You know the Coen brothers and the Farrelly brothers, but if you haven’t seen the horror comedy Undead, you probably have no idea who the Spierig brothers are. The writing/directing duo hails from Australia and is the team behind the latest film to indulge in the vampire craze, Daybreakers. It’s a good thing the two sport different looks, because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to tell Michael and Peter apart!
They first gained attention when Lionsgate unexpectedly acquired their self-financed film Undead and set it for a limited theatrical run and DVD release. A couple of years later, the studio and the twins reunited to shoot Daybreakers. Not only were they completely taken aback by the concept of not having to swipe their own credit cards to finance the producer, but their dream headliner, Ethan Hawke, was on board to star.
Check out what Peter and Michael said about their filmmaking techniques, potential for a Daybreakers 2 and their next project, a film adaption of the adventure novel Captain Blood.
Do you guys fight like brothers?
Peter: Sometimes, yeah, but on set it’s very very rare. We do have disagreements when we’re working through the script or whatever it might be, but there’s no fistfights. Or at least not yet.
Michael: We did so much work preparing this film. We storyboarded the whole film and we did our own animatics and we did so much pre-visualization that there was no sort of confusion when we were on set. It wasn’t like two opposing views fighting each other. We shot this film in 40 days, which is pretty quick for an action effects picture, and what we often did was we had to split up. So we split into two units so Peter would be directing Ethan and Willem and I would be off directing Sam Neill and Isabel Lucas in another scene. So we had to split up every now and then and shoot two units at the same time.
When you guys started working on Daybreakers, the whole vampire resurgence hadn’t even begun. What was your reaction when you found out the film was going to hit theaters in the middle of a craze?
Michael: The interesting thing was we started writing the script in 2003, we shot it in 2007, it’s now finally coming out. Qhen we started shooting the film I started seeing these T-shirts coming out, ‘Team Edward’ or ‘Edward the Vampire.’ I’m like “How do they know about our film already?” I’d never heard of Twilight, no idea what it was and then …
Peter: And then their vampire’s named Edward and ours is too and it’s just one of those things that happens.
You have the distinction of actually following the standard vampire rules.
Peter: They don’t sparkle in our movie. It’s fun to kind of play on that and try to be as true to the popular culture understanding of vampires and then try and bring in some new mythology in there as well.
Which horror movies and directors were most influential on you as filmmakers and movie fans?
Michael: We like all types of films. It’s not just horror that we like. I actually see Daybreakers more as a science fiction film than a horror film. Growing up in the 80’s there was such great films. Certainly the Star Wars films were a huge influence on me. I’m a big fan of David Cronenberg. He’s one of my all-time favorite filmmakers so he was a huge influence, huge influence on me. I really like George A. Romero and certainly Dawn of the Dead is a big influence.
Peter: We’re big fans of Peter Jackson, obviously his early stuff we’re huge fans of and stuff he’s doing now. And it’s been great because we’ve gotten to know Peter a bit now, and he’s been such a huge influence on our filmmaking. There’s a lot of great Aussie filmmakers as well. Ethan’s worked with Peter Weir, an extraordinary filmmaker, and George Miller. So we’ve got quite a few talented directors coming out of Australia as well.
What’s it like going from making Undead where you were maxing out your own credit cards to a financed production like this?
Michael: You know what? It was surprisingly similar in many respects. We didn’t have anywhere near enough money to make this movie, same as Undead, and Peter and I ended up doing over half of the visual effects in Daybreakers because we ran out of money, which was basically what we did in Undead. The major difference, obviously was when we made Undead I don’t think there was a single person that had ever been on a feature film set before that worked on that film. None of us knew what we were doing. So Undead was a film that was almost like film school. It was one of those films that was made where we never ever thought it was going to get a release, we never thought that anyone would see it and when it actually came out we went ‘Really? Really? This is actually getting released? OK, alright, that’s great!’ It surprised the hell out of us. Once Ethan said yes we knew it was going to get a wide release and we got the opportunity to work with some great technicians, fantastic cinematographer and production designer and it was a whole new experience working with such talented actors.
Peter: The shooting budget of Undead was less than the contact lens budget of Daybreakers, so that gives you kind of an idea of the scale.
Sometimes in filmmaking necessity breeds brilliance. Do you find that the lack of a huge budget forces you to come up with more creative concepts?
Peter: Absolutely.
Michael: Yes and no. Yes, absolutely you come up with interesting ways of resolving problems rather than just throwing lots of money at it. The other thing too is sometimes, it’s unfortunate, you wish you could have had another extra day or two to add more into the world and that sort of thing, so it’s kind of a double edged sword in many respects. What filmmaker doesn’t wish they had more money?
What’s your screenwriting process? How do you brainstorm together?
