TB: Let's start at the beginning of this. How long has Doghouse been in the works? I think you first sent me some concept art about a year and a half ago.

JW: That's right, yeah. I became friends with the writer, Dan Schaffer - he's a comic book artist and writer - we became friends after Evil Aliens. He saw the film and really liked it and I liked his comics and we just started chatting about other projects. Doghouse was the thing that was born of that. And, yeah, in the early stage - after we got the script done - we started coming up with some designs because we thought it would be important to visualize the Zombirds so that people could see them. It worked from there, really.

As soon as we had the script finished I got it to a producer in the UK, someone who had worked with Carnaby before, and they set the project up with them. We basically made the concept art for them because we knew the first question would be "What do the Zombirds look like?" We wanted to create a visualization that people could understand easily, to really set the film up visually.

TB: In terms of the level of violence and gor and the type of comedy, how is this going to compare to Evil Aliens?

JW: Evil Aliens was just a pure juvenile splatstick comedy. I think Doghouse differs in the fact that it's got splatter in it but it's also very much a film about the characters and is a more mature script in the sense that it includes issues of gender politics and friendship. It has a bit more depth in it. I'd say that it's more in the realm of films like Shaun of the Dead or Severance or films like that. It's still very comic book and still has splatter but Evil Aliens was a movie made purely as a love letter to Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi, early splatter films. It was made for a different reason and meant to be gleefully juvenile whereas this one has a bit more content and should be a little more friendly to a mainstream audience. It's slightly more mature story telling but I don't think my core fan base is going to be disappointed.

TB: I guess, unlike Evil Aliens, on this one you're playing with someone else's money.

JW: Yes, exactly. The budget on Evil Aliens was two hundred and eighty seven thousand pounds. On this one it's two million pounds. And obviously we've got a much better cast, a cast which is well known in the UK. We're working with better talent and stuff like that.

Evil Aliens was an ultra-low budget, grass roots kind of film, made with a real spirit of just going out and making the best we could with as little as possible and this, I think, is a much better crafted film. We have to worry about getting a return back for the investors. The fact that the film got bought at script stage - Sony came on board as the distributor then, which is very unusual for an independent film - we've been quite charmed with it so far. We'll have to wait and see what audiences will think but I think they'll be entertained.

TB: Let's talk about the cast a little bit. I want to ask you about all of them, but I really want to know about Stephen Graham. I was really surprised to see him in this. He's a guy who we don't see very much here ...

JW: Oh, he's a guy you're going to see quite a bit more of.

TB: Well, that's what I wanted to ask about. With the films he's been in that we see here in North America, to be charitable, he's been uneven. In Snatch, for instance, I thought he was the weak link. But then in This Is England, he was absolutely mind blowing. It was hard to believe it was the same guy. He is so good in that film.

JW: Oh, man. That guy, I think he's a real powerhouse performer, to be honest. Certainly he's an actor who is capable of real characterization and is by far the most complex actor that I've had the chance to direct. What's interesting about him, I suppose, as a performer is that he takes very, very different roles between films. He takes on very different projects. Snatch and This Is England couldn't be further apart. Doghouse is, I think, the first time he's done a genre film. Certainly a down-the-line genre film like horror. And he's great. He's got good timing, he's funny, and I'm really looking forward to people seeing him in the role. They won't have seen him like this in any other role he's ever done.

And the reason I say you'll be seeing more of him is because he just shot Public Enemies with Johnny Depp, for director Michael Mann. He did a football hooligan film called Away Days, which is just about to come out in the UK and he just finished shooting a film with Nic Cage, called Season Of The Witch, that they shot in Europe somewhere and he's about to start working with Martin Scorsese, playing Al Capone for HBO.

TB: Oh, wow.

JW: Yeah, it's really diverse stuff.

TB: You know, only Michael Mann and Martin Scorsese, he's not doing any big stuff at all then.

