Daybreakers: true [Aussie] blood
Australian horror gets a fresh transfusion with the release of Daybreakers, a big budget film designed with a global audience firmly in mind. Paul Hayes writes.
Futuristic vampire films are not the most popular genre among Australian filmmakers, but twins Michael and Peter Spierig are not your typical directors either.
The Spierigs found international success with their first film, the self-funded ‘credit card’ zombie flick, Undead. It showed Hollywood what they were capable of, and made it possible for their second outing Daybreakers to have a cast that includes Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe, and the backing of US studio Lionsgate for development, production and international distribution.
The film is set in a not-too-distant future where a plague has turned 95 percent of the world’s population into vampires whose food source, human blood, is running out. Environmental allegories aside, Daybreakers is a designed to get lots and lots of paying customers into the multiplex.
For the brothers, filmmaking is as much about entertaining those paying customers as it is about producing anything resembling art and moving from zombies to vampires was a natural segue. Getting a $20-plus million Australian production off the ground however, was a case of having to go away from home in order to triumphantly return with the necessary means.
After buying and distributing Undead in the US, Lionsgate was prepared to develop and produce the early draft of the vampire project the Spierigs pitched to them. From the beginning, the brothers always had the plan to bring it back to Australia.
“We pushed to shoot it here,” Peter said. “Our goal is to get big American money and make films here, using local crews and as many local actors as possible.”
That is why Claudia Karvan, Michael Dorman, Vince Colosimo and Isabel Lucas can be seen alongside Hawke and Dafoe, as their American-accented allies and villains.
While big for an Australian production, the budget for Daybreakers is relatively small in Hollywood terms – not that you can tell when watching it on screen, thanks to its high production values.
According to producer Chris Brown, it is this ability to make the most of a budget that made shooting the film locally an ideal choice.
“In Australia we can make films that effectively can be big studio pictures, and deliver an incredible value,” he told Encore. “Because we’ve serviced so many American films and TV shows, there’s a huge section of the crews and technicians that understand the level of excellence and quality that you have to achieve to make it acceptable to the American market.”
TOO COMMERCIAL?
This notion of making larger scale productions, with the end result being put out for a global market, is one that both Brown and the Spierig brothers hope to replicate in the future.
“This is not a one off, but something I’ve been trying to do for a very long time,” Brown said. “To create a model and an environment for us to make much bigger commercial films.
“That’s not to say that I don’t love and admire Australian cinema at the other end of the budget range, but I just think that we need to create a landscape which has both ends.”
The Spierigs themselves hope to follow a pattern that has already been established across the Tasman.
“Our ambition is to do a similar thing to what Peter Jackson has done in New Zealand,” Peter said. “That is, go and get the money from wherever we have to, and
then make the films here.”
Michael adds that these types of commercial films don’t quite lend themselves to the current filmmaking structure in Australia.
“You can’t make these $20 million movies without going overseas to get money. The Australian film industry can’t sustain that.”
One of the main reasons the local industry can’t sustain such a production, the brothers say, is that it doesn’t work with the audience in mind. Filmmaking is, by its very nature, commercial, and money spent on production has to at least be attempted to be recouped.
“People need to understand if you want to go and paint a picture it’s not going to cost you much money, or if you want to record a song it’s not going to cost you that much money,” Michael said. “But if you want to make a film, they cost millions and millions of dollars.
There is no way around it.
“You should feel a responsibility to make that money back. You can’t make a $20 million movie and expect to recoup that money by targeting just an Australian audience, so we tried to make a film that will hopefully appeal to a global audience.”
It is this idea, making films for entertainment’s sake,that has been such a hot topic of conversation in Australian film in recent times, and one that the Spierigs feel strongly about.
While they say that things have definitely changed for the better, their commercial style saw their avenues severely restricted as burgeoning local filmmakers.
“We tried to get funding for a number of projects over the years and we struggled,” Peter said. “It got to the point where we financed our first movie entirely ourselves.”
Even after Undead was sold to Lionsgate and saw a US theatrical release, the doors in Australia were still slow to open.
“Every studio in Hollywood wanted to meet with us and not one single person or one single funding body in Australia wanted to sit down and have a conversation with us,” Peter said.
The suggestion that a style of filmmaking can be ‘too commercial’ for the Australian industry is one that the brothers rail against. Passionately.
“That is such a stupid, stupid statement, and anybody who says that is a tool,” Peter adamantly claims.
While these suggestions do certainly exist in the local industry (see Andrew Scarano’s recent doco, Into the Shadows, for evidence), both Peter and Michael say
a change in attitude in the right places is on its way, which has been evidenced by the support of the defunct Film Finance Corporation and its successor Screen Australia, as well as the Pacific Film and Television Commission.
NOT ANOTHER VAMPIRE MOVIE
Despite the film’s 2010 release date, Daybreakers’ Brisbane shoot actually took place in the middle of 2007. This delay begs the obvious questions of whether this vampire film is now jumping on a certain bloodsucking bandwagon that seems to have overtaken both big and small screens.
According to both producer and directors, it was more a case of testing and timing.
“Because of successful test screenings, Lionsgate decided that the film was really, really worth putting a lot of effort behind,” Brown said. “We went back and redid the ending because that was what the tests showed.”
The brothers point to a glut in the horror slate as an additional factor in slowing the release.
“It is a really packed market at the moment and Lionsgate didn’t want to put it on a date where it was going to get buried under a whole bunch of horror films,” Peter said. “The first real free date was January 2010, so that was the way it worked out.”
As for comparisons to the other big vampiric entry at the local Cineplex and others on TV, the brothers point to one very obvious part of their story they say confirms Twilight’s lack of influence.
“Our main character’s name is Edward,” Peter laughs. “A couple of years ago I started seeing these t-shirts saying ‘Edward the Vampire’, and I thought ‘how the hell do they know about our film already’?
“People were talking about Twilight, and I said, ‘what the fuck is Twilight?’”
Despite the (pale) skin-deep similarities in the subject matter, the brothers know Daybreakers is a very different entity to a love triangle between a girl, a vampire and a werewolf.
“It’s safe to say that our vampire move is very different to others that are out there,” Michael said.
The idea was to present a futuristic society of vampires that mirrors our society in every way: they catch the train to work, drink coffee, watch TV, except they do it all at night (or using technology to protect themselves against direct sunlight, during the day) and their primary food source is the rapidly depleting human blood, is certainly a novel one.
“We had so much fun playing around with the idea,” Michael said. “If you’re a vampire and its normal what would you do to your house? How would you adapt your car? How would you get around the city? How would your life work?
“It was a lot of fun to play around in that world.”
This world that the Spierig brothers created is safely set on a very different plane to Twilight’s Edward and Bella’s struggles with forbidden love.
“If our vampire movie was a teen romance, then I would think, ‘Oh, we’re screwed,’” Michael admits.
“That said, we have seen a lot of this anti-Twilight movement from more traditional horror fans who are looking for something that isn’t fluffy and nice, with vegetarian vampires. We are hoping that this is the antidote to that kind of film.”
Hoyts certainly hopes the antidote will work when the film is released on February4.
Note from the editor: Since the original publication of this article, Daybreakers has been released in the US, earning U$25.5 million in its first two weeks.
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