How the pandemic drove filmmaker Aditya Sarpotdar to make a zombie film

Filmmaker Aditya Sarpotdar says that he has always been a fan of zombie series and films and has been an ardent follower of series and films like The Walking Dead, Shaun of the Dead and Korean movies on the subject.

Aditya Sarpotdar’s recent film, Zombivli is a Marathi zombie comedy. And he says the idea for trying out thie genre came from the pandemic crisis, which causes people to be afraid of the unknown.

Aditya Sarpotdar has directed Yoodlee Films’s zombie comedy Zombivli.

“During the first lockdown, we stated writing the film then. We felt that it was the perfect time to get into this space,” he tells us.

Citing similarities between the pandemic and the film’s subject, zombies, Sarpotdar adds, “It is about a threat we don’t know about, a period we felt trapped, extremely unaware of what is going on. That is the basic premise of a zombie film. That is something we all went through in the first lockdown. Putting zombies into this kind of emotions went really well together.”

The filmmaker says that he has always been a fan of zombie series and films and has been an ardent follower of series and films like The Walking Dead, Shaun of the Dead and Korean movies on the subject.

So why did he make it into a Marathi film and not a Hindi language film? Sarpotdar says that he felt that the more local he went, the more fun he could have with the story.

“The minute you get into the Hindi space, a lot of economic get into play – where will you shoot, who you will cast, how to set it up. And then you lose the essence of making an extremely rooted film. I feel regional cinema‘s power lies in the fact that it can be local and it still has universal appeal. But we are planning to release the Hindi dubbed version of the film soon,” he ends.