LUCIDMEDIA

Bringing Zombie Girl to Life

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Wednesday, 06 May 2009 08:57

Eric Mauck, Aaron Marshall and Justin Johnson were three Austin-based filmmakers looking a subject. A notice on a website asking for 12-15 year old kids to take part in a zombie movie got their attention though, if only for the fact that the film’s director was a sixth grader named Emily Hagins.  

“She was this sort of mature 12-year-old girl making a male-dominated genre film, and that right off the bat was of interest,” explains Mauck. “We weren’t sure what was going to come of it, we just thought it was a good idea and said, ‘Let’s run with it.’”

The intention though was to do something more than a simple behind the scenes documentary, and when they found that hook is when the trio of filmmakers knew they had something. “I think once it started expanding to things other than the production of the movie, like this really unique bond between her and her folks,” says Mauck.

“We started clocking more hours of Emily not shooting her movie and we saw how her and her mom have a pretty unique bond,” adds Johnson. “Most people’s parents I know if they work 40 hours a week they just want to watch TV afterwards.”

But naturally being filmmakers themselves, the making of a movie was still of some interest. But was it difficult to leave themselves out of it as experienced filmmakers watching a novice work? “It was at times, for sure. But as we turn on ourselves being filmmakers it just became another subject,” says Mauck. “You’ve just got to turn that off and get the footage you need.”

Marshall adds, “To interfere with her process would have been really tainting what she was doing, and that’s not what any of us wanted to do. We wanted to just be flies on the wall and let it unfold. Even in the way we cut it together we chose not to put in a voiceover or anything to keep our filmmaker voices out of it as much as we could.”

As Johnson points out though, they weren’t completely separated from the action. “We agreed during shooting that if they said, ‘Hey, can you help us,’ or ‘we don’t understand how this light plugs in,’ of course we would.”

In fact, Mauck helped Emily with a tripod at one point. “But after you got 15 minutes of footage of her struggling,” joked Marshall.

As for the filmmakers’ own challenges, most of those came down to taking a lengthy and nuanced two year odyssey and cutting it down to an average movie’s running time. “We had a lot of footage,” explains Marshall. “We shot about 150 hours and trying to figure out how to cut an 89 minute movie that tells the same story you get from watching all the footage, without being manipulative, and while being true to what happened, that’s obviously a challenge. Post-production on a documentary takes a while.”

Another challenge was in deciding when enough was enough in terms of getting the footage. “We spent so much time with them that towards the end we had to make a decision as to when to give them back their lives,” says Mauck.

“Whoever your subject is, you’re not paying them to follow them around,” adds Johnson. “So it really is a challenge at times. You really have to trust your subject and your subject really has to trust you, and you have to allow each other space to breath.”

“At some point in the production Emily and her family got more comfortable with the cameras being around and that comes from putting in the time, and they built a trust with us and we built a trust with them,” says Marshall

Although they travel together with Zombie Girl to film festivals, the three filmmakers are not all based in Austin anymore. Marshall has since moved to LA, but Mauck is still based in the Texas town and was recently on the set of Emily Hagin’s new film, a ghost story called The Retelling,to get some supplementary footage for a future Zombie Girl DVD.

Ask Mauck, Marshall and Johnson about some kind of sequel and they’re hesitant, but come 10 years and if Emily is working on a major motion picture or is working in film in some grander capacity, then that could be a story worth telling. “I’m more anxious to see what Emily makes from this point on,” says Marshall. “She’s gone through that stage where she’s struggled and learned and made those mistakes.”

In the meantime, Marshall says that by basis of skill and locality, Emily’s right where she needs to be. “What makes [Austin] a good place for Emily to be, is because it’s got kind of a perfect storm situation where she’s not in LA or somewhere where it’d probably be a bit too big and overwhelming. She’s in a place where there’s a tight knit and knowledgeable film community and it’s able to give her a good environment to learn and grow in.”