Meera Menon has directed episodes of some of the biggest series on television, including “The Walking Dead,” “Westworld” and “Ms. Marvel.” But after she had a baby, she wanted to make a radical departure and revisit the beginning of her career, so she made an indie zombie movie with her best friends. Now, “Didn’t Die” is debuting on Tuesday night in Sundance’s Midnight section.
“It was a spontaneous act of creation in the middle of directing a million different TV episodes that are my bread and butter these days,” she says. “I had a moment to breathe because I had the baby that’s in the film. I decided to just make something with my friends again, and it was a movie that was made so much in collaboration with the cast.”
“Didn’t Die” begins well after a zombie apocalypse has taken place, and humanity has more or less figured out how to coexist and protect themselves from the walking dead. Vinita (Kiran Deol) passes the time by hosting an irreverent podcast about life in this new world, and heads to her family’s home to record a live anniversary special. What follows is a surprisingly moving story about a woman coming home again and reconnecting with her siblings, which is slightly derailed once an ex-boyfriend enters the picture, clutching a baby that isn’t his, saying he needs help.
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Menon says that although the initial idea came about because of her time on “The Walking Dead,” she and her collaborators — including her husband Paul Gleason, who was the cinematographer as well as a producer and co-writer on the film — were much more interested in exploring humanity through the project.
“Paul and I wrote a 40-page outline with some pieces of dialogue here and there, but the cast ran with it and workshopped it and figured out what the movie was really about,” she says. “I directed ‘The Walking Dead’ and that’s where the kernel of the idea for the movie started. In directing scenes from that show, I came to realize how interesting grief and loss were as things the characters in that show would be dealing with. I started to wonder what a zombie movie that focused more on that side of things, and less so the action, would look and feel like.”
Additional inspiration came from the COVID pandemic.
“When I started reaching outward to the cast and the tiny group of people that ended up helping me make this film, some of them are zombie film fans, but some of them are not,” Menon says. “I think the film is a product of people thinking about how to find meaning in a world that’s been devastated. That was the creative prompt for everyone to start to wrangle with. What really matters in life when everything falls apart? I think that was motivated by our lived experience of 2020 and COVID.”
Vinita’s podcast at first seems like the musings of a person not taking the end of the world too seriously, yet it becomes clear it’s masking her inability to process a catastrophe. Menon believes this points to a common reaction among certain swaths of the population.
“It’s probably our generational affect as millennials,” she says. “There’s so much of Kiran in the character. We talked about even in her costuming choices that she should look a little like Daria, and I think her vibe is a little like Daria. We’re influenced by ‘Daria’ — if you’re born of a certain generation, that’s a pivotal reference, a crucial reference. But it comes down to Kiran and her affect and the way she deals with tragedy and sadness in the world. I saw her react this way in 2020, and always felt like she could be a vehicle for hope and optimism and proactivity in a world that feels leveled by something.”
Menon is debuting the film in the wake of another tragedy, as the Eaton Fire burned down the Altadena home she shared with Gleason and their 3-year-old. Watching the film, this adds a new dimension, given that flashback scenes with the family before the zombie apocalypse are shot at the Altadena house.
“Those pickups of the family and their memories and happier times were all shot in my backyard,” she says. “That was all caught up in this fire from a week ago, so it’s crazy that those flashbacks and those memories were shot on Super 8 film in our home. It’s just a wild fact now in context.”
That said, Menon was surprised at the emotions conjured up while watching the film for the first time after the devastation in Altadena.
“We had to do a quality check on the final print we sent to Sundance,” she says. “It was me, Paul, our producer Erica Fishman and our editor, and her husband, Geoff Boothby. All of us had lost our homes and we were all sitting there with our two daughters running around in the theater watching this movie. And it was, honestly, weirdly comforting. I’m so glad we have it now, both on film for ourselves, but we have this whole tale that we wove. I don’t doubt that it’s going to help get through it.”