Zak hilditch biography of christopher
Blog
You’ve come from a graphic design and advertising background, how did you first make leap into drama?
I studied documentary at film school. I had no interest in doing drama. Zero. I thought it was the dirty end of filmmaking. But one day I told a friend a story about something that happened to me when I was a kid and they said it would make a great short film.
I had never had an idea for a short film, I wasn’t interested in making drama, but when they said that, it kind of clicked, “Maybe I could make a short film, actually write something and create characters rather than as a documentarian try and ‘find a story’ with real people.” I ended up making the short Crackerbag. My producer and I entered it into The Cannes film Festival and it won the Palme d’Or for short film in 2003.
Cracker Bag was a very quick entry into the world of drama and that opened my eyes to the idea that you could ‘fabricate a story’ and it was OK. It seams like such an obvious thing, but to me who was only interested in documentary, it was a revelation. This lead to making my feature film Last Ride and on the back of that I met John Edwards and Imogen Banks, who had seen the film and wanted to talk to me about doing some episodes of a new show they were making Offspring. I remember going in there and them telling me what Offspring was about, which sounded to me like a romantic comedy. I said “I don’t know if you’ve seen Last Ride (2009), it’s a pretty heavy drama, I’m not sure I’m the rom-com guy…” and they said, “Don’t fight the material, we want you to be the filmmaker you are, but have fun with it. If it’s comedy, make it funny. If it’s dramatic, make it dramatic.” They encouraged me to bring my point of view to the show. I learnt so much from that experience. From there I went on to make the telemovie Beaconsfield (2012) and from there Puberty Blues&
Feature Films
2014 Broken Contract Minor Dir: James Pentecost
2013 Wrong Night Stand Minor Dir: Mark/Neal Huxley/ Jag Pannu Productions
2013 The Turning/Aquifer Minor Dir: Robert Connolly, Arena Media Pty Ltd
2012 These Final Hours Minor Dir: Zak Hilditch, 8th In Line Productions
2010 The Rag Witch Minor Dir: Jacob Holmes-Brown, Lion’s Den Pictures
Short Film
2013 Synesthesia 1922 (Zak Hilditch, 2017) 3 out of 4 stars. Based on a 2010 Stephen King story of the same title, from his collection Full Dark, No Stars, the new Netflix film 1922 tells a gruesome morality tale of crime and punishment where no one escapes the consequences of an evil deed. Led by an excellent Thomas Jane (Before I Wake), the cast delivers solid performances all around, with Molly Parker (Jackie Sharp on Netflix’s House of Cards) and Dylan Schmid (Nick on Hulu’s Shut Eye) rounding out the leads. The film also features solid period production design and a mostly strong script (from writer/director Zak Hilditch, These Final Hours). Though small in its narrative ambitions, it delivers the dramatic payoff with a satisfying punch. If it occasionally disappoints in its expositional dialogue, it makes up for this with its near-constant atmosphere of dread and unease. This is, after all, the world of horror master King. Jane plays Wilf (short for Wilfred) James, a Midwestern farmer down on his luck. It may be 7 years before the start of the Great Depression, but he’s already in need of help. His wife, Arlette (Parker) has some inherited land coming her way, but since they don’t get along, she plans to sell it to an outside outfit and take off with their teenage son, Henry (Schmid). It’s this last threat that galls most of all: how dare the woman take the boy from his father? What, then, will be his legacy, especially if he loses the farm? And so Wilf plots a grizzly way out that doesn’t quite go as expected, leaving him literally haunted by his deed, suffering the wages of sin. It may not be particularly original, but the details are well-realized, and the film moves along at a brisk pace. A minor King adaptation, perhaps, but a good one.
Two years ago, filmmaker Zak Hilditch had an idea. It involved a young mother on a road trip. Her child's bitten by a rattlesnake, then saved by a mysterious woman. Later, she learns that in order to keep her child from succumbing to the snake's venom, she must take another human life before sunset.
Eventually, this would become the basis for the horror flick Rattlesnake, which Hilditch wrote and directed. Ahead of its world premiere at the Austin Film Festival Thursday night, just hours before premiering on Netflix, Hilditch told SYFY WIRE about how his own budding fatherhood was the catalyst for getting the movie made.
"I didn't know what to do with it," Hilditch said about his initial idea. "I didn't know how it was anything; I didn't know how it was a story, I didn't know how it was a script."
Two years would go by before Hilditch started to really develop the idea, which he credits mostly to the impending birth of his son.
"So, I'd been walking around with this idea for two years in the back of my brain, [and] my son was one month from being born, and it just clicked," Hilditch said. "I knew that I needed to smash this script out quickly because once he arrived, it was lights out for that idea — for a while."
With parenthood on the horizon, and knowing he was about to lose out on lots of extra free time, Hilditch started to hammer out the script rather quickly. He even admitted that "I'd been sitting on it so long that it sorta just came out of me."
Eventually, Hilditch showed the script to producer Ross M. Dinerstein, who'd previously worked with the director on the Netflix adaptation of Stephen King's1922. As a parent himself, Dinerstein said he immediately related to the story, but was intrigued by the way Hilditch wanted to drape the film in ambiguity.
"I think that's why the movie really works," Dinerstein