Hey folks, Harry here... The first person to chime in on UNDEAD that I saw was the infamously banned from AICN writer... MASSAWYRM. I'm still not entirely sure why he got banned, but I was in Spain, minding my own affairs, wallowing in cool cinema, and some sort of Moriarty / Massawyrm confrontation came down... I believe it was over ... special brownies... Anyway, because of his banned status, his review never hit the site, which frankly blows, cuz it was exceptionally well written and passionate about this film. Since then, we've had many more reviews... The story ends well for the Spierig Brothers... In fact, they are set to whup major ass at Toronto's MIDNIGHT MADNESS. Soon you'll see a half dozen slobbering geeks that get their Zombie quota filled till the cup runneth over. Then next year, the rest of us get this movie via Lion's Gate! Meanwhile, here's a wonderful interview that Latauro did with the Brothers Spierig...
INTERVIEW WITH PETER AND MICHAEL SPIERIG, DIRECTORS OF UBER-COOL NEW AUSTRALIAN ZOMBIE FLICK "UNDEAD"
This interview came so close to not happening. On Saturday I was up at the snow when I got a call from the Spierig's representative, who was responding to my request for an interview. It turned out that the concept of the interview itself wasn't a problem, but the brothers were based in Queensland (I'm in Melbourne), and they were flying to Toronto early this week.
On my way back from the snow, my beloved car (Karla) broke down in as many ways as a car can break down, and it seemed like I'd be stuck in the middle of nowhere (I'll bitch about this in this week's Downunder column). This was last night. It was only by a chance of fate that I got home, got to work today, checked my email, and found that the interview was set up for 2pm today... two hours after I'd checked the mail.
So I frantically searched for a speaker phone, set up a recording device, and wrote a bunch of questions... and just getting it all done by the time the little hand hit the two and the big hand hit the twelve.
So, depending on when this goes up, there's a very good chance you'll be reading this within a few hours of the interview itself. Pretty cool, huh?
As for the subjects, if you read this site then you should know who they are, or at least what they're responsible for. UNDEAD is the best zombie film we've had in years, and it's a compliment to the film that I can write that without a hint of irony or sarcasm. The film is terrific (check out my review at: Click Here To Bask In My Brilliance You Miserable Swine!), and it was made by two brothers, Michael and Peter Spierig, who brought the meaning of "independent cinema" back to its grassroots.
LATAURO: Keeping in mind that it will undoubtedly serve as a template for other aspiring filmmakers, how did you get started in film?
PETER: We started making films when we were very young, maybe ten or eleven when my dad bought a video camera, and we started playing around with it, shooting things in the backyard. Burning things, blowing things up, all that kind of stuff. I got interested in film and TV at high school and it just built from there, to the point where we were making dramas and productions that weren't just burning things down. Then we went to University and we made a bunch of short films. And it grew from there to the point where we decided we'd work together and try to get a career making feature films. Luckily, straight out of Uni, a commercial director here in Queensland saw a whole bunch of short films we had done and offered us a job directing TV commercials which we did for three or four years. Then along came the feature.
LATAURO: What were your inspirations for UNDEAD? Which films did you draw upon?
PETER: Well, we're big fans of Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi. BAD TASTE, BRAINDEAD, EVIL DEAD... obviously the Romero stuff. Just big fans of indie horror. TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, all those types of films. And films that are done on no budget, limited resources, and start careers. The sort of stuff we were interested in for UNDEAD, trying to figure out how do we make our mark, how do we start our careers, what is the type of film that we need to do. And also, what types of films do we love that work on an independent level.
LATAURO: So it is a zombie film or an alien film?
MICHAEL: That's a good question. It's both... It's a zombie film, it's definitely a zombie film. It's a comedy, I would say, above all things. I don't know... it's both. More zombie than alien, though.
LATAURO: Where did Marion come from? He struck me as being the distant cousin of Ash from EVIL DEAD.
PETER: You know, that wasn't really ever the intention. We just wanted to come up with a character that was, yeah, he's kind of the loner, Clint Eastwood-style but at the same time, it's trying to come up with a character that's got a certain amount of mystery to him. And trying to do something that has an Australian quality about it, but at the same time is not so *specifically* Australian that people wouldn't relate to it internationally.
MICHAEL: Obviously, I understand why people would say he's the distant cousin of Ash, but I also don't quite understand that because Ash is kind-of an idiot. I love those movies, but Ash is kind-of a bumbling fool that just makes his way through it, while the Marion character, he's certainly not a bumbling fool. He may be insane, but....
PETER: ...he's got a plan, he knows what's going on.
MICHAEL: Ash is just kind-of a goofball.
LATAURO: That spaghetti western definition nailed it. It's been bothering me, I've been trying to pick what achetype he is. He really struck me as a send-up of those loner characters. It's the ridiculousness of always being prepared...
MICHAEL: That's the intention, absolutely. The whole film is really tongue-in-cheek. That's the point. It's saying that we know we're in a situation that's really out there, and we should play with it. We should have fun with it.
LATAURO: Rounding down to the nearest 100, how many people told you it would never happen, that you were being overly ambitious.
MICHAEL: I don't think we really associated ourselves with people who told us it couldn't happen. We'd been down that road before when we'd tried to get short films financed, and certainly another script that we'd written a few years ago, we tried to get some development money for that, and that never happened. There was a certain group of people who told us it would never happen, but we just don't associated with those people. We associate with people who believe in the project and who wanted it all to work.
