Lost in a world reclaimed by nature and overrun by mysterious creatures, Die Alone picks up with a young man suffering from amnesia who teams up with an eccentric survivalist to find his missing girlfriend.
Written and directed by Lowell Dean, the movie stars Carrie-Anne Moss, Douglas Smith, Kimberly-Sue Murray, and Frank Grillo.
With the movie now available in theaters and on Digital and On Demand, we recently sat down with Dean to learn more about making this edge-of-your-seat, yet still very emotional, zombie apocalypse adventure.
As well as taking a deep dive into the creation of Die Alone's terrifying "Reclaimed," the filmmaker talks about putting a new spin on an all-too familiar genre, why he made some key creative decisions, and the importance of having Moss on hand to lead the project.
Dean also addresses the biggest challenges that came with making this movie and discusses the possibility of revisiting the world of Die Alone in a potential sequel. You can read the full interview below.
As a filmmaker, what did you enjoy most about creating a post-apocalyptic world and the rules which go along with that?
I think the fun for me with creating the world and the rules was trying to honour and reflect previous films in the genre that I grew up on and love. But also, not just be repetitive. I wanted to offer my own take and have my own spin because why I love the zombie genre…there are a million reasons and so many of them are redundant but the ones I think stand the test of time offer something new and move them forward a bit. That was the fun for me.
The creature design in this film is incredible. It looked like a lot of practical effects were used, so can you talk us through that process, particularly when it came to making the Reclaimed more plant than people?
I am a huge fan of practical effects. I’m not against VFX but I love the tactile, tangible approach of using practical. Whenever I can, I like to start with that and with this film especially, being that our creatures are very organic, it was very fun to brainstorm with the makeup effects supervisor, Emersen Ziffle, in terms of how these creatures could look and not just a catch-all of one style. How can we tell the story of the decay and evolution of these people using different creatures over the course of the film?
I think Emersen and I created the look together. I had a story point for what I wanted each Reclaimed to accomplish in the film. There are some we see at a certain point I wanted to look a little more human and some I wanted to look further along. I was never drawing my own sketches and saying, ‘The creature has to look like this.’ It was more a conversation about, ‘Okay, what would the furthest along creature look like if you were stuck in this world for 20 years and you were stuck under a pile of moss or beneath a tree? What would you become?’ That was the fun thing of trying to inspire him to come up with fun ideas.
My personal favourite is a character I just call Tree Head. That was a character we shot in reshoots and is Emersen himself. It’s a cameo of his. I wanted to have a creature that really showed humanity and nature really merging and going far down the road. The vision was, you think it’s a tree and then you see the tree move and realise, ‘Hey, that could be a person in there.’ That was the marching orders and Emersen and his team at Amazing Egg made him up, covered him in branches, and we did a bunch of takes of him standing in the forest. He loves a good cameo.
What made the idea of Ethan’s memory loss and the fact he wakes up to this terrible world with fresh eyes on a daily basis so appealing as a storyteller?
I’m a big fan of many genres, chief among them is the time loop movie. I thought we’ve seen so many of those like Groundhog Day or Palm Springs, but it’s more about them and less about the circumstances. So, I imagined, what about a time loop movie where you’re literally waking up every day to the worst day of your life and what would that be? The idea of a pandemic was one of the first things that came to my mind and I imagined how sick we are of a certain thing and then every day you reset and have to wonder, ‘What’s happening?’
I read that this is a movie you’ve been looking to get made for the better part of a decade - as challenging as that must have been, did seeing the impact COVID had on the world prove beneficial to you as a filmmaker when the time came to shoot?
I think COVID happening did a couple of things for our film. One, I think it made a sense of empathy and readers and people behind the scenes in that, ‘Okay, now I understand what you were going for and now maybe this film…’ People who might have overlooked the film as fantasy or sci-fi were suddenly like, ‘Oh, this is actually really relatable.’ I also think because of that, it impacted me in my rewriting of the script because in an earlier draft, I spent way more time in the early stages of the pandemic. I feel like we’re all just so over it as a society. I don’t want to watch a movie with 20 minutes of people figuring out there’s a virus and wondering whether they have to wear a mask. I decided to turn that whole section into a one or two-minute montage because we all get it now. We get the point.
This film has a great cast, but to bring an action icon like Carrie-Anne Moss on board...what did that mean to you?
It meant the world to me to work with Carrie-Anne. I’ve been a fan of hers for years. Literally since I saw The Matrix. It was a formative moment in my life watching that, so to have someone I consider an icon not just of cinema but a Canadian was really fun. Also, it was fun to put her in this world and this story and use, I think, what we expect of her from some of her more famous roles and upend it a bit. Mae is a very unique character. She’s very interesting, very over it in terms of how the world is and being around people, so I thought it was fun to show a different colour of Carrie-Anne’s performance. She’s so great in this film and I actually think she’s quite funny too.
You have such a brutal opening to the film - how early on did that come to you when writing the script?
I always knew I wanted to start the movie with what felt like an ending. From the very first draft it was always there, a guy standing alone in a weed field with a gun contemplating taking his life. That was something I never really wanted to lose no matter how much the script would change. That was always there and inevitably a thing people would always, at a certain point say, ‘You’re not actually going to start the movie like this, right? You’ve got to lose that scene.’ Even through the editing of the film, there were people who were occasionally saying I should lose the scene. No. It’s not just attention grabby, but it’s actually a nice bookend to what the movie is saying.
There were so many scenes like that. The movie evolved and changed over the course of shooting. There are only a couple of scenes that actually ended up being deleted that we shot and didn’t put in the film. They were actually related to Frank Grillo’s character. It was just because…he was going to appear earlier in the film but it was a scene that really told you where he stood morally and I realised it was far more interesting if we took that scene out and then you spent so much more time guessing who he is and what his allegiances are. It was a hard scene to cut because I loved it but I think the movie is better for it.
What was the biggest challenge of making a film like Die Alone when it has such an ambitious scope?
I think the biggest challenge was just bringing it to life. I know that’s a big catch all, but there were literally years where I was positive this movie wouldn’t exist and then to finally get the green light to go ahead and make it, I had to take all that anger and stress and energy and just pour it into positivity. This was our one shot so I had to inspire and hopefully surround myself with super talented people, which I did. We had to go as hard as we could for six months and make it worth the fight.
Would you like to continue exploring this world with a new set of characters?
I never say never. I’m someone who, I think with everything I write, I think about it so much I can imagine other characters or stories in that world but I do think the beautiful thing about Die Alone is not the zombies or the Reclaimed, or the world, it’s the story of these two weird loners. One who is super independent and tough but lonely and one who is super dependent and scared and in need to help. That’s why I love that story. I don’t need another movie in this world, but if there was enough demand, I would never say never.
I’ve seen the film and loved it, and it's definitely unique - could you tell our readers what makes this different to other "zombie" movies?
I think this movie is different than other zombie movies because secretly, it’s not a zombie movie! It’s a love story. It’s a story about amnesia, survival, and a story about how far we go for people we love. I actually think if you pulled out the zombieness of this movie, it would hopefully still be a good story but if you pulled the love story, it would be kind of hollow. My hope is that my deep love of zombie films is so baked into this movie that fans of the genre will get a lot out of it in terms of the mythology and the world and seeing some different things, especially if they love practical creatures. The secret to me is this is a love story more than anything else.