JW: Yeah, exactly! I'm directing a guy who has worked with two of the top five directors! For me it's been wonderful to have someone of his caliber on board. He really brought a lot to the role and made it work in a way that I don't think other actors could have done. His role, the character Vince, is probably the most difficult part in the film to play. He's the guy who's depressed because of his divorce and his mates are trying to cheer him up. He starts off not being himself and throughout the course of the film you slowly see him come back to himself. There's a real progression in his development, he's got a couple really key moments and speeches where you really need an actor like him to bring it to life. When you see the film you'll see what I mean. I think people are going to be surprised.

TB: Danny Dyer people know here from Severance, though he certainly doesn't have the profile here that he does over there.

JW: Do you guys know The Football Factory or The Business?

TB: I know of them but I haven't seen them. They're not available here, I don't think.

JW: Well I certainly recommend you see The Business. The Football Factory is more of a simple film - a simple, violent film - but The Business is a great movie. It's kind of like a British Scorsese flick set in Spain. It's got a real kind of gangster filter and Danny's great in that. You can see how he's a very British actor in Severance so I'm not sure how well that will travel to the States.

TB: I like him in Severance a lot.

JW: He's very charismatic and he has a real presence, something that I think a lot of actors don't have. In the UK he's an actor where people either really love him or they don't like him at all. It's a love him or hate him sort of thing. But on the whole he's got a very big fan base in the UK which will hopefully help the film. I think he's a really good actor and very charismatic and he was great fun to work with. And he enjoys the genre. He's someone who has naturally good comic timing, which helps as well. The comedy very much comes out of the characters themselves and the situations they find themselves in so we needed actors who could make that work rather than it being reactive stuff like in Evil Aliens where you laugh because there's something so outrageous on the screen.

TB: Because you were working with an outside company and Sony was involved, did you find you had to change your working methods at all? Where there demands placed on you that you wouldn't normally have had?

JW: The thing with Sony is that they came on at script stage because they loved the script. And because the film was actually produced by Carnaby Films - who raised the funds through private investors - with Sony on as a distributor only, I was pretty much left alone. Sony came on set while we were shooting but the only time they really became involved was in the edit and that was just for pacing and length, not for content. My cut was ninety six minutes and they wanted it under ninety. That's the only time that they got involved, that seemed to be the only time they felt like they could or should comment. They didn't get involved in the shoot at all. Now they're working with the media campaign and publicity but, so far, they haven't been a thorn in my side, no. I really feel like I've made the film for Carnaby, not for Sony.

TB: In the behind the scenes reel that you posted it certainly appears that you're taking a very practical, physical approach to your effects.

JW: Oh, yes. One thing with Evil Aliens was that even though we did that film with as much practical make up as we could but there was a fair amount of CG in it because we obviously didn't have enough money to build real space ships or some of the other fantasy elements. It's one of the things the film was criticized for. Unless your CG is so brilliant that it meets Hollywood standards people generally want to criticize you for it. I'm not really a big fan of CG other than that it's another tool that a director can use and I think that on the whole fans - especially on the horror side of things - don't like CG stuff. They like stuff which is realistic. And I much prefer the real aesthetic as well so I just wanted to go completely old school and use traditional make up and mechanical effects in this film. Really the only CG in this film is some wire removal and a bit of enhancement on a car crash, but that's about it. I've gone as pure as I can on this, it's mechanical effects and practical makeup all the way. It's definitely old school.

TB: What's it rated in the UK?