Peter: We start with just a single idea and then we expand it into plot points, and we’ll both just work on that in a very very basic sense. Then we will get into index cards and start pinning up things on walls and just discussing every scene and the intention of it and ultimately where it’s all going. It’s completely collaborative the whole way, and then when we get to the actual part of writing the screenplay we’ve planned it well enough that Michael can go off and write a scene, I could go off and write a scene and, in theory, they should connect together. It doesn’t always happen but it’s a pretty smooth process once all that prep work is done.
How long does the process take you?
Peter: [Laughs] It could take a long time. We’re very slow. We’re very slow writers.
Michael: But it’s always different. Sometimes ideas come quick and then to actually write it out can take years. It just depends. The interesting thing about writing is you never finish writing the script until you do the final sound mix. We’ve learned that more and more. You think you’ve got a solid script down, you do a table read, everything changes. Well not everything, but lot of things change. Actors throw a thousand questions at you and usually, for this group there was a lot of good questions and things that perhaps we didn’t see that they were seeing and we did a lot of rewriting then. Wen you shoot you start running out of money and then you have to condense scenes down. We did that a lot.
Is it difficult not to be thinking sequel when you make a movie like this?
Michael: Yes and no. We wrote a pretty extensive back-story, what happened the whole ten years before, during the plague, when the plague started and we’ve also written ideas of what would happen afterwards. But I try not to think of sequels because you really jinx that I think. I think sometimes you might be cheating the audience, you know? You’re not giving them the complete film. You’re teasing them and saying, ‘Here, you want to know what really happens? You’ve got to see the next one.’ I don’t know if that’s a good way to work.
What made you go with Ethan Hawke for the lead actor? Was it Gattaca?
Peter: Well, yeah, we love that film and our thought when we were writing the script is, ‘Gee, this would be great for an Ethan Hawke-type.’ In other words, somebody who’s intelligent and vulnerable and could play an action hero too, but it was always an Ethan Hawke-type. It was never actually Ethan Hawke because that’s just crazy. That’s not going to happen. And then we kind of said, ‘Well, what the hell? Let’s send it to him. Why not?’ And we just got this very surprising phone call that said, ‘Can you come to New York? Ethan wants to meet you.’ So we figured worst case scenario we get a free trip to New York, best case scenario we have our first choice for our movie. He said yes and that changed the attitude towards the film from other people. It suddenly legitimized it and that made it possible to get fantastic actors like Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill. We’ve got some of the top Australian actors in our film too, people that we’ve admired for a very long time. So, yeah, we really owe Ethan a lot because he took a gamble on two guys who made a silly little splatter film in their backyard in Australia and said, ‘Yeah, I’m onboard.’
How do you feel about Lionsgate and how they’ve marketed the movie?
Michael: I think Lionsgate really understands the movie. The worst thing is when somebody picks up your movie because of a trend or something like that. I particularly like the new posters that are the ones with the vampires hanging upside-down. I think they’re fantastic. And the thing I love about it is they haven’t said, ‘Okay, well Twilight is popular, we’re going to try to do a Twilight type of poster.’ I was terrified. I’m like, ‘Oh please let’s not have Ethan doing that sort of Twilight pose. Please don’t do it.’ And they didn’t! They went almost the opposite, which is this really sort of ugly and aggressive looking vampire in a suit. I think the trailer is spot on. I think the great thing about the trailer is it doesn’t give away what happens at the end of the movie. I think that so many trailers give you the whole film in two and half minutes and it really pisses me off when I see that.
Would you be open to having Daybreakers adapted into a TV series?
Michael: Absolutely. I think it’s a really interesting world and I think we’ve only sort of scratched the surface of it and it’d be great to do a TV series that doesn’t involve this cast, that has a whole new cast and we can tell the stories of what it’s like to be a vampire living night to night in this world. It could be really interesting.
Is it a given this will be a videogame?
Michael: Nothing’s given. Videogames are difficult because most videogames based on movies suck. A videogame, a good one, can take four to five years to develop. It takes as long as a movie can. So when they try to rush out videogames based on films they generally suck.
Where are you guys currently at with the Captain Blood movie?
Peter: There’s a script and it’s still being developed. We’re moving forward, but there’s still quite a long way to go.
Is it still set in space?
Peter: Yeah! It is and that draft has come in and it’s pretty exciting.
Any Ethan Hawke-types on your wish list for that movie?
Peter: There are a few people that we’re thinking of, but I can’t tell you at this point.
If you did have $10 million extra dollars, was there a specific scene you would have liked to shoot?
Michael: Yes! Yes! First of all, I would have shown the world more because we had so much more of the world and secondly, there would have been a massive subsider fight.
Peter: It was scripted. There was a storyboard.
Michael: It was scripted, we were about to shoot and we completely ran out of money.
Peter: There were locations scouted, we were ready to shoot it and then we just couldn’t afford to.
