In a nondescript office building on Cahuenga Boulevard, Frank Darabont is putting the finishing touches on the end of the world. The writer-director, famed for such Oscar-nominated feature films as The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, is masterminding the zombie apocalypse with his new TV series, The Walking Dead (starts on Tuesday at 9.20pm, on TopTv's Fox F).
Adapted from Robert Kirkman's graphic novels, Walking Dead follows a band of survivors struggling to retain their humanity in a nightmarish world overrun by the undead. While it might seem at odds with the prestige pictures for which he's so widely known, Darabont insists that the show is allowing him the opportunity to marry that A-list sensibility with his inner geek.
Shawshank and Green Mile were based on Stephen King novels, after all, and early in his career, Darabont wrote the screenplays for projects including A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and The Fly II.
"My earliest memories are of watching the great Universal monster movies when they were in television syndication in about 1965 ? I've always loved the cinema or the literature of the fantastic, it's my special bent," Darabont, 51, says. "Having made those more mainstream films, people are surprised to know that I can converse in geek language."
Certain elements of Walking Dead will seem familiar to anyone who shares that particular fluency. In the pilot episode, smalltown sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) awakens in a deserted hospital after being shot in the line of duty. Determined to find his wife and daughter, he sets off - on horseback - toward a rumoured survivors settlement in Atlanta, fending off flesh-eating ghouls along the way.
It's difficult not to think of director Danny Boyle's haunting thriller 28 Days Later during those hospital scenes, and the zombies themselves are straight out of the George Romero school, which Darabont proudly acknowledges.
But Walking Dead, he maintains, is unique because it's serialised, meaning that he can explore how Grimes and the other characters cope over the long haul.
"We've all seen the one-off zombie movies," Darabont says. "I didn't want to try to compete on that level because it's been done and done well, either as a serious film or as a comedy. But to do it as a TV series, to invest in those characters over the long term, that struck me as a pretty exciting notion."
Exciting, perhaps, but it wasn't easy for Darabont to convince TV executives that the premise could work. Zombies and vampires might be ubiquitous figures in popular culture these days, but that wasn't the case when Darabont was first attempting to get Walking Dead made after he'd stumbled upon the title during a trip to Burbank's House of Secrets comic book store.
"We may seem to be following a cultural trend; we're not really. I tried to set this up five years ago. The idea was: 'Let's do something off the beaten path from what one expects from a TV series.' Hopefully it still is, but in the meantime it's been Zombies R Us in the culture."
He originally took the project to NBC, but wound up at AMC after he partnered the show's executive producer Gale Anne Hurd. She was the one to suggest that the cable outlet responsible for Mad Men and Breaking Bad might be willing to take a chance on a series that is an ensemble character piece masquerading as a horror movie.
Walking Dead was shot on location between April and August in a sweltering Atlanta.
Darabont describes the heat as "debilitating", but Sarah Wayne Callies, who plays Grimes's wife, Lori, said there were benefits to working in real-life locations as temperatures soared.
"It gives you an immediate physical response to the story," she said. "You're hot and you're sweaty and you're dirty and you're burnt. So it's less acting and more reality."
Callies said she'd never seen a zombie flick but was attracted to the role because of the way the series' outré setting amplified the interpersonal dynamics among the characters.
In a separate interview, Lincoln said he was excited by the prospect of playing a man struggling to remain honorable in such a threatening environment.
He likens Walking Dead to Greek tragedy "because it's life or death situations continually", says Lincoln, an English actor. "You have incredible combustible scenes between all the characters because of the situation, and it makes for great drama."
Both actors also responded to the bigger questions the series' premise poses - namely, how do people retain their humanity in the face of great calamity? Darabont believes the show taps into what he calls "millennial dread", the anxiety looming about, say, chronic oil shortages or the devastating impact of climate change.
"There's a sense of doom settling into our species because clearly what we have built here is not sustainable as a civilisation and we're all starting to get the idea that the fish tank has been poisoned and sooner or later all us little fishes are going to float belly up if we don't do something it," Darabont says. But he's quick to add that he has no intention of using Walking Dead to flog viewers with weighty messages about the end of the world. He's simply looking to satisfy his urge "to play in the zombie sandbox".
"All I really want to do with this series is tell really good stories and get people hopefully addicted to an entertaining and smart narrative." - LA Times