The ‘Didn’t Die’ Filmmakers Made a Zombie Movie About Enduring a Tragedy — Then Their House Burned Down in the Los Angeles Fires
It’s daylight, and a family is racing from their home with their infant child, unsure if they’ll ever be able to come back.
That scene is the climax to “Didn’t Die,” an indie zombie film premiering in the Midnight section at Sundance, but it’s also the reality that director Meera Menon, cinematographer and writer Paul Gleason (and Menon’s husband), and producer Erica Fishman had to deal with earlier this month as they fled their Altadena homes due to the Eaton Fire in Los Angeles.
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“Didn’t Die” is a film about coping with tragedy, figuring out how to pass the time, endure, and most of all live, not just survive, in the face of an apocalypse. In the weeks leading up to the festival, the “Didn’t Die” filmmakers have been doing just that. Each of their homes were completely burned down in the fires, both Menon and Gleason’s on the east side of Altadena near Eaton Canyon, as well as Fishman’s on the west side of town four miles away from where the fires began.
In an even more surreal twist, the baby that appears in the film is Menon and Gleason’s actual daughter. And the home where several scenes of “Didn’t Die” was shot is the same Altadena home that’s now lost. The images seen of it in the movie, including several that are staged as black and white, 8mm, childhood home movies before the zombie apocalypse began, are some of the last records they have of their home.
“The 8mm footage, which is supposed to emulate a memory, is now, in fact, a memory of something that’s lost,” Gleason told IndieWire. “The levels of strangeness and strange serendipity are hard to articulate, and probably something we’ll be processing for a while.”
IndieWire spoke with Menon, Gleason, and Fishman over Zoom, with Menon wearing a USC sweatshirt that had been donated as part of fire relief. A week before the fires began on January 7, the team, including editor and Fishman’s partner Geoff Boothby, had delivered a final DCP to Sundance. A week removed, they were still eager to attend the festival (the movie is for sale) and be with a supportive community of people. But what’s more, the film offers some bittersweet solace.
“All four of us were nervous about it, but I actually found it to be comforting to see that it still exists in this movie,” Menon said. “Because the strangest part of this whole thing is just, it’s all gone. It feels surreal to think all of this stuff, not just our home, a whole community’s worth of homes, just gone. So it’s something comforting to see that it did exist. It wasn’t just a dream.”
The Eaton Fire started almost literally in Menon and Gleason’s backyard, visible to them before it was all over the news. Menon and Gleason evacuated to Fishman’s house on the other side of town. They stayed a couple of days before relocating again to El Segundo, but it was at that point that Fishman realized she needed to leave too. She packed a few things, took her cat and dog, and went to a house in North Hollywood after a friend texted her to “Just come over. Don’t be stupid.”
“Very much in the spirit of the movie, we just showed up in the living room like, ‘Hey, can we sleep here? Now we have this child,” Fishman said. “Those types of things feel really strange and so eerily similar to the film.”
The memories Gleason and Menon have from the day of the fire are themselves cinematic. To illustrate just how close they were to the danger, one exterior shot in the film from their lawn has Eaton Canyon in the background.
“We had just walked in the canyon with our daughter earlier. It was a beautiful day. The winds were cold, and the air was warm, and we took some of the most beautiful pictures and had an incredible memory,” Gleason said. “And I was in the garage where we had filmed a lot of this stuff, and all of a sudden we didn’t have power, and the door suddenly opened. Meera’s with our daughter, Lakshmi, and she’s like, ‘The canyon’s on fire,’ and the cognitive disconnect there. I looked at it and it was just, oh no, we have to leave now. There’s no time to think. So we just threw our dog and our daughter into our car and drove.”
“We didn’t even know where we were going to go when we pulled out of the driveway. That’s how fast we were moving,” Menon added.
The good news is, everyone was safe, from their pets to their children. But also the hard drives for “Didn’t Die,” strangely one of their last possessions. Before they came to Park City, they took time to visit the remnants of their homes, donning painter suits and masks to sift through what’s left and to be able to get just a bit of closure.
The film’s premiere should provide another dose of closure. Within 48 hours, both pairs of kids were clothed with bins of outfits, Sundance had been asking them for their sizes to gift them additional clothes, and they joked the only thing they really needed was a time machine to be more prepared. Ultimately, the filmmakers are ready to move on to the next thing.
“I think the only thing you can do in these times is move forward and put one foot in front of the other,” Menon said. “And this is the next thing we were going to do. So we’re going to do it.”
Of course Menon hopes that audiences like it and that the film finds a distributor, but Menon said “Didn’t Die” now is “too meaningful” to them to not be figuring out what’s next for it. For them the message of the film is that “loss is survivable,” and you can find meaning and beauty again.
“We’ve strangely been just overwhelmed with gratitude, not sadness,” Menon said. “Most of the time we feel grateful, and then we have these moments of sadness, but we have so much support, it’s hard to not just be buoyed by that gratitude and feel that much more strongly that attention and support needs to be directed towards people that don’t have these support networks.”
“We have so much to look forward to in the short term, and things are going to work out okay,” Gleason added. “It’s a tragedy that is so much bigger than this micro story that we have to tell. And I’m grateful that we have our friends and our family. There’s a rhyming to everything that’s happening, and it reminds you how lucky you are, and if that’s what we get to walk away with, that’s actually a great reminder.”
“Didn’t Die” premieres on Tuesday, January 28 at the Sundance Film Festival.
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