latest features
Air Jordan
Michael B. Jordan is flying high on the recent success of found footage/super-powered action thriller Chronicle. He took some time out to chat with FilmInk about the adventure so far.
Creative Excess
Triple threat actress/writer/director Anya Beyersdorf stars in the provocative new film ‘Black and White and Sex’ and has a handful of other artistic pursuits on the horizon.
Cruise Control
Director Rob Sitch and actors Josh Lawson and Christian Clark give us the lowdown on ‘Any Questions For Ben?’, a comedy about those with everything – except the things that matter...
The Bit In Between
Actor Ryan Johnson gives us the lowdown on his web series ‘One Step Closer To Home’ which hilariously follows two newlyweds wondering, ‘What comes next?’
search the site
newsletter
Enter your email address below to receive the weekly Filmink newsletter
Brothers Make Movie With Bite
With the release of Daybreakers on DVD, FILMINK had the chance to sit down for a chat with writer/directors Michael and Peter Spierig and actress Claudia Karvan
If you're a filmmaker, the one movie you wouldn't want your film to release alongside is Avatar. That's what happened to Michael and Peter Spierig's Aussie vampire flick, Daybreakers, when it hit cinema screens in summer earlier this year. "We released in the most competitive January in about ten years," recalls Michael. "Avatar was a big hit, and so was Sherlock Holmes. Peter Jackson's new movie was about to open, and Denzel Washington's was as well and we thought, ‘we're screwed, we're screwed' but we managed to push through and we did alright," he smiles.
The film has done more than "alright", grossing over $40 million at the US box office and about $50 million world-wide. With the film on sale on DVD in Australia this week, co-directors Michael and Peter Spierig are hoping to further improve these already impressive results.
Daybreakers was the follow-up film to Undead, the low budget zombie splatter fest which marked the filmmaking debut of the Queensland based Spierig brothers. Almost straight after the release of Undead in 2003, the brothers started writing the script for Daybreakers and subsequently secured $20 million - a mixture of US and Australian funds - to shoot the film on the Gold Coast.
"Someone said to me recently that we kind of skipped a step with moviemaking," Peter says. "We made our first film for 70 grand and made Daybreakers for $20 million and we missed that movie in between but I guess we have big ideas and we can't handle those without that sort of budget but the result of that is you have to prove yourself. I guess that's why it took so long. We had to constantly sell the idea because people are nervous about giving guys who have only done a low budget film so much money."
Daybreakers is set in a dystopian future of 2019. A virus has turned most of the human population into vampires and society has become a dark place with one looming problem: the blood source is running dry. A scientist named Edward (Ethan Hawke) works for an international corporation, headed by the sinister Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), which is unsuccessfully experimenting with blood substitutes. Edward meets a couple of vampire slayers (Willem Dafoe, Claudia Karvan) who reveal there might be a cure that can restore the human race.
Claudia Karvan, recruited by the Spierig brothers because they admired the actress from her work on the television series Love My Way, wasn't a huge fan of vampire flicks before she scored this role. "I hadn't seen a lot of them," she offers. "I'd seen Shadow of the Vampire because I've always been a massive Willem Dafoe fan. I hadn't even read Dracula but I fell in love with the whole kind of myth once I got the job and I saw Twilight, which was made after Daybreakers, but I did love it and I thought it did great things for our film. It's such a great compliment. It's the underside of Twilight."
Another actor the Spierigs had in mind from the outset was Ethan Hawke, who they thought had the perfect qualities to play a vampire with a conscience. "It's so risky for an actor to say yes to a project," Peter says. "He was the first one we sent a script to. We'd just made this low-budget cheesy zombie movie and for him to say yes to a project and to come to Australia and trust essentially first time filmmakers with a production of this scale takes a lot of courage as it could be a total fuck-up. It was pretty brave of him."
Karvan offers another insight as to how Hawke came to be on board the film. "I remember he told me that he had watched a bit of Undead and thought it was garbage. Then he had his younger brother staying with him and he walked down late at night and heard his brother and all his friends sitting in the living room pissing themselves and just having a ball and he asked them what they were watching and they said, ‘Undead, it's fucking great.' And he told me he thought he should revisit his judgment, so that was lucky," the actress laughs.
With plenty of blood, gore and exploding bodies, Daybreakers is a film that gleefully puts a bit of bite back into the vampire genre which some believe has softened, thanks to a certain franchise. Surely, the film was a lot of fun to shoot? "Everyone thinks it must be so much fun playing with blood and spraying it about, and it is and it isn't," Michael says. "All my film experiences have been both. It's a joy to watch it back and to see that it works and you got it and it looks great but the processes can be painful particularly when you have to shoot complex things quickly, and this film's shot in forty days which is really quick for a movie like this."
Daybreakers bursts with clever and resonant ideas. In particular, it draws an eerie parallel between the movie's world of diminishing resources and ours, standing as a candid metaphor for the way we so readily deplete vital resources whether they be oil, water or in Daybreakers' case, human blood. Peter says that they wrote the script with these undertones in mind. "There's a fine line that you have to be careful of," he explains. "We're always aware of it, but I think that you can't be too preachy otherwise the audience feel like they're being cheated a little bit. The broader audience want the fun."
With the recent release of the film on DVD and Blu-ray, there are a number of special features including a documentary which chronicles the Daybreakers journey. "The doco was planned from the beginning," Michael explains. "It goes through everything from the initial script stage, to the script meetings in LA, all the way through to the production to the release at the Toronto Film Festival, and it's something we've documented over six years. Everybody's in it - Michael [Dorman], Claudia, Sam, Ethan. You should definitely check it out."
Daybreakers is available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray now.
Picture caption (L-R): Peter and Michael at Tropfest 2010, courtesy of Getty Images. Taken by Gaye Gerard.