Last week at Comic-Con, I participated in roundtable interviews for Dead Rising: Endgame, the second film based on Capcom's popular zombie video game franchise. With the Legendary Digital Media movie now available to watch on Crackle, the cast and crew discussed their badass characters in the sequel, plans for a Dead Rising TV series, and much more.

Keegan Connor Tracy and Marie Avgeropoulos on what attracted them to the Dead Rising franchise:

Keegan Connor Tracy: My role was actually supposed to be a man in the beginning. For whatever reason, they let me audition, even though it was supposed to be a man. I liked that. I liked that she was a strong character in that respect because originally she was meant to be a man. I felt that if they had written her as a woman, they wouldn't have written her that way. So I was like, "No, no, leave the things." At first they gave her a very female name, and I said, "No, she needs a name that's..." They picked Jordan, which is not what I would have picked, but what I liked about it is that it was a male part, all we did was switch and make it a woman and we left a lot of those elements in. That was what appealed to me. I wanted to be able to play a strong character and a character that they thought should have been a guy. I wanted to show them the reasons why it didn't have to be.

Marie Avgeropoulos: The appeal? Wonderful, strong women. It's great to play strong female characters, roles that are really empowering to women, like Keegan was saying. I got to kill zombies with a spiked bat and shoot an action-packed movie in 18 days. It was really quick, it was fast-paced, and we worked long days, but we're all really happy with the product and the fans are into it, too, so what more can we ask for? We love it! You feel a little rushed. Ideally, I'd like to dig my fingernails into a character a little more than that. I also started filming this movie the very next day after I wrapped The 100 after 6 months straight of playing Octavia, so I didn't have a lot of time. I felt a little unprepared, but hey, that's life, you've got to roll with it.

Jessica Harmon on her favorite part of playing Jill:

Jessica Harmon: To be quite honest, my character changed a lot from the original script to what we ended up shooting, which was totally okay, but there were a lot of rewrites and we went different directions all the time, which happens. It's part of the experience. It started one way, so I had one feeling about it originally, and my character ended up in an entirely different place than what I expected it to be. I liked where she ended up, because she was not a replacement for Jordan, but she stepped in and had to fill the shoes of a very strong woman who had already set the stage in the first film. I got to step in and try to be that person and I like that she swears and she calls people a "pussy" if she needs to. That was my favorite line, "You pussy." That was 4:00 in the morning when we were shooting that and I was saying that. I got to go past the limits. In my 20s as a woman, I was in bikinis being killed in the forest seven days a week.

To get to a point where I'm a little bit older and I'm now in my 30s, it was nice to have that feeling of, "I get to have a voice, I get to swear, I get to be kind of a badass, I get to go up against big corporations. I like the metaphor of what our film is in terms of what's happening in today's society with pharmaceutical companies, what's going on in the world. It's actually a pretty good analysis of what's actually happening because we have a serious problem with what's going on. It's a nice representation of that in a fun, campy sort of way. As a female, to be able to bring that and represent that and be a badass and fight the man, fight the power, was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed that. To be next to two wonderful, strong women in their own fucking rights, it was swank.

Tracy on how Jordan was originally intended to be killed in Dead Rising: Watchtower:

Keegan Connor Tracy: In the first movie, Jordan was supposed to die, and I said all the way along, "I'm going to make her strong as I can." She was supposed to die at the end, and I was like, "You're not going to want her to be dead. You watch." From day one I said that, and they still kept it, and then they did the advanced screening, everybody was like, "Why would you fucking kill her? Don't do that, that's stupid," and they took it out. I was like, "See, I told you."

When they called and told me what was going on in the second one, I was like, "Yeah!" Never as much of it shows up as you want to be in there, but I felt the story that I could create for her about where she was for those two years and what was going on, I loved to be able to dig into that. I was really happy about it. I loved that she was going to get to kick some ass. I thought it was just great. Particularly, look, I'm 44 years old. To be in a movie with no makeup on and laying some waste to people. I felt, in particular, really good about that. I felt like I'm representing the older ladies [laughs].

Executive producer Tomas Harlan and co-writer/producer Tim Carter on looking to adapt Dead Rising as a TV series:

Tomas Harlan: We thought about the IP and thought about how we could best apply that to live action. What's really cool about the world of Dead Rising, not the entire world has become zombified. A virus breaks out, the quarantine wall goes up, and outside that wall, you're just living your life as normal. It really allowed for some awesome storytelling in a very contained environment. You could think, I would say, Night of the Living Dead meets 24.