JW: We haven't gotten the rating yet because we're just finishing the film still. As soon as we finish the film it'll go before the BBFC. They want a 15 rating on it, which means it can play to a wider audience but we'll have to wait and see how that pans out with the UK censors. We're not expecting too much trouble. The sense is here that when they want to cut stuff it's strong, sexualized violence and what's in this film is more on the fantastic part of the spectrum. It's comic. On the one hand it is quite violent but I think it'll be okay. Of course, I've completely lost my moral compass on this sort of thing. I made the film as scripted and now whether people are going to like it or not like it, I never know what the rating will pan out as. With Evil Aliens I thought the violence was really funny because it was very splatstick and silly so when it got an 18 here I was quite surprised. The anal drilling and things like that is apparently what pushed the rating up. It was sort of spunk as well as blood flowing around in that film. In Doghouse it's much more ... the horror and the comedy are more entwined together. I think tonally it should be a 15. But I don't think that'll be letting down people who like horror, this is very much a horror-comedy. It's got lots of horror in it. It loves the genre. It has real affection for it from the makeup work right down to the score. It's got a score by Richard Wells, who did Evil Aliens, and it's kind of a fusion of John Carpenter via Ennio Morricone - a hybrid spaghetti-western horror score. It all points back to things that fans of this stuff will love. It's meant to really entertain them and make them feel good. It's not designed to really freak anybody out though it's got some of those moments in it like any of these films have to.

TB: Obviously you're going someplace very different with it, but your starting premise - the toxin driving the small town mad - did you have Romero's The Crazies in mind at all?

JW: Not really. The Crazies is a film that I've only seen once and that was when I was a teenager. I doubt I've seen it in twenty years. I know they're doing a remake of that, oddly. The actual idea of a viral infection that only affects women was something that came about because when we were writing Schaffer's girlfriend was ill and she kind of reminded him of a zombie. I don't know if you have the phrase there but here when men are ill you can hear the women referring to it as "man-flu", like there's nothing really wrong with you. So the whole idea of a woman being ill and genderizing it came from that, we thought making it gender specific would be a new spin on the whole viral infection thing. Pretty much all zombie films come from some sort of government experiment, viral infection sort of idea and we wanted to use that in a way that was different from anything else we had seen. Looking on the internet a lot of people seem to think that Doghouse was influenced by Jack Ketchum's Lady's Night which is, once again, something that Dan and I aren't familiar with. I know Ketchum's stuff is really ultra violent and from the research I did it seems that was an early book about a military grade infection that affected women in New York. It sounded very urban and a lot more violent than what we've done. I haven't read it so I don't know if it's really like Lady's Night or not.

I guess the whole women-being infected, the battle of the sexes idea, it's not the first time anyone's come up with trying to use that spin, but in terms of zombie films I can't think of any other film that does that so we really thought we were on to something original. Perhaps other people will think differently. Can you think of any other films?

TB: Films? No. A couple of books that play with the idea but not films.

JW: I think we may have gotten to it in film first, or at least done it in a very different way. There are elements of it that are very British, that I don't want to spoil, things about the delivery system of the virus, that I think are quite original. There's a bit of fun to that. We know these movies and wanted to do something a little different that people would enjoy.

TB: You've mentioned it a couple times but, to be clear, you consider Doghouse a zombie film?

JW: Yeah, it's a zombie film but in some ways ... One of the characters in the film owns a comic book store and argues at the beginning with a child, saying that the creatures in The Evil Dead aren't technically zombies because they aren't actually dead. And in many ways he's right. And it's true here, too. The women who are infected aren't dead so from a practical point of view they're not zombies. That's part of why we call them Zombirds. A bird in Britain is a term for a woman. We treat them like zombies but if you want to be pedantic about it they're not actually dead, they're not resurrected corpses. They're alive, they're just infected and fucked up and they're mutating.

TB: And they use weaponry and things, too.

JW: Yeah. But for me it's the closest I've ever been to a zombie film. The different Zombirds in the film have their own characteristics depending on who they were before they were infected. All the zombies in typical zombie films normally sort of act in the same way where the Zombirds in this film seem to have some of their individual characteristics still left in them.

TB: Do you know if Sony has made any decisions internationally yet, because I know they have a first-look on it.

JW: That's right. Sony has the option to buy whatever territories they want. As soon as the film is totally finished, which will be just before Cannes, Sony US will be seeing it. They've been waiting but we don't want to show it to them until the mix and effects and grading are totally finished. In the next couple weeks it will be sent to the States but since we open up here so soon - June the 12th - they may just wait to see what the box office is like here before they make a decision. But because Sony has the option to buy whatever territories they want, at the moment we can't sell to anyone else.