He may have traded furry feet and Middle Earth for a deadly infection and the undead, but don't tell Martin Freeman he's come to Australia to make a zombie movie.
"It's not a zombie film," he says in his trailer in the middle of marshy saltbush territory an hour north of Adelaide, after a hard day's filming that has left him physically and emotionally rather wrung out. "I wouldn't have come here to do a zombie film."
![Martin Freeman as Andy, a father who has 48 hours to get his daughter to safety, in the Australian zombie film <i>Cargo</i>.](/web/20160926065710im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/m/y/p/f/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grn0mj.png/1474626142489.jpg)
What is it, then?
"I think it's a film with some zombies in it, that's the absolute truth of it."
The film in question is Cargo, in which Freeman plays Andy, a man who has become infected and knows he has only 48 hours to get his baby daughter to safety.
The film is the debut feature for Yolanda Ramke, 30, and Ben Howling, 34, but it's their second stab at telling the story.
Their first was in the form of a short film made for Tropfest almost four years ago. They shot it over a weekend in late 2012, screened it at the festival in February, and by April were being feted by agents in Hollywood who had watched the seven-minute dialogue-free short online. By May, the wheels were turning on a deal to develop the feature version of Cargo.
That, surely, is every young filmmaker's dream?
"It was a joke, an absolute joke," agrees Ramke, who wrote the screenplay for the expanded tale. "We were just pinching ourselves."
When you made the short, did you dare to think of it as a dry run for a feature version?
![Martin Freeman in The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies.](http://web.archive.org./web/20160926065710im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/c/m/u/c/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1473389961810.png)
As Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies.
"At that time, no," says Howling. "But when we finished it there were definitely a lot of ideas that hadn't made it into the short."
They didn't know where they wanted to take the story, exactly, but one thing they were sure of. "A zombie with a baby on its back," Ramke says. "That was the image we wanted to play with."
Hang on: did someone say zombie?
"I said to Ben and Yolanda a long time ago that I didn't think the world needed another zombie film," Freeman says. "I've enjoyed zombie films – f---ing hell, I've even been in one [Shaun of the Dead], fleetingly – but I don't need to make another one."
What did attract him was the environmentalist theme behind the genre surface. "There's an element of us reaping what we sow with this," he says. "What we're doing to our planet has somehow – no one quite knows how – caused this to happen.
"It's not tub-thumpy, though, it's not preachy. But it's not all people doing that …" he sticks his arms in front of him, in classic zombie-walk pose. "To me, this is a film for grown-ups," he says.
And then, sotto voce: "And yes, I know zombie films can be for grown-ups."
Cargo is in production now in South Australia, with release planned for 2017.
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