Zombies are pretty big right now. If they attended high school they would be in the ‘Cool Crowd’ with the vampires and Ryan Gosling.

Most people see zombies as pretty terrifying. They eat people, they tend to gather in large crowds and they give off the impression that they smell pretty rank. So if you have a fear of being eaten, crowds or insulting smells, zombies are probably your worst nightmare.

Whenever a new zombie movie comes out the survivors turn out to be the fire man, the local doctor, the ridiculously good looking woman (job usually not specified/important) and a couple of kids who are sure to cause havoc along the way.

But what if the fireman was called out to an emergency (like the zombie invasion perhaps) and was brutally devoured by 500 zombies, and the local doctor surely would have been one of the first to go, I mean he’s the person people go to if they are feeling a bit funky, the ridiculously good looking woman was probably on a date in a busy restaurant at the time of the mass zombie break out and the kids would have done the exact opposite of what they were told, so they definitely would have headed out onto the streets filled with hungry zombies when told by officials to stay inside.

In reality, the real survivors would be the lazy, unemployed, couch potatoes.

Finally there is a zombie movie that has turned all those stereotypical heroes into zombies and the local embarrassments into the last known survivors.

‘Last of the Living’ is a dark comedy that breathes new disease ridden life into a ‘done to death’ concept.

Morgan Williams was one of those lazy couch potatoes given the task of surviving through a zombie movie.

I interviewed him about his time as an underwhelming hero (over the phone, just in case he was infected).

Hi Morgan, thanks for talking with me today. So how long have you been doing this sort of work?

I guess that’s um, loosely sort of 6 years of acting, I’ve also made a few trailers for things i.e. shot, edited and directed them. I’ve also made adverts for my own underwear company called Nudel Men’s Packaging. I’ve also done a bit of presenting, mainly for educating videos and corporate videos.

‘Last of the Living’ looks like an interesting take on the usual zombie film. I like that there’s such unlikely heroes’ in the film, what was it like to be a part of?

We filmed the majority of it, about 80% in 2007 in two weeks. My friend Logan McMillan wrote and directed it and pretty much everybody who was on the film was a mate.  It was a pretty intense shoot, it was a hot time of year and everyone was getting pissed off with everyone else. I think you tend to get pissed off with your mates much easier than on a professional set. We were all switching roles too, I think at one point I was co-producer and the guy who was doing sound would be holding the boom in one shot and then dressing up as a zombie for the next scene.

And what about the other 20%?

Well about a year later, Logan and I just happened to both be in Wellington for Christmas and he had his camera gear and home made steady cam and we met at the beehive on Christmas day. We were able to do all of the pick – up shots then as the place was completely deserted. We tried to do the same thing in Christchurch after that but it was surprisingly busy, I don’t think we ended up using any of the Christchurch footage.

What is the film about?

Well my character was called Morgan, there were two other guys Ash (Ashleigh Southam) and Johnny (Robert Faith) and were the only known survivors of the zombie apocalypse. We end up becoming the unlikely heroes when Stef (Emily Paddon-Brown) who is a scientist finds us and she believes there is an antidote to cure all of the zombies, so she convinces us lazy  guys to help her find a cure. The film is more about their journey and finding the antidote rather than being really gory. That was partly due to not having a huge budget.

Yes, it sounds like it was a pretty low budget film, how did you get funds?

Well Logan initially made a trailer for the film off his own back and  managed to get some interest from a local investor who gave us $10,000 and that was the money we used to pay people on the job and shoot. Once the majority of the film was shot, Logan made a trailer and put it up on zombie fan sites trying to get as much interest in it as possible and a small distributor in America saw it and paid for the rights in America, giving us the funding for editing and finishing the film.

Have you gathered much of a fan base since the ‘Last of the Living’?

Not really, I think New Zealand is kind of immune to the whole celebrity thing. Like we see people walking down the road who are on TV and it doesn’t really bother us. But I was on a train in Britomart recently and I sat next to this Indian guy in his early 20’s and he just looks at me and goes “Oh my God. It’s Morgan from Last of the Living. I love that film so much, I have watched it so many times and I have got all my friends to watch it”. And all the people on the train are looking at me and going we have no idea who this guy is. (laughs).  This guy even knew all my lines, it was crazy, I was just about to say to him as well like, it’s not the best film when he brought it up, but maybe that’s what he liked about it. It had a sort of rawness about it.

