Daybreakers Interview: THE SPIERIG BROTHERS

Five years ago, two unknown Aussie brothers named Michael and Peter Spierig unleashed their low-budget yet high brow zombie flick, Undead upon hundreds of fans at the “Midnight Madness” Toronto International Film Festival screening. Five years later, they came back with a vengeance with their ultra-violent, tongue-in-cheek and futuristic  vampire feature, Daybreakers starring big A-list names such as Ethan Hawke, Sam Neill and Willem Dafoe.

After viewing the film at this year’s Midnight Madness programme at TIFF, I was lucky enough to catch up with the charismatic writing/directing team during a roundtable discussion for the film. Read on to find out more about their attraction to the vampire sub-genre, the secrets to indie film making and possible news of Daybreakers 2.

The Vampire sub-genre is fairly marketable right now. What made you attracted to filming a movie in this genre?

Peter Spierig: The Vampire genre is probably the first movie monster genre that ever existed in cinema. We were trying to do something a little different with it and not to be kind of disrespectful to it in a way where we just ignore all the rules. We said, ‘Let’s take the rules and kind of twist it and do something different.’ We’re such big fans of the genre too.  I think with vampire movies there so much you can do with them, because there are so many interesting rules and ideas and if you can subvert them, you can do something really cool with the genre.

There’s a fair amount of social commentary in vampire films mostly having to do with racism or being different in general. Would you say you injected that into your film?

Michael Spierig: I think so. Anytime you talk about depleting a resource, I think there’s always some sort of social commentary there. The fine line you have to walk when you’re doing a genre picture is that you don’t want to get bogged down with the political side of it so much that you alienate your audience and there really is a fine line. We talked about it a lot. ‘How far are we going to take this?’ ‘How political do we want to get?’ I hope we don’t get bogged down with it in the film. I hope it’s just something that sits behind the blood and guts. [laughs]

P: So many times you hear about vampires being a metaphor for just the idea of sucking a resource dry. Especially nowadays with the idea of somebody bleeding something dry. It happens all the time. It’s very clearly in our movie, a bit like Michael said. It was not our prime focus, but it’s great for it to be there and I think people are in tune with that given the state of things right now.

So did you try to balance that more when you wrote the script?

P: So much of what we do is in pre-production. When you get on set, given the nature that we’ve come off low budget, [films] there’s not a lot of opportunities to really figure it out when we’re on set. We worked on movies for six years and we spent 40 odd days on set, so it’s a small portion of the whole process. So you want to have it all figured out to some degree when you get on set. We don’t have a lot of time to play around.

How different was it to work on a film with bigger stars and a bigger budget than your previous effort?

M:  It’s actually surprisingly similar in many respects. We still approach it the same way. We storyboard everything. We plan everything out. We do Animatics and we have been working with the same special effects guy since we were in college. The difference is we don’t have to pack the lights up at the end of the day and drive the gear home. [laughs] Also, the catering is so much better now. [laughs]  The things that happen when you have more money, for example the construction crew, an amazing cast rehearsal time and effects department. All those sorts of things we didn’t have with our first film are certainly available to us now. The difficult thing when you do low-budget films like Undead is that you have to do SO many jobs and it takes you away from the primary focus—which is directing. We did a lot of visual effects in this film as well. The great thing about having more money is that you get to do fewer jobs and focus on the most important one—which is again directing.

Any added pressure or expectations when you get a bigger budget?

P: The more money you have, the more pressure. The great thing about a studio like LIONSGATE is that they want to do something that’s different. They have a reputation for doing movies that are kind of outside of the box, especially in horror. We had a good budget but we didn’t have a huge budget, so there wasn’t that much pressure on us to make it for everyone. They were really supportive of the ideas that we had. While there is that pressure, we really never felt it a lot.

There are a lot of intense action sequences in this film. Out of all of them, which was the most difficult to shoot?

P: You know which was the most difficult to shoot was when the creature comes into the kitchen.

That was scary!

P: [laughs] It was difficult because it had every kind of technique. It had literally every technique we knew how to do. We had really complicated make-up effects where the actor would be in the chair getting all the makeup done for ten hours, and be on set for twelve and then have another four hours getting it removed. There’s also a lot of wirework and there’s a small amount of CGI. One of the things Michael and I said from the beginning is that we don’t want to digital creature work. We want to try to put people in suits and when you do that, it ends up taking a lot more time.

The fans appreciate that far more because it seems far more authentic. Now everything looks like cartoons.

P: [nods] I would always opt for having bad makeup effects as opposed to having kind of okay CGI. That was our attitude. If it’s not that great, it doesn’t matter because it’s going to be so much better than CG. The great thing is that we had the great make-up too. Make-up is always our first preference.

Do you have any plans for a sequel or trilogy?

M: We had this discussion the other day with LIONSGATE and we don’t want to jinx anything yet. [laughs] The film doesn’t come out until January. We’re all optimistic and from what we gather, the [midnight madness] screening did go great last night.  We certainly have a continuing story that we’ve got in mind. We wrote a whole backstory that’s really not in the whole film at all.

P: We have lots of material. We spent a lot of time with just living in that world and exploring a bunch of ideas and stuff you don’t see in the film.  It would be a lot of fun to go back.

M: You can ask me that question at the end of January. [laughs]

How long did the script take for Daybreakers?

M: We developed the script for close to two years…which is quite a long process. I think we wrote it in about a year and then we spent the better part of another year editing the script while we were trying to raise the finances.  LIONSGATE bought it from the treatment stage. It was a fourteen-page treatment and then they paid us through out the better part of two years.  It’s a long process but I thought it was a very good process, because during that time you really try every possible way to try to tell the story to start and end the scene and you sort of eliminate them all until you have this really refined script.  I don’t think we had any deleted scenes in the movie. There are maybe one or two little ones. [laughs]  And that’s all from putting so much time in the prep, because we knew we wouldn’t have that much time when it came down to shooting.

How do you two work with one another as co-directors?

P: It’s one of those things where it’s 50/50.  Michael will work on a scene or I will work on a scene, and what we do is we spend a lot of time talking about things. A lot of time prepping things.  So when we get on set, we’re able to split the roles and our reactions to a scene are very, very similar.  I think we have exactly the same feeling about it.

M: We were running out of time with this film, so we split and I would direct one scene and Peter would do another. It was like having two units going at the same time.

How did making Undead prepare you for Daybreakers? Were there any unexpected challenges?

P: Making a low- budget feature film on your own dime is the best kind of film school you could ever have. It’s terrifying and it’s horrible and it’s great. It’s all those things.  We learned so much.  I’m extremely proud of Undead, but I think that we also learned a lot of what NOT to do which is the best lesson you can learn. The most important to learn is that time on set is so precious.  That moment that you have with your actors on set is a very a short period of time in the grand scheme of making a movie.  So whatever you can do to make that time as substantial as it should be, be it whether having the preparation ready on set so there’s no figuring it out. You know what you’re going to do and you can be inspired by what the actors are doing.  That’s the great thing about being Australian, that’s why I think Aussies do very well as actors, directors, cinematographers, we just don’t have any money.  [laughs] We’re so used to battling. So when we get money, I think we are out to embrace it.

M: Maximize it.

P: Yes, and maximize it. [laughs]

Thank you guys for your time!

M: Thank you!

P: Thank you!

Sink your fangs into DAYBREAKERS January 2010!

Email Serena at serena@killerfilm.com