Budget Not Included: An Interview with "The Battery" director and star Jeremy Gardner

Earlier this year, I had the task of compiling a piece on low budget zombie films for The SFX A-Z of Zombies. Among the gems featured - and some of the turds I neglected to feature - was standout slacker zom-com-drama The Battery. Sun-kissed, laconic and a joy from start to finish, it's genuinely one of my viewing highlights of the year. Soon as I could, I got in touch with writer, director and mightily-bearded lead, Jeremy Gardner for a few searching questions. Gracious with his time and considered in his responses, I reproduce his answers here in full, for the first time.

Gardner: doing that hand thing what directors do.

Warning: contains mild plot spoilers.

The movie – at least to me – seems fairly entrenched in Americana (baseball, rootsy rock music, the cattle and countryside etc). Was all that a conscious decision on your part?

Baseball = US Rounders?

It wasn't conscious that it all be of an "Americana" piece, I think that just happens to be a bigger part of my own personality than maybe I was even aware of.  I was raised in a very Southern part of Florida. Not south Florida, but "Southern" Florida. Lots of grits and manners and cattle and country music and fishing, my father watched classic westerns almost exclusively.

So even though I've moved away from that, and have a far more eclectic cultural taste, those sensibilities are sort of ingrained in me I think. I love baseball, always have. Get a few pints in me and I'll argue that it is the greatest game human beings have ever devised. Baseball and chess. I know a UK audience might be inclined to groan at that, but there is a patience and a constant tension and release to the pace of baseball that I think also informed the structure of the film.

"Where's Jason?" "Wrong film, dickhead"

I’ve read a lot of reviews that see this as a buddy drama first, and a horror film second. How do you feel about that assessment?

It is certainly a fair assessment. I love horror movies. It is a genre that I hope to always work in, but it's also a very malleable genre in that a lot of my favorite horror films are also dramas, or comedies, or sci-fi or adventure. The horror element of our film is for the most part on the fringe of what is essentially a character study, so I can understand it being billed as a drama first. Strangely though, there are a lot of places that have billed it as a comedy, which I do think is misleading.

One of the things I am most proud of with the film is how funny it is, but the humor is an organic offshoot of just trying to create honest performances. I wouldn't want anyone to throw down their money expecting a laugh-riot like Shaun of the Dead. Although I guess even calling it a zombie film could be misleading considering how often they are relegated to the background.

The zombies are often a background, almost unseen threat: was this budgetary limitation, or was it always the plan?

"Fuck Nicotinell, I'm going hardcore"

It was always my idea to make a character study first and a zombie film second. I could have wrapped the story of these two men around the bones of any number of catastrophes: plague, war, asteroid; I chose zombies because I have always loved  them as a convention, but more often than not I'm disappointed with the execution of zombie movies. That said, it probably would have been a lot easier to suggest a super-flu wiped everyone out than make it something that requires a lot of makeup effects and extras.

So the answer to your question is: A bit of both, the movie was always going to focus on the characters, but with more money and makeup and extras we would probably have had more zombies. And in fact we cut at least four featured zombies from the finished film mostly for execution reasons.  In a way the zombies for us ended up being like Bruce the shark in JAWS never working; we tried to have more of zombies, we shot more of them, but for one reason or another those scenes didn't work and now we are getting maybe a bit more credit than we deserve for keeping them in the background.

Having said that, however, that’s an impressively sizeable crowd of zombies around the car – how did you convince people to become part of your undead hoard?

I'm so glad you that crowd impresses you, because honestly, it depresses me. Not the actors, not the extras, they were all incredible and patient and stayed out on a mountain road all day in the heat and into the night without complaining. But the fact that we shot in such a rural area meant we were really only able to wrangle about thirty extras. Which is fine and can be made to feel substantial from inside a car when they are crowded around the windows, but there was a beautiful shot that I ended up cutting, that revealed how small that horde actually was. 

"Look, do you want your fucking windows washed or what?"

Originally I wanted to shove the audience into this tin can car for forty minutes, and then suddenly, finally, cut to this wide shot from the field, of a mass of zombies swallowing up this tiny car. And we shot it. And it was lovely. And it would have been such a breath of fresh air. But it was so completely underwhelming. The amount of extras we had simply could not be made to look intimidating when you saw them from a distance. The whole crew and I argued extensively over that shot, and it was one of the only times I exercised my right to say "I hear you, but I am putting my foot down on this." I would rather watch a movie and be mad that I didn't get to see something I was hoping to see, than see it and think... "That's it?"  So we had to get creative about the ways we cut around it and I think it works much better the way it is now.

