I wasn’t going to write about this but I decided I need to. A little over a week ago we screened my feature directorial debut END for the cast and crew.
END is the tale of Molly & Matt, a father and teenage daughter who are trying to survive a pandemic of the walking dead. Matt has decided the best course of action as society crumbles around them and civilization flees is to fortify his house, keep he and Molly separated from the outside and proceed with life as close to normal as he can. All of this is thrown out the window when several months into their isolation a band of survivors stumbles onto Matt & Molly’s house and seeks shelter. Together the group of survivors has to deal with the current state of their lives, and the tragedies they have all faced in getting to where they are now. Everyone must face the fact that the world has changed and they can do nothing to stop it.
I did not make a traditional zombie movie. My film is going to get billed as a horror film or zombie movie and it really is not. There are no zombies in my film. Instead, I set out to make a film about the people that were pushed to the very edge of despair and how they deal with finding a way to move forward every day. END is by far a drama more than anything else and I love that it plays that way.
I cannot talk about the flaws in END, while I am sure there are many because any film shot in eight days and completed on a budget as miniscule as mine always has some intrinsic flaws, but as I have lived with this film for well over a year now I am sure that I see more flaws than actually exist in the finished product. Things that bother me I am sure bother no one else except maybe my editor, and things that I know are issues because of how we had to shoot or fix larger issues will obviously be noticed by critics much more harsh than myself. If my film manages to get sold or seen on a larger scale I am sure critics will find many fun ways to create puns from the name of my film.
But at the end of the day the majority of people at the screening loved END and won’t stop talking about it. The critical artist in myself would love to immediately squash this all down and say that these people praised the film because they know someone involved in it, but the fact that everyone is saying very specific things about the film and everyone is saying something radically different stood out to them and this makes me think that not all of it can be made up. It makes me think that perhaps I accomplished my goal. Perhaps, a cross section of the audience saw past the “walkers” and horror trappings and realized that my film is actually about what it means to be human, and the persistence to survive.
I hope some day many more viewers will get to watch not just END but an entire catalog of movies with my name attached to the directing credit, but for now all I can hope is that perhaps the right people will see or want to see END, and just maybe I can finally call my self a full time director.
Director: Megan Welch
Writer: Christopher Welch
Matt: David Scott
Molly: Lauren Dunacheck
David: Brian Renner
Angela: Marissa Merrill
William: David Sharp
Jacob: Ashton Reese Trujillo
Alan: Pearce Akpata
Phil: Weston Cody
Jodie: Samantha Kern
Doc: Brian Harvey
James: Lorn Connor
I wasn’t going to write about this but I decided I need to. A little over a week ago we screened my feature directorial debut END for the cast and crew.
