by FilmInk Staff
Set in a remote Australian outback village Opal City (actually Coober Pedy), this new eight-part series produced by See-Saw (The King’s Speech) for AMC network offers a smart and stinging rebuke to the conventions of White Australia’s post-Colonial history.
The plot centres on Tyson (Rob Collins), guardian to adopted teenage daughter Shanika (Shantae Barnes-Cowan). The pair seem to split their time between trading (very funny) insults and slaughtering some very ugly Vampires. They call this ‘pest control’.
Driving the story is the arrival in Opal City of Vampire King (Callan Mulvey). Originally sent with ten other fanged-monsters on the First Fleet to wipe out the Indigenous population in the name of the British Empire, Vampire King braces for a face-off with Tyson and Shanika and their mob… And we reckon the less you know about this twisty and clever plot the better!
The production design by Amy Baker (The Unusual Suspects) is a brilliant mesh of vampire-gothic imagery and real-world outback authenticity; the costumes by Heather Wallace are grungy with just a hint of 18th century romance. Editor Mat Evans keeps things moving, and the stunt work (Nathan Lawson), fx,(Marty Pepper) and make up (prosthetics, Larry Van Duynhoven; make-up/hair, Jennifer Rossiter)) have all the splat, urgh and grunt any genre fan could want.
Thornton shared directing duties with Fletcher and Tony Krawitz (Thornton shot most of it, too.) Writers on the series, including the creators, are Kodie Bedford (Mystery Road, series) and emerging filmmakers Devi Telfer and Josh Sambono.
Firebite is the latest in a long-time collaboration for Thornton and Fletcher (We Don’t Need a Map, 2017).
“We’ve started wearing each other’s clothes,” Thornton told FilmInk, tongue-in-cheek.
We spoke to them about the making of the show.
We understand that the inspiration for the show came from an historical detail about the First Fleet which arrived in Australia in 1788. It aimed to establish a penal colony. The boats carried 1500 prisoners. And 11 vials of smallpox.
WARWICK THORNTON “When I read about that a very long time ago, I got pretty pissed off. When [colonisers] went to North America and [other territories], mysteriously all of these communities around the world come down with this mysterious disease very similar to smallpox.
“I think it could have been an interesting period film. We started to think ‘how can we bring this story to a much bigger audience generally?’ So, it became eleven vampires arriving on the First Fleet instead of eleven vials of smallpox.
“I pitched it to Brendan over a beer and he said, ‘let’s do it’.” Within a week, Brendan had me by the short and curlys, and we were writing a pitch/outline.”
BRENDAN FLETCHER “We had the first script for the pilot not long after Warwick and I had that beer. That was 2014. It had been in Warwick’s brain for God knows how long before that! When he told me, ‘what if the vampires came on the First Fleet and as the Colonisation spread across Australia, so do the Vampires’, the penny kind of dropped and I went ‘ah now I get it!’
“From the beginning, we said this is a show for the world. My brain just exploded [with] all the metaphorical stuff… but Warwick said, ‘let’s have some fun bro’.
“We were like, ‘let’s throw in some fast cars, let’s get some cool weapons and kill some vampires’. We wanted to expand our filmmaking muscles.”
The show is very Australian. The dialogue is sharp, funny, idiomatic. At one point, one character says, about the hero Tyson: “He’s a dickhead, but he’s not an arsehole.” It’s a compliment!
WT “We created characters who can speak like that naturally. But they are dickheads – Tyson is a dickhead. I call most of my close friends dickheads. People I do not like I call arseholes.”
The show was produced by See-Saw with AMC (Mad Men, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad). Did the Americans have ‘notes’?
WT “[With this show] they bought a ticket to outback Australia, and they knew that.”
BF “They just got behind the vision. Never once did they say, ‘that sounds too Australian’.”
WT “They knew there was going to be so much shit that they do not understand. But what they are good at, is story. That’s their strength.”
BF “Of course they have notes, but most of them are about the story: ‘is it as good as it can be’, ‘are we understanding it’, ‘can we make better’… but as far as the tone goes – and let’s be honest, it took them a few years to get their head around it – but once they did, they bought the ticket. They were smart enough to back the creatives. I think we can both say we were happily surprised how the process has gone once we all got on board the same bus.”
The principle location is Coober Pedy, a small town 850kms north west of Adelaide, famous for its opal mining. It’s famous too, for the lifestyle, where people live underground because it is so hot…
WT “For the premise, it was [ideal]. It is the best place to live if you are a vampire. You could pretend you are a miner working underground all day, but you are really asleep and then you could come up and drink at the bar!”
BF “If you walk around Coober Pedy, you see doorways in rocks… you never know what you are gonna find when you enter those places [Laughs].”
One of the ‘hero’ locations is an underground bar which is very unique, very distinctive.
BF “Places like that do exist. We were fortunate to find a location in Port Adelaide where we could build the bar – it was a disused warehouse.
“It was an eighty-two-day shoot. About a third of that was in Cooper Pedy. It was split between [studio work] in Adelaide.”
There is a lot of wit and humour in the imagery as well as the situations. Like the fact that some of the baddies – the vampires – arrive on a bus which looks like, in silhouette, a coffin…
WT “Yeah, we had a lot of conversations about ‘fly-in, fly-out’ vampires.”
Throughout, the imagery is very suggestive of ‘vampire lore’. Horizontal and vertical lines in the most mundane settings – a hospital dorm, a streetlight – ‘become’ a crucifix… even the desert – seen in aerial shots – is made strange. Coober Pedy’s distinctive white soil is very suggestive…
WT “Yeah, [it looks like] sores on the skin. Like an outbreak.”
The show mixes comedy and violence and it’s bloody, and shocking and scary and yet, it’s not too much of anything, it feels balanced…
WT “We always knew there was going to be a very large body count. If you were connected [as an audience member] to every single person we kill on the show… it would be so boring, if you know what I mean? So, we knew the violence had to be comical in a strange way.”
BF “I think it goes back to that dance really, between the heaviness of the themes. There’s anger in this show: ‘let’s just kill them, kill em all’… and on the other side of it is, ‘we wanna have fun’. While people can think what they want about the themes of the show, we want them to enjoy the ride, we want them to be on the side of our main heroes… it has to maintain the sense of momentum and fun and it’s a genre show.”
WT “I don’t want to sound like a wanker, but I liken it to a great ‘70s rock ‘n’ roll album, where you can just dance to it or you can sit down and read the fuckin’ lyrics.”
Firebite is available exclusively on AMC+ now, the new streaming bundle available via Amazon Prime Video Channels and Apple TV Channels. New episodes Thursdays.