With such a familiar formula as the zombie genre, it must have been very difficult to do something new. But boy, did you ever manage it! I’m talking about Mickey’s wonderfully perverse appreciation of the female zombie. What inspired you to put that scene in?

Zombie girl. Would you?

It would be, I think, I a disservice to your story to write something simply to shock the audience. That scene came straight from the ether and through my head and out the pen and onto paper and was completely organic to the level of desperation and loneliness I wanted the character of Mickey to have sunk to. That said, once it was written, I really believed that if the actors could pull it off then it really would be something new and shocking and funny and perverse; and my God those two absolutely killed that scene.

It was one of the few scenes that I wasn't in and it was such a pleasure to just stand off screen and watch them absolutely attack those performances. It was such an awkward thing to do, and it took a lot of faith on their parts to trust that we were going to shoot it properly and cut it right and not let it wind up a joke for the wrong reasons. I was so thrilled they pulled it off. And Adam, he literally looked like he might have actually pulled "it" off.

Without the might of a studio publicity machine, how has it been promoting The Battery? Hard?

It has been difficult. Very difficult. It is a lot of tweeting and retweeting and begging respected sites to cover your film and then wading into the terrifying comment sections and being humble and approachable and engaged. That is something we have tried to cultivate from the beginning, this idea that we can be contacted and asked questions and be a part of the conversation. We aren't reclusive shadow people and we didn't make a perfect film, so write us, tweet at us, call us even---413-24-VOLVO, That's a real phone number!--- and tell us what you liked or didn't like or ask us how we did something. That's the only way we are going to grow an audience who is interested not just in this film, but in what we do next. And I think it is probably one of the most important things you can do if you don't have Hollywood muscle pushing you out into every corner of the market, just be available. Luckily we have also had some really incredible champions at some amazing sites and magazines who have helped get us awareness as well.

"Like my film or else muthafucka!"

OK, hypothetical time – a studio offers you the chance to either re-film your movie with blockbuster-style megabucks, or fund a sequel with a modest, but reasonable budget. Which do you do, and why?

Sequel. We joke all the time about remaking the movie every time there is a new camera update or an actor's schedule opens up, but we've really come to understand that there is something endearing about the rough edges of the movie. This scene is dark because night fell, and the sound in this scene sucks because the rain killed the microphone and we had to record in-camera. We have thought about sinking money into some of these things and trying to fix them, but the film is out there now. It isn't ours anymore. And audiences have embraced it so passionately, I believe in a lot of ways, because it feels like something that was made, by the skin of teeth, and just barely. It's like a raft made of bundled flotsam and jetsam that actually makes it across a river: it has problems, but it works.

Keep strollin' dude.

So, to that end, I have an idea for a sequel, and it would also work as a stand-alone movie. It would be called, obviously, The Orchard. I have always envisioned it as the Desperado to El Mariachi. Same character, same quirk of filmmaker personality, but bigger and more slick.

Speaking of a sequel, could that be a possibility?

It is an idea we are entertaining, but it would be silly to jump into a sequel without any demand for it. I am working on a couple different scripts now, and the other guys in the group have some ideas too. So the sequel will only happen if it is demanded by a torch-wielding mob, or someone commissions it. 

How much of a part has the ease of digital distribution played in your decision to get this movie made?

It was definitely a part of the original pitch. But no movie gets made now without considering the digital outlets. The two most important factors that got the movie made, at least on the business side, were Genre and Budget. Horror sells without name actors, and we would have had to fuck the thing up beyond recognition not to at least make our money back on a six thousand dollar budget.

Thank you Jeremy!

The Battery is distributed States-side on iTunes, PSN, Amazon Prime and XBox Live. It's gradually making its way around select European horror festivals before the producers either get digital distribution sorted or a DVD/Blu-Ray. Also, I neglected to mention the soundtrack, which is kick-ass. 

So, soon as you legally can, get this film in your eyes and earpipes.

All images copyright The Battery Movie / Joe DeAngelis. Official poster designed by Greg Bunbury.

A truncated version of this interview was originally published in The SFX A-Z of Zombies, edited by Will Salmon. He's a really great pop culture scribble chap who's dead nice too. Just thought you should know.