The storyline is really cool because you've got a ticking time bomb. You have 72 hours effectively to figure out how to get the humans out of there, what's going on with the conspiracy, why the government won't reach out before they firebomb the place. From a storytelling perspective, that offers up a lot of opportunities. When I played it, Tim's a genius writer, and we started thinking about where we wanted to go in the story. What seemed really cool for us was, could we take it to TV? The way the game works, there's an outbreak, another outbreak and it always gets resolved, that could be a season to a season to a season and have different outbreaks for different reasons and different locations. Then Tim went to work with that.

Tim Carter: Coming off the first movie, which we loved and we had a great time making, we knew that we wanted to evolve it into a ten-by-one-hour, twelve-by-one-hour cable TV property. There were a number of things that we were going to need to do in order to set it up for that. When we started developing the story, it was with the idea of putting into bedrock some of the elements that we knew were going to drive that. For instance, there are these cities now that are walled off and are a contained thing, but as Tomas said, the rest of the world is all still alive and just going about its life as normal.

You could have adventure stories of going back into them, exploring themes of corporate corruption and the malfeasance in the part of the army and looking at the way that the press covers things and the relationship between the press and the government—a lot of these things that are actually hot topics today in the United States. We wanted to set it up as a model for what that could be and how we might be able to take that forward into a longer cable narrative franchise.

Tomas Harlan: It's worth doing, and the idea was, after the first show, to try and pick up from there and go straight to the series. It's great that Crackle, when we partnered with them, wanted to do this in 90 minutes. It offers up a lot of opportunities as a feature and different modes of distribution, but we had a budget effectively for a TV series. That brings about a lot of challenges. When the first one came out it was pretty successful and we said, "Okay, well, we want to do another 90-minute feature." We try to see these as bookends, if you will.

The first film was really created as a love letter for the fans. If you're a fan of the world, even though it's not lockstep with a Dead Rising game, you know immediately when you see Zombrex and you see the combat weapons and you see the quarantine wall, you know it's your world. The second film, we tried to broaden to a wider audience to bring in more action this time so that we not only have the fans who love the game, but we can show the general zombie fan, if you will, why they could be invested in this world even if they didn't know the game, just like how many people went to see the movie Tomb Raider who did not know it was a game.

[Director] Pat [Williams] was really critical of that. Pat has a long history in TV, having created a series successfully run for several years, and in seeking out a director who could work with us on a tight budget in 90 minutes—a real run-and-gun production, but bring the chops and say, "This is how you create something that will then veer into TV," Tim might know how to do it at a feature level easily, [but] how do you create new storylines within the construct of the game already that will then lead into the possibility of a series that can be replicated season after season? As I've said, we gave him a very unenviable task: "Here, take a one-hour TV budget, but make 90 minutes out of it. Make it really cool [with] a lot of action and make sure that we've got a reason to go to Season 2, Season 3, Season 4."

Director Pat Williams on making the sequel more serious in the vein of other zombie movies like 28 Days Later and World War Z:

Pat Williams: You don't get a chance to direct zombie movies every day of your life, so it was a thrill and although it was an unenviable task, I was thrilled to have the task of trying to figure it out. After watching the first movie and hearing the dynamics of how that went and what everybody wanted from the second movie, we sat down and talked long and hard about it and how to expand the audience. How to make this movie a little more serious and take an approach a little more along the lines of a 28 Days Later, World War Z kind of vibe, where we're lacking in humor but we're amping up the action and amping up the tension a little bit. Then how do you do that in 18 days on a one-hour TV budget, essentially.

The goal is ultimately to please the fans. First and foremost you've got to make the fans happy. You've got to get everybody involved in it so if you're grandmother's going to watch it or your kids are going to watch it—I wouldn't recommend the kids—but they've got to love the characters. You've got to start with the characters, let's start with the story. The Dead Rising world, they want to see zombies and they want to kill zombies, so let's try and create a number of great sequences that allow the audience to get that pleasure out of the zombie killing machine that is Dead Rising. Put Chase Carter in as much trouble as we can, introduce as many new characters as we can.

Harlan on enhancing the zombie threat in smaller spaces and balancing the humor and action while looking ahead at a Dead Rising TV series:

Tomas Harlan: Think about budget restraints. If we got all the money in the world, then you can put 10,000 zombies in an open field and he's got to fight his way through, but how do you create a scenario where three zombies really become something menacing? Very tight, contained, claustrophobic spaces, and the ultimate goal of these shows effectively was again, first, here's something to the fans. Second one is, here's something for the larger action, and then can we bring these together into a series where you've got the humor side of a TV series, because you're going to have ten hours, twelve hours to tell the story, and you can have the high-action side. That was the goal.

For the people who are looking at the second one going, "Where's the humor?" For the people who looked at the first one saying, "Where's all the action?" This is how it all comes together as we move to series.

  • Derek Anderson
    About the Author - Derek Anderson

    Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.

    When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.