was a good decision.
Wyrmwood: Apocalypse feels like the second film of a trilogy in a lot of ways. Is that intended?
Oh, yeah, 100 percent. I mean, I'd love to make Wyrmwood 3 and then do Wyrmwood TV. This is a world where the riffs can be endless. We've come up with this thing that melds two really cool worlds that were originally created with Mad Max and Dawn of the Dead, and it delivers enough new ideas and themes to make it just the easiest thing to write for us.
If somebody told me to sit down and write a random Wyrmwood TV show set in Spain, I could do it tomorrow. It's a world that works. So I'm happy to keep doing these as long as they'll let me, you know? I mean, I've already started writing down the structure of the ideas and whatnot for Wyrmwood 3. I could probably write the treatment in a single day and then write up a first draft in a week. Writing these films is like a hot knife through butter.
Do you have any ideas that you're willing to share about the potential third film?
Yeah! So again, we've written ourselves into a corner with Brooke and Barry because they're becoming more and more monstrous, so they're less relatable. They're now going into the territory of almost these dark Grecian gods, and they're almost too big to write. So they become quite full-on characters. They're like Dark Jedi. The fun thing is now, the Grace and Maxi parts played by Shantae Barnes-Cowan and Tasia Zalar are taking over the Brooke and Barry roles. So I get to repeat those arcs but in a completely different way. We have these amazing indigenous actresses who are just firing on all cylinders, and I just can't wait to start writing their characters again. Those two get to kind of take over the Brooke and Barry arcs, and Brooke and Barry get to go to a really full-on dark place, and I'm really looking forward to that.
I also have several other ideas. I've had this idea where a character chops a zombie's arms and legs off, wears the zombie like a backpack, and attaches the mouth to a flamethrower, using the zombie as a flamethrower. Ideas like that keep coming to me. I also would love to do a zombie on a drone bit, like a drone powered by a zombie. How cool would that be? You know, once you start with these ideas, they just keep coming. So yeah, I hope we get to do the third one. That'd be great!
Wyrmwood: Apocalypse premieres digitally on April 14.
