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You ever had that moment Dave where you see the girl you know you're gonna marry?
My names Beth
The script came about because me and Tom Wadlow, the director talked about trying to do something
different and also wanted to do something a bit bigger trying to do a feature film and
looked at different ideas and we had already had an idea for a zombie film from a little
while ago and that sort of developed this story of one man against the apocalypse. We
thought it would be interesting to take that kind of view and see what we can do, try and
create a drama about that rather than a simple zombie horror movie.
I mean I like sci-fi, I like horror but generally I want something grounded in the real world
that sort of makes sense and say something a bit about life than just action for the
sake of it.
When me and Tommy were talking about the script early on we started discussing ideas and films
that we liked in the genre, so obviously the classics like Night of the Living Dead, Day
of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead those kind of things were big influences as well as other
films that aren't entirely connected to the genre but we liked the idea of the human element
of it, so the idea of creating this personal story, this relationship story with a backdrop
of the end of the world and everything going wrong and humanity as we know it not existing
anymore.
Scott's a very interesting character he was brought to right because you have so much
time with him cuz he's on screen for most of the scenes I think he's in nearly everything.
So you have a lot chances to make him multi-layered, you can make him in the flashback sequences
where he's quite cocky and confident, then you see him in what is actually present time
where he's actually a lot more withdrawn from life, it's kind of interesting watching his
life unfold in flashbacks to see what made him that way and see how he reacts to things
now and how he would have reacted to them then, and also he's quite, he's quite normal
I'd like to say and quite an ordinary guy set in an extraordinary situation.
Beth was a difficult character to write because you mostly see her a lot of the time in flashbacks
in the normal world so you had to kind of create somebody who would be a regular person
but also knowing that towards the future she was gonna wind up being a bit more aggressive
and more outgoing so you could kind of bring her back into the story and let her loose
that way, so it's very very difficult to balance that especially with a female role without
making her just seem like a man that we've cast a lady in the part so it was kinda, kinda
tough but ultimately I think she works very well she's one of my favourite characters
I've ever written I think, my favourite character that I've ever created.
Through the drafts of the script it became clear of the direction the story should go
for example Scott gets a chance to go to London with Beth obviously from a budgetary reason
we couldn't actually go to London to film, but also from a story point of view it didn't
feel right because the character of Scott is quite heavily conflicted, in the early
part of the film he is very confident arrogant and showboaty and the way he meets Beth for
example he's very cocky with the way he approaches her and she's actually on a date herself and
he sort of just cuts in and takes over but then when he is sort of threatened a little
bit by the fact she goes she's looking for her family he sort of pulls away from her
and doesn't want to be as involved cuz there's danger there and he's not a fighter he definitely
tries to hide away and so that kind of dictated a lot of the story to us.
The main thing with Wasteland is love, and the other one that I wrote about was loss,
where people have lost family, lost friends, people have lost society so that's the other
main theme. The love aspect was very very key to our writing and probably the reason
why I wanted to write the screenplay so much. It was great to have a story like Wasteland
where you had all the horror and all the drama but actually the core of the film is about
love, it's about love and actually about losing love and then still kind of yerning for it
and waiting for it and was about to say the power of love but that's just going a bit
cheesy, but it is that kind of story where it's really focusing on two people's love
and how that kind of lasts over that time period and against all odds. It took a lot
of thought about trying to balance up what you see as a world how you see the modern
world but then trying to think about how you would react if it was all taken away, if we
didn't have computers and power and the friends and the simple idea of going to the supermarket
to buy stuff how would you react to all that? So those were the kind of things I tried to
think about was what my life would be like in the situation just trying to keep that
sort of thought running through everything I did, just trying to keep characters real
and as believable as possible in that situation which takes a lot of imagination, takes a
big stretch but still not losing the audience thinking this isn't realistic.
So as soon as Scott leaves the hide out that the home he created he meets characters called
Max and Lolli. Max and Lolli are so totally different to every other character in the
film because they're really characters born out of this new world order, this new creation
that's happened, where Max for example used to be a pharmacist and he was very pinned
down in his job he couldn't be this flamboyant creative character, but when all the rules
have gone and there's nothing left why not just become who you always wanted to be.
The main challenge was trying to keep focus on the budget trying to create a great story
that would still work and would still please fans of horror movies but yet not trying to
explode and go crazy with what was going off and show too much of the world and trying
to make it possible to make, trying to make it actually possible to film.
You sure you're okay?
This is Scott Miller
is there anybody out there?