PETER: You just gotta find those people. The trick is, when you're making an Australian horror film you're really up against so many things. The fact that Australian horror isn't all that highly regarded...
LATAURO: CUT had a lot to do with that, I think.
PETER: Well, yeah, absolutely. That's a film I know didn't receive any positive reviews, as far as I know. And it definitely hurt us. And it hurt genre pictures in Australia. I don't know if Australian audiences are ready for genre pictures -- I hope they are. I know I'd like to see some more Australian genre pictures, because we just don't have that. And genre picture can be made, and have been made, some of the best ones were made with no money. So it doesn't make sense to me why we're not making them; they can sell internationally, they translate well across the world.
LATAURO: Did you have an idea about the special effects beforehand? Did you know for certain they'd work, or were you acting on faith?
MICHAEL: We'd done a number of short films where we'd used visual effects before, certainly not to the level that we wanted to do in UNDEAD. Peter and I did have a bit of a background in visual effects, Peter's been into 3D animation since the mid-90s when it was just becoming domesticated. So we had a good idea of how things should be done. There were certain effects shots in the film where we'd shoot the plates we needed, then when it came to doing the effect on the computer we'd read the tutorial that day and end up doing the shot that night. It was a bit hit-and-miss, but pretty much all of the effects we set out to do we managed to achieve. That's just the way the technology is nowdays, you can do that level of effects work at home.
LATAURO: I was amazed when I read you'd rendered them all on your home computer.
MICHAEL: It was a nightmare! All up, with all the previsualisation and testing, it was nearly a year working on the effects. And that's going back over a year ago now. Nowdays it would be twice as fast. We've really got to the stage now where visual effects are accessible to anyone who has time to learn the technology.
LATAURO: I was particularly impressed with the cinematography. Most government-funded films seem to look like they were shot on Hi-8, whereas UNDEAD is very crisp, very clear. What did you do differently?
PETER: We shot on Super 16, so we were already in a far more difficult position as opposed to someone shooting on 35mm. We had to try and make it look cinematic and hold up on a 35mm blow-up. We spent a lot of time talking to the cinematographer, Andrew Strahorn, about the look and the style, and we wanted a look that had a very definite look and feel and atmosphere about it. That's why we shot just about all our interiors in sets, so we could control the lighting and the art direction and maintain a look. I don't know what it is, I don't know why Australian films look so ordinary. And it's strange when you think that we produce some of the best cinematographers in the world. I don't know, maybe there's not enough time spent talking about it and planning.
LATAURO: What was the next stage once you'd completed the film? How did you get it out there?
PETER: We managed to secure a sales agent in LA, and he took it round to a whole bunch of film markets and sold it. I'm talking specifically about Australia, that is. He sold it to Imagine, and they saw it at the American film market. A lot of our sales has happened because of our website, when we put up the trailer and started placing images on the site we had a lot of interest. And Harry's responsible for quite a bit of that, too, with his review...
LATAURO: That was certainly the first place I heard about it...
PETER: Yeah, it's a scary thing. And I know that, especially if you've done an independent film and you submit it to somebody like Harry or Garth at Dark Horizons or whoever it may be, if they say something like "It's an absolute flaming pile of shit", you're in big, big trouble. So we took that risk, and thankfully they both liked it. But certainly Harry has been quite vocal about it, and that's great. We didn't know that it would have that kind of reaction. We thought we'll just try and make a zombie film that we would want to see, and hopefully people would want to see. And it's just extraordinary, the power of the internet and the power of something like Ain't It Cool News, and what that means to an independent film.
LATAURO: So, Peter Jackson went from BRAINDEAD to LORD OF THE RINGS, Sam Raimi went from EVIL DEAD to SPIDER-MAN... Which tentpole blockbuster can we expect from you this holiday season?
PETER: That's a very good question... I have absolutely no idea. I know that Michael and I have had a plan for a very long time. We start with this type of film, we do a couple of these types of film, and eventually we get to this type of movie. And, like you mentioned, LORD OF THE RINGS or SPIDER-MAN, somewhere down that path would be just fine. That would be extraordinary. But there is a plan, and UNDEAD was the first step. Hopefully the next step will lead to the next step, to the next step, to the next step that will eventually lead to us doing a SPIDER-MAN or a LORD OF THE RINGS. I think we still have a lot to learn, we're not in any hurry. I think we'd be absolute fools to jump into a film like, say, SPIDER-MAN. I get the feeling that we wouldn't have the kind of control or the knowledge to work within the system. Every project you do is a big learning experience, so we're not going to jump in and do a $100 million movie coming off a $1 million movie. I don't know whether any studio would be eagre to do that. I know that there are plenty of studios that are very interested in Michael and I, but to what degree of budget, we're still trying to figure out.
LATAURO: So have they come calling with offers of money and concubines? Is there a next project?
PETER: There is definitely a next project that's going to happen. What that will be, we're still working through. There's a whole bunch of things that we're interested in. There's a script we've been working on for quite a while, we're going into a second draft, and that's definitely at the top of our list of things that interest us. But there are also a couple of projects set up at studios that we're definitely interested in... It's really just a matter of what happens first. There's a book we're chasing at the moment as well, so we'll just wait and see. There's no big hurry. UNDEAD took three years to make, and it was a very difficult film to make, but we're incredibly proud of it, and it was the right film to make. So we just want to make sure that the next one is the right film as well.
LATAURO: Congratulations, and good luck in Toronto.
Peace out,
Latauro
