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Apr 23, 2018 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

In Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling’s seven-minute short film, Cargo, a dying father rigs his infant daughter into a backpack carrier for her own safety; just out of reach at eye level, he dangles a bag of festered carrion from the end of a stick, like a carrot in front of the proverbial donkey. As he succumbs to his bite and joins the ranks of the living dead, he continues to march; eventually, carrying his daughter to safety amongst a group of survivors. Even in death, he’s able to carry out his fatherly duty to protect his child.

It’s a harrowing image, and one that resonated with audiences. Cargo was a festival hit, and has picked up more than 14 million views since it was posted online in 2013. It proved to be the perfect calling card for its co-directors, Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling. The duo were eventually tapped to expand their idea to feature-length. The new film version of Cargo stars Martin Freeman, and was snatched up by Netflix for a May 18^th release.

The movie greatly expands upon the preceding short, but the core idea remains the same: Freeman’s Andy has less than 48 hours to find someone to care for his daughter before a zombie’s bite transforms him into a monster. The filmmakers’ unshakeable image has been unfolded into a father’s desperate quest.

One of the feature’s most interesting elements – one that makes it so distinctly Australian – is that the pocket of survivors best managing to carry on their lives post-apocalypse aren’t a grizzled biker gang, a rogue paramilitary group, or anything so cliché. They’re the outback’s indigenous groups, whose abilities to hunt and live off the land have better equipped them to survive in a world where so much of society has crumbled. We spoke with first-time feature directors Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling about incorporating indigenous culture into their film, and how their fresh take on the undead genre made its way to the screen.

Austin Trunick [Under the Radar]: The short – and eventually, the feature – sprouted from the image of a zombie carrying a baby on its back. Can you tell me where that image came from?

Ben Howling: It’s actually a very contentious issue between us. [Laughs]

Yolanda Ramke: Jokingly contentious! We both think we came up with it.

Howling: We were both brainstorming for another festival, a 48-hour film festival, and somewhere between these two amazing minds, the idea came. There was something very provocative about it, and it just stuck with us. We never actually made anything for that festival, but it stuck with Yolanda and three months later she’d come up with a script based on that idea, and it was great. So we jumped on making that as a short for another festival.

Of course, the short film did very well at the festival, and a lot of people watched it when it was put online. It snowballed from there, and eventually became this feature film version. Let’s go back before all of that, though. Where did the two of you first connect?

Ramke: We met ten years ago, both working on a reality show.

Howling: Big Brother.

Ramke: We became buddies on that. We had a common interest in film, and a lot of the same tastes in films. We ended up living in the same city, in Sydney. We were both making our own short films and helping each other out. When Cargo came along, because it was an idea we’d come up with together, it just made sense for us to co-direct it.

The short film mostly encompasses two scenes from the full-length Cargo. Where did you even begin to look when you started to expand a seven-minute story to a feature-length script?

Howling: I think it was more like, where don’t we look? There was a lot to do in that world. We knew the heart of it would be the father-daughter love story, but from there the world was our oyster, in terms of what we could add. We weren’t really interested in exploring the outbreak, we wanted our story to begin a ways into it. But then, we also wanted to explore what had happened with the rest of the family – the mom, that is, how she became infected. And then, we started to think about how other people responded to this kind of fallout.

And what about fleshing out your main character, Andy? You had more or less a blank slate – the character doesn’t say much in the short film.

Ramke: The one thing we knew really early on with that character is that we didn’t want him to be the more cliché alpha male. That sort of, “I’m always going to triumph, I’ve got big muscles, I’m a heroic guy.”

Howling: Not that there’s anything wrong with those.

Ramke: No, no. But we’ve seen that done so well, and we had to find a point of difference so that we could carve out our own version of what this genre could be. We also wanted a character that was relatable, who was fallible, who made mistakes, and had some growing to do. Throughout the course of the film, he has to learn how to become a father, how to accept help from the outside, and just how to be more open to other human beings. That was the big driving force of that character. Also, the idea of the character being British was interesting to us on a thematic level, too. Being a distinctly Australian film, and with Australia’s colonial history being quite dark, and quite unresolved and loaded, and the idea of what having a white character interacting with indigenous characters in this world might feel like, and what that would evoke, was interesting to us.

Howling: And with his being British, he’s even more of a fish out of water.

Ramke: And once Martin came on board, it just naturally started to take on his voice when we were doing re-writes. He brought a lot to it as well, of course.

At some point in this process, you stopped calling your monsters ‘zombies’ and started referring to them as ‘virals’ instead. How did that help you avoid many of the genre’s clichés?

Howling: It was more a thing for our performers and crew. The word ‘zombie’ is very loaded and brings a lot of baggage with it. We didn’t want to recreate either of the slow, shuffling Romero-style zombies, or the fast-paced, 28 Days Later kind of zombies. We wanted to find something that was a little more unique. That’s why we coined the term ‘virals.’ People came in and thought, “What’s a viral?” rather than saying, “Oh, I’m a zombie? Well, this is how a zombie behaves.” We then had to figure out how a viral walked and moved, and have our own ideas. We wanted to humanize them as much as possible.

The indigenous characters play such a significant role in this film. Can you tell me about your research process, and the people you worked with to get those things right? It’s an area I imagine you needed to be careful not to get offensively wrong.

Howling: Absolutely. We were very mindful to be respectful to the culture. Early on, as we were outlining, we researched into the culture as much as possible. After that, we brought in a cultural advisor to help. And it was still tricky, even at that point, because we hadn’t identified where we’d be filming. In every location, there’s a different community which has their own culture, and set of beliefs, and language, and practices. Our consultant helped us come with a kind of universal thing, by saying that [in the film] these groups are all traveling from different areas to this one safe haven. In a way, it’s become this sort of boiling pot for all of their different practices. That could help us avoid offending any one group by accidentally attributing a practice to someone who doesn’t follow it. And then after that, once we locked in our filming area, we started working with the locals.

Ramke: We had an indigenous script consultant early on in development, as well, named Jon Bell – he’s a writer, in his own right. He helped us understand an indigenous perspective, and informed us in how an indigenous character might look at this world. Later on, it was a more practical thing of talking to the elders in the communities where we were shooting, showing them the script and fielding any concerns they had about it, re-working any issues they had and seeking permission to use their language in the film. That was a big part of it.

You mentioned that once you cast Martin, you started to re-write the main character to fit his voice. What did Martin Freeman bring to the role that you hadn’t seen in it in the original script?

Ramke: I think it was mostly in the dialogue. Having seen a lot of Martin’s work, I would start to think how Martin’s voice would say something, and that might subconsciously inform sentence structure in the dialogue, or something like that. Other than that, I don’t think we wanted to be too prescriptive about it. We would of course talk through things in pre-production, but just let him find it on the day. That’s one of the things that’s so wonderful about Martin, that he’s so surprising in the choices that he makes. He’ll never play two takes in the same way twice. He gives you so many choices to work with. It was a really fun process for us to watch him bring that character to life.

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Cargo premieres on Netflix on May 18th.