When is a zombie film not a zombie film? When it’s Martin Freeman’s Cargo

Something about Cargo drew the Hobbit star to the Australian outback, but it certainly wasn't the undead, he tells Karl Quinn.

All around him is chaos, but Martin Freeman has buried his head in the sand. I don't mean that figuratively, either; he literally has his bonce in a hole in the ground.

What's more, his eyes are gummed up with some kind of yellow ooze, he's wearing a huge mouthguard, and there's a baby carrier strapped to his back, while his hands are tied together. All in all, you'd have to say he doesn't look terribly comfortable.

"This is f—ing bullshit," he mumbles from somewhere inside the sandpit and then, lifting his head, he turns to the director and has what must surely count as the most mild-mannered dummy spit in the history of filmmaking.

"We can't do that many more times, you know," he says. "I'll give you two more at most. I feel like my back is about to break. I've got a baby, it feels like she's about to topple into the hole. All of a sudden, the fun has gone out of the day."

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And he hasn't even mentioned the massive mosquitoes buzzing about everywhere.

A little later, I find myself sitting opposite Freeman – his face thankfully cleansed of goop, his back relieved of infant – in a trailer somewhere in the South Australian bush, where Cargo, a sort-of but-not-exactly zombie thriller is being filmed.

It's been a long day and he looks absolutely shattered. Unbeknownst to me at the time, he's also in the throes of a long-range break-up from his partner of 16 years, actor Amanda Abbington, who is back home in London.

"It's very physical and very uncomfortable," Freeman says of his role as Andy, a man who has been infected and knows he has just 48 hours to get his daughter to safety before he turns into a ravenous flesh-eater. "You're not sitting in a bar in a lounge suit – it's being cold, wet and uncomfortable most of the time, with shit on your face, carrying a baby."

Not that he's complaining – well, not much anyway. "There's no glamour really on any job, but that's not why you do them, otherwise you'd be on a yacht in Barbados all the time. Which would be nice for two days, but after that you'd want to get dirty, you'd want to do something else."

Cargo was written by Yolanda Ramke and co-directed by her and Ben Howling (they're mates, but not a couple). It's their first feature, an extended reworking of the seven-minute film they made for Tropfest in 2013, which became a YouTube sensation (it's been watched more than 14 million times).

On the strength of a three-minute promo reel culled from the footage with Freeman, Netflix paid what was rumoured to be a "multimillion-dollar" fee for worldwide rights in February 2017. In Australia, it's getting a cinema release before making its way to the streaming platform – a first for this territory.

Best known for his roles in The Office, Fargo and Sherlock on television and a certain trilogy of movies about a large-footed traveller called Bilbo Baggins on the big screen, Freeman says he's not a particular fan of the zombie genre, despite having once had a small part in Shawn of the Dead.

I wouldn't have come here to do a zombie film.

"And that's the reason I'm doing it – because it's not a zombie film," he says. "I wouldn't have come here to do a zombie film."

Well, OK, but you have to admit there are a lot of people doing funny walks and drooling and trying to eat human beings…

"I think it's a film with some zombies in it, that's the absolute truth of it," he says, conceding the point a little, but not entirely. "I said to Ben and Yolanda a long time ago that I didn't think the world needed another zombie film, and they took that on the chin and said they are big fans of the genre but they weren't making that either.

"It's not that I don't do zombie films like I don't do Ku Klux Klan films – I'm not politically allergic to them," he continues. "But I don't want to do any genre film for the sake of it."

Having made a couple of Marvel movies – Captain America: Civil War before Cargo and Black Panther after – he's clearly not averse to a bit of tentpole action either.

"There are good action films and bad action films, good superhero films and bad superhero films," he says. "You want to be in good ones, and this to me was a good one. I was touched by the story."

At its simplest, that story is about a father sacrificing everything to save his daughter. According to Ramke, "the intention was always that the zombies would be almost peripheral. They're there to provide stakes, some threat, but we're much more interested in the human drama at the heart of it."

That drama can be boiled down to a simple question: in a world that has gone to hell, is there any room for hope? Without giving too much away, Cargo comes down, albeit tentatively, on the side of the affirmative.

But even if it isn't your classic genre piece, the filmmakers felt it was important that the zombies – or, as they prefer to call them, "the virals" – should represent a clear sense of threat. And it is in keeping with the film's understated suggestion that the source of this outbreak might have something to do with environmental disaster that the way the virals move is informed by a style of dance born out of just such an event.

Cathy Adamek, a dancer and actor who is credited on the film as "movement director", says she coached the actors and extras playing virals in a simplified form of the Japanese dance form butoh.

"It was developed post-war as a reaction to the horrors of Nagaskai and Hiroshima," she says. "So I went off and researched key butoh characteristics and developed a 10-point way of teaching people."

Some people were better than others at picking it up, she says. "There's a technique in butoh called the boiling of the blood, where there's a shaking through the whole body, and it's quite difficult to do. But the poppers and lockers [breakdancers] were really good at it."

"The way we do the viral thing is really interesting," says Freeman. "The movement vocabulary we've come up with, I haven't seen that before. It's actually quite hard to watch. It's not passive, it's not arms-outstretched Scooby-Doo slow walking. It looks really horrible, and I like that."

He's not sure he'd go quite so far as to call it a message film, but he adds: "I like the fact that the theme in it is what we are doing to the Earth. There's an element of us reaping what we sow with how we're getting energy. What we're doing to our planet has somehow – though no one quite knows how – caused this to happen.

"It's not tub-thumpy, it's not preachy, it just feels like a film for grown-ups."

He pauses, then adds sotto voce: "And I know some zombie films can be for grown-ups."

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Karl has been a journalist at Fairfax Media since 1999, in a variety of writing and editing roles. Karl writes about popular culture with a particular focus on film and television.

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