Even though the film was full of gory zombie deaths, there were still a few zombies that were killed using various objects. How did you do the special FX for this?

It was mostly done in post, like when Stef (Emily Paddon-Brown) kills this boy zombie we used a melon as his head when we shot the scene and then in post -production we made it into a real head.

What else have you acted in?

I worked on a show called ‘Prehistoric Park’. I was on episode three of the series and played a biologist. It was really fun and interesting because I got to work with a bit of green screen, but mostly CGI (Computer Generated Graphics), and there were people with puppets on their hands pretending to be dinosaurs. Theses puppets would be turned into dinosaurs in post, so I’d be rolling around on the ground pretending to fight off this dinosaur that in reality was a person with a puppet on their hand it was definitely a new experience.

By Tessa McEwing for M&T Models and Talent Agency.

Matthew Fox, brooding and intense, chain-smokes cigarettes just off camera as he prepares for the next shot.

Tommy Lee Jones strides past, the very image of his character, General Douglas MacArthur. A plucky RNZAF flight lieutenant asks if he would like to join the air force. “Not yours,” he drawls.

The two Hollywood stars have maintained a low profile while shooting the World War II drama The Emperor in New Zealand. But yesterday, theHerald on Sunday was given exclusive access to the big-budget production.

Nearly 300 extras, plus dozens of crew members, were on location at Whenuapai Air Base in West Auckland as they recreated General MacArthur’s arrival in Japan at the end of Word War II.

In a break from filming, Fox, who plays Japanese expert General Bonner Fellers, says he has been “pretty slammed with work” during his two-month stay, though he did manage to get a few days off while his wife Margherita Ronchi and two children Kyle and Byron were here.

“We went to Piha and it was frickin’ fantastic. We had such a nice weekend there. We spent the entire time in the water. The kids spent six years in Hawaii when I was working on Lost so for them to get back in the surf was awesome, we had such a blast.”

The family have gone home to Oregon and Fox says he is desperate to join them when filming ends next week.

“I’m really excited to go home. It’s so hard for me being away from the three most important people in the world to me.”

In the meantime, he has been indulging his love of wine – and has taken a particular liking to Waiheke Island’s Destiny Bay vineyard. He visited the winery last weekend and met owners the Spratt family.

Fox says most fans recognise him as Jack out of epic TV fantasy Lost. “But honestly, I don’t get recognised most of the time. I try to keep a low profile.”

Today, the famously gruff Jones is off-limits for interviews. But he mingles freely with the crew, standing in line for lunch and sitting down to eat with co-workers.

Jones came to New Zealand with wife Dawn Laurel, and the couple flew to Queenstown for a sightseeing trip last weekend.

Jones has a special connection with the country: his eldest son Austin was born here in 1982 while he was filming pirate film Nate and Hayes.

Kiwi producer Tim Coddington worked on that film with Jones.

“I remember feeling sorry for Tommy at the time, having his first-born son while he was filming,” Coddington says.

The cast and extras spent up to 18 hours on set yesterday as Whenuapai was turned into Atsugi Airfield in Japan, where MacArthur arrived in August, 1945, to accept the Japanese surrender.

The production team had earlier turned Southdown Freezing Works into war-ravaged Tokyo.

Director Peter Webber, whose credits include The Girl With the Pearl Earring, says it is a great showcase for New Zealand filmmaking. The Kiwi-dominated crew has brought a refreshing “can-do” attitude.

“In some countries you get this thing where people are a bit like ‘oh that’s not my department’ but here everyone mucks in.”

The film deals with whether Japan’s wartime ruler, Emperor Hirohito, should be tried and hanged as a war criminal – a subject that Webber says still resonates today.

“The Americans dealt with this in 1945 – I would argue with more intelligence than the situation was handled in Iraq. Japan rose from the ashes and the rubble and became a world power.”

By Bevan Hurley