Writer-director Jean Luc Herbulot and actor-writer-producer Hus Miller wanted the freedom to take risks with their scrappy action-thriller, Zero. So they decided to shoot it in Dakar, Senegal, where they could maximize their relatively low budget — while maintaining complete creative control. 

“I think for young filmmakers, you really have to ask yourself, ‘Where is the place where people want to go crazy?’” Herbulot tells MovieMaker. “The good thing about Senegal is that all the things that we did there were new. When it’s new for your team, for your actors, for the technicians and all that, they will put more motivation and more imagination into what they do.”

Herbulot grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but he moved to Senegal, on the west coast of Africa, in 2018 after shooting a French-language Canal+ television series there called Sakho & Mangane. 

There, he became a partner in Lacme Productions alongside founder Pamela Diop, who also produced and co-wrote Herbulot’s 2021 action-horror film Saloum. 

Diop co-produced Zero as well, helping to shepherd in the American movie production, a rarity for the city of Dakar. 

“Every foreign production coming into Africa is always beneficial. Because, of course, there’s experience for the crew and experience for the actors — especially because the thing with Africa, and especially West Africa, is that it’s very difficult for people to get a visa to travel,” Herbulot says.

“The average age of the population is 19 years old. Those guys have a lot of dreams, and they want to travel. And of course, now we have the internet, we know everything that’s happening in the world,” he says.

Jean Luc Herbulot and Hus Miller on Their Zero Collaboration

Cam McHarg, left, and Hus Miller in Zero. Courtesy of Zero

While the leads of the film were American and the film was all English-language, the majority of the cast and crew that worked on Zero were Senegalese. Herbulot says the production was able to give back to the local community by providing opportunities for young creatives to get experience on a movie set.

“They want to discover stuff,” Herbulot says. “When people like Hus and his company and all the cast and crew make the effort and are brave enough to come to Senegal and trust us, this is also beneficial to all those young guys who are learning from all that.”

Moving to Senegal was a breath of fresh air for Herbulot, who was a producer before he became a director. 

“A bit like Hus, when I arrived there as a producer, I was like, ‘Whoa, this is the gold rush of production’ — meaning this is an industry that is just starting. So you want to be there and you want to experiment with everything,” Herbulot says. 

Miller was also a producer on Saloum, as well as the shorts like “Deer Season” and “You Can’t Say No,” both of which he also acted in.

Together, in 2018, Herbulot and Diop redesigned Lacme Productions from a company primarily focused on music videos and short-format content into one focused primarily on movies. 

“That’s how I happened to live in Senegal for five years. So we did Saloum, and then met these guys and did Zero. Let’s see if we’re going to make other ones,” Herbulot says.

Miller got involved in Zero when his co-star, Cameron McHarg, introduced him to Herbulot.

“We were looking at doing something sort of off the grid, kind of out in the middle of nowhere,” Miller said.

Gary Dourdan in Zero. Courtesy of Zero

After a successful Zoom meeting between the actors and the Lacme team, they decided they would do a film together. 

That’s when Herbulot sent them the idea for Zero.

“I had this call with Hus, and I was like, ‘You know what? I think I have something,’” Herbulot says. “Two Americans in the car, they wake up, they don’t know why the fuck they’re there, and they have bombs strapped to their chests and a 10-hour chronometer. And from that, we were like, ‘Ah, there’s something interesting.”

Also Read: Elric Kane on 20 Films That Inspired His Dating-App Horror Film The Dead Thing

Miller and Herbulot ended up co-writing Zero together, which follows Miller as “#1”, an American man who finds himself in Dakar with a bomb strapped to his chest and a clock counting down the hours he has until his death. His only hope of defusing the bomb is to listen to the mysterious man speaking to him through an earpiece — voiced by Willem Dafoe — who instructs him to complete a series of complex and dangerous tasks. Along the way, he mets McHarg’s character, “#2” — a fellow American who has been roped into the same ordeal.

Benefits of Shooting in Senegal

Hus Miller in Zero. Courtesy of Zero

Not only was Senegal a place where they could make an outside-the-box movie, but it was also a place where they could do it for a fraction of the cost of shooting in the U.S. or Europe. 

“I think why we have such a great alchemy between me and Hus, and also the entire team — well, especially me and Hus — is that outside of me being a director and him being an actor, we were both producers before that. So we always went to the smartest choice,” Herbulot says.

