Festival audiences in Australia have also warmed to the film (it won The Age critics prize at the 2013 Melbourne Film Festival) that throws up a fascinating question: what would you do if you knew the world was ending in a few hours? Last party: Nathan Phillips and Angourie Rice in Zak Hilditch's These Final Hours. In These Final Hours, James (Nathan Phillips from Wolf Creek) is heading across a lawless city to a hedonistic end-of-the-world party. In a few hours, a blast from an asteroid strike in the North Atlantic will hit. When James reluctantly saves the life of a young girl, Rose (newcomer Angourie Rice), he must reassess his priorities. As cities across the globe are progressively wiped out, he confronts what really matters in his life. Hilditch says his own fixation with mortality – ‘‘the sort of things that keep you up at night’’ – inspired the film. ‘‘Natural disasters take people by surprise, then you’re gone in an instant and you didn’t have time to prepare," he says. ‘‘I thought, ‘What if you could turn that on its head?’ Imagine if you could see the thing coming at you. You couldn’t stop it but it gave you time to prepare. That would strip everything down and make you really consider where you truly belong, who you truly love, what you should do, where you should be.’’

Hilditch is a longtime fan of such confronting-the-apocalypse films as 28 Days Later and 12 Monkeys, which he describes as heartfelt character journeys in extraordinary circumstances, and old Twilight Zone episodes with "what if?" scenarios. Directing: Zak Hilditch guides Angourie Rice. But instead of New York or Los Angeles getting destroyed, in These Final Hours it’s – cough – Perth. Which has led to a new variation on the old joke attributed to Ava Gardner on the set of On the Beach: that Melbourne was the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world. ‘‘It’s my home town and it’s my apocalyptic love letter to the place,’’ says Hilditch. ‘‘I definitely didn’t want to set it in Nowheresville. I wanted to give the movie a personality. Making it very apparent that you’re in Perth and not shying away from that is what I wanted to do from the very get go – have all these street references and iconic landmarks and even landmarks that people who live here might not know.’’ Hilditch, 34, grew up loving movies. ‘‘I was just really lucky that my mum let me and my sister stay up late at night watching TV with her because she was such a big cinephile,’’ he says. ‘‘She just loved Hollywood and loved movies. I always had movies and TV shows on in the house and I’d just watched everything, probably things a child isn’t supposed to watch. I just had a real encylopaedic brain about movie stars and actors and that sort of thing.

‘‘But I really never knew I was going to do anything with that until I was mucking around with cameras and doing media studies at high school. It wasn’t until after high school where I thought, ‘OK, what do I really want to do?’ and it really was filmmaking, especially after Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction just blew my mind and opened my cinema world up to different kinds of films." While studying film at Curtin University in Perth, Hilditch met a bunch of fellow movie lovers and made three self-funded features with them: the comedy The Actress (2005), which went to the Slamdance festival and was released on DVD; the drama Plum Role (2007); and the comic drama The Toll (2010). ‘‘Making those films definitely instilled the ability that I could do it,’’ Hilditch says. “It was like the post-film-school film school, trying to make longform things without any backing, just trying to find the right passionate people who wanted to get what they wanted out of it as well.” Phillips, who came back from a minimalist life on a northern California farm to make These Final Hours, loves the film's Australian flavour and the way it sparks philosophical conversations centring on the likes of Darwinism, existentialism and nihilism. “Telling stories from our own backyard with our own vernacular and our own idiosyncrasies as a culture really resonated,” he says. “And it's something we all have to face: our mortality. It's wonderful to be part of a film that really reaches an audience's mind and an audience's heart.”

Shooting the film gave both cast and crew the chance to think about what they would do if the apocalypse was looming. “Every lunch, that was what was shared," Phillips says. "There's that whole fight or flight mechanism. Some people were [saying], 'No, I'm not going to die. I'm going to get a bunker and dig into the earth'. “I love how some people are just like, 'I'll just party and rage and be with people I love, and barbecue'. Basically, it's the Australian long weekend. I think Australia is pretty much living the last day on Earth in a lot of ways.” Hilditch has also decided what he would do in his own final hours. “Apart from a lot of crying, I think there would be a lot of boozing with as many loved ones as I could get my hands on,” he says. “We'd listen to horrible music and get very drunk and very rowdy.” These Final Hours opens on Thursday July 31