‘These Final Hours’ – the end of the world as we know it

ZAK Hilditch’s apocalyptic thriller taps into the zeitgeist.

Zak Hilditch

MY 22-year-old daughter is gazing at her computer screen when news of an incoming asteroid appears on Facebook. A news feed shows Western Australia’s science minister saying nobody needs to panic. A few friends share jokes about it on chat rooms while another vows to quit his job and start ticking off a few lifetime goals. One friend has organised an end-of-the-world party. In the hours leading up to impact hour, the posted images of Perth are of a pre-apocalyptic panic zone: prayer groups on street corners, sex orgies and burning cars in suburban streets.

Welcome to the elaborate ruse that is part of the website promotion for These Final Hours. It’s an online countdown to one’s very own apocalyptic thrill before the film launches on July 31. “I just experienced the end of the world,” wrote one viewer who, like my daughter, had granted permission for These Final Hours to access their Facebook data and insert the names of friends into the action.

The film’s writer-director Zak Hilditch is beaming as he navigates the site on his laptop. He says helping Sydney-based social media outlet Soap to dream up 900 content items and 20 minutes of online video was almost as much fun as creating his first feature film.

Trailer: These Final Hours

It is symptomatic of the knack that Hilditch — with producer Liz Kearney — seems to have for tapping into the zeitgeist, or intuiting what today’s multimedia consumer might want to see. It comes of being a 30-something, social media-addicted individual whose mother allowed him to stay up late and watch whatever films he liked.

It is also the result of hard work during and after his film course at Curtin University, where he made five short and two feature films in four years. Named WA Young Filmmaker of the Year then best director at the WA Screen Awards, his 2006 debut feature The Actress was selected for the Slamdance festival in Utah. In between films, he’s driven a biscuit delivery van to make ends meet.

Hilditch is cheerful and polite, and a year ago married Alison James, a Perth-based documentary maker. So it feels faintly odd to hear him say that the script for These Final Hours came “out of fascination with my own mortality, the kind of thinking that keeps you up at night. Disasters often take people out without any warning and you’re gone.”

A few days after our interview the world reels from the missile attack that ended the lives of 298 plane passengers. Unlike the Malaysia Airlines tragedy, it was a natural disaster Hilditch chose to focus the minds of his characters in their final hours. “If you could turn around and see a natural disaster coming, where you can’t do anything about it but you have time to prepare, everything would be stripped back,” he says. “ ‘Where do I truly belong? What should I be doing before I die?’ They are universal questions.”

Hilditch and his wife have watched a lot of end-of-world movies, from Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later to Armageddon. But Hilditch never wanted to linger on the menace itself. To him, the threat is of only passing interest.

What fascinates him is the human activity that threat stirs up, rather in the way of a stick poked into an orderly ant heap. What are the responses of desperate people: redemptive acts or a raucous descent into oblivion?

Further, his appetite for doom and gloom required that the threat could not be stopped. “That’s the best thing about this movie,” he says, with a slight grin. “Ben Affleck isn’t going to hurl a missile into the asteroid and destroy it. It’s coming and there’s nothing anyone can do but prepare themselves.

“But the beautiful side of this film,” he adds, “is that James has a relationship with a little girl, Rose, and he’ll do one good thing before he dies.” He’s referring to the hard-bitten anti-hero (Nathan Phillips), who rescues a child (Angourie Rice) on his way to a party-to-end-all-parties on the last day on Earth. While the clock ticks down, he also must navigate final partings with his mother (Lynette Curran) and his partner (Jessica de Gouw).

“It was like working backwards,” says Hilditch of the scripting process. “We already knew what the ingredients were to be. It had to be a father-daughter type relationship in an apocalyptic landscape, and it had to convey a sense of heat.”

James — who has her own career in documentary directing (Outback Truckers, Boomtown and a coming ABC series The Dreamhouse) — says death is the only taboo left. “Sex and drugs are lunchtime fare, they’re no longer off-limits. Yet we still find it hard to contemplate our own deaths.” She confirms that Hilditch “thinks a lot about death”.

These Final Hours may have a similar impact on the audience, she suspects, “or at least it will make them think about what’s important in life.”

Viewers have the bonus of getting up from their seats after the world’s cinematic end; they have time to make changes.

The WA film industry’s arm, ScreenWest, received a boost from These Final Hours’ before it opens in cinemas. ScreenWest co-funded Red Dog, the eighth highest grossing Australian film, and Bran Nu Dae, both of which were picked up by Roadshow Films for commercial release. These Final Hours is the first WA film by a homegrown director that Roadshow has picked up for distribution.

The film has already won accolades, including best screenplay at the Australian Academy Cinema Television Arts Awards. It also became the first WA feature film to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in April during the invitation-only Directors Fortnight.

Hilditch is grateful to ScreenWest and Screen Australia for the part they have played in progressing his career. His script was developed through Screen Australia’s Talent Escalator program, Springboard, an initiative described as “enabling filmmakers to develop a short film script that speaks to the sensibilities of their proposed feature film and becomes a strategic tool in its financing.”

Hilditch puts it more bluntly: “It’s a $150,000 sum to make a short film to show investors you can pull off a full-length film and not just say you can.” It enabled him and Kearney to make Transmission; a polished 10-minute film about a young man whose wife is among the victims of a plague-like disease, leaving him and his 10-year-old daughter to fare for themselves. Transmission won best short film and best director at the 2011 St Kilda Film Festival.

After five years, the Springboard scheme is now in abeyance. “To lose the scheme would be bad,” says Hilditch. “If we hadn’t had Springboard, this film would never have got into the shape it needed to get to the next stage.”

That next stage was ScreenWest’s West Coast Visions initiative, which landed him and Kearney $750,000 to start seeking other financial backers. Hilditch says both organisations afforded him the time and effort required to make the script ready to show big investors. “We need to make sure we keep these schemes going, so that if it’s the right project at the right time, it has a chance.”

This weekend in Review: Evan Williams reviews These Final Hours