It wasn’t hard to convince Miller to shoot in Senegal.

“Zero would have been a $10 or $15 million movie if we shot in the U.S., but shooting in Africa, we were able to get away with so much and our budget was able to go so far by shooting there,” he says. “So really, like Jean Luc said, everything really aligned perfectly to shoot there. It worked for our budget. They were already there. They had a production company. So we just meshed the two things together.”

But Zero has a large international footprint that extends far beyond Senegal. After production wrapped, the Zero team edited the film in Paris. And for post-production, they worked with Caffeine Post in Mexico City. 

“Taking what should be a small, independent movie and making it a bigger international thing was really beneficial for us, but it was also totally different. We never thought we were going to do it that way, and it just kind of happened very organically,” Miller says.

That only left one final piece of the puzzle: Willem Dafoe. 

Hus Miller in Zero. Courtesy of Zero

While the lines for the mysterious man speaking through the earpiece were always scripted out, the team didn’t actually cast the part or record the lines until the rest of the movie was long finished. So they decided to shoot for the stars.

“We were like, ‘There’s no way we’ll ever get Willem Dafoe.’ But he was always on our list that we sent to the casting director,” Miller says.

To the team’s surprise, Dafoe was an easy yes. He’d watched Saloum to get an idea of Herbulot’s style, and loved it. Two days later, he called Miller and Herbulot to commit to the role.

“It was perfect, very fast. He said, ‘I will totally do this. I’m totally into the project. You guys just need to come to Rome.’ And we’re like, ‘Yeah, no problem,’” Miller says.

Along with knowing when to aim high and when to save money, a lot of Herbulot and Miller’s success with Zero came down to smart production decisions. 

“Most of the time you hear, ‘Oh, it’s always better if you want to do a first feature to shoot in places that you know, to shoot with subjects that you know,’ and stuff like that. I don’t really agree with that,” Herbulot says. “Like, go take some risks, be inventive, and the more you’re going to be inventive, the more you’re going to gain from what you’re doing. But that’s my philosophy.” 

“This is the best producer I’ve worked with,” he says of Miller. “People who are just open to new stuff and open to risk. And when I say risk, it’s not just risk at the money level, but risk as, ‘Let’s make something new.’ And it may appear clichéd, what I’m saying, but this is why we’re having the movies that we’re having. There’s a lot of people who don’t want to take risks. 

“This production, the size of it and the fact that we were working with this kind of budget, also allows you to be very free — because the interesting theme with Zero is it’s in English with American actors, but in the same way, it’s very international. So you know that you can also sell it in a lot of different places — so the risks are minimized from other types of productions. So if you ask me, as a director who works with a producer, what a great producer is, it’s somebody who is curious and who is able to be a bit crazy.”

Miller says the mark of a good producer is someone who has “the willingness to put yourself in a situation where you can do something different.”

“For me, that was going to Africa and shooting with Jean Luc and the trust level there, and saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to dive into this thing, however this turns out.’ I mean, every day we were in Africa, as a producer, I was worried that everything was going to collapse. Every day — the entire crew was going to get Covid, someone was going to get hurt. Luckily, none of those things happened. It was because of our crew, it was because of our director, it was because of every element. We got very, very lucky,” Miller says. 

Well, for the most part they got lucky. They did encounter one hiccup in 2021, when they were all ready to start shooting right before Senegal shut down its borders due to Covid. 

But that ended up giving the team an extra six months to prepare.

“We also put ourselves into a position where we’re like, ‘Hey, this could fall apart tomorrow. And for me, that’s how I like living my life, too. I was like, Hey, I’m going to go and do this thing, and I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but I’m willing to put myself in that position and see what happens. So I think there’s that adventurous level.”

Herbulot agrees.

“It’s always about taking risks, right?” he says. “Allow yourself to take risks — calculated risks. Then don’t be stupid.”

“It’s getting harder and harder to do something different,” Miller says, “but I think there are still ways of finding it.”

Zero, which we are proud to support through MovieMaker Production Services, is now on the festival circuit and just won best film in the Orbita section at the beloved Sitges Film Festival.

Main image: (L-R) Zero writer-director Jean Luc Herbulot, producer Pamela Diop, and
producer-writer-actor Hus Miller.