Exclusive Interview with The Spierig Brothers Dayb...

One of the many films that premiered at this year’s Toronto Film Festival was The Spierig Brothers “Daybreakers”. The film stars Ethan Hawke as a brilliant vampire hematologist (blood expert) and he lives in a world where most humans have been turned into vampires due to a plague. Unfortunately, with a vampire society so large, they’ve killed most of the remaining humans and they’re relying on Hawke to provide a blood substitute. The film also stars Sam Neill, Isabel Lucas, and Willem Dafoe.

While I wasn’t sure what to expect going in, I was surprised by how much I liked the movie. It’s a high concept film that also plays as a vampire movie. I think audiences are going to like it when Lionsgate releases it this January. Anyway, while at the festival, I got to interview The Spierig Brothers and you can read our conversation after the jump. They talk about doing some of the special effects themselves, getting financing, making the film, and they also talk about their next movie “Captain Blood”.
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Peter and Michael Spierig Daybreakers Q&A...

Michael Spierig has a shocking confession to make.

“When we made Daybreakers, I had never even heard of Twilight,” says Michael, who directed the upcoming vampire saga with brother Peter. “Our lead character’s name is Edward, and I started seeing these Edward the Vampire T-shirts. I’m like, ‘Do they already know about our film? What the hell’s going on?’ And I’m told there’s this other thing called Twilight. And I go, “What the hell’s Twilight?’”

The Spierigs – the Australia brothers who first caught our attention with 2003’s micro-budgeted zombie saga Undead – now know all too well about the girl-friendly Twilight saga. But they’re not worried the sequel New Moon will take a bite out of the ultra-violent Daybreakers’s business when it opens Jan. 10, 2010.

“I think it’s actually going to help us,” Michael says. “I would be worried if our film was like those, but our film is so different.”
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Isabel to Climb Mt. Killimanjaro...

When Jessica Biel, Lupe Fiasco and Isabel Lucas get together in Africa, they’ll have nowhere to go but up.

The entertainers have signed on to climb the continent’s highest peak — Mt. Kilimanjaro, at more than 19,000 feet — to raise awareness about the need for clean water worldwide.

The Summit on the Summit expedition, set for January, is the brainchild of singer and producer Kenna. His father suffered from waterborne diseases as a child in Ethiopia.

Biel, 27, said she was “astonished” to learn that more than a billion people across the globe have no access to clean water.
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The Waiting City review by Variety...

When a Sydney couple travel to chaotic Calcutta to collect their adopted child, the drawn-out process strains their already fragile marriage in the uneven drama “The Waiting City.” Quasi-mystical second feature from Aussie helmer-writer Claire McCarthy (“Cross Life”) lyrically presents the many faces of India and the country’s strong spiritual appeal through Western eyes. But despite convincing thesping and vivid lensing, the pic undermines its grip on viewers with annoying gaffes in plot and character logic and odd shifts in tone. Pic will open on home turf next year, but foreign exposure is likely limited to fest dates and ancillary.

Arriving in Calcutta sans some of their luggage, high-powered lawyer Fiona (Radha Mitchell) and her laid-back musician hubby Ben (Joel Edgerton) quickly get a taste of what it’s like to operate on Indian time. After getting little satisfaction at the baggage claim (“This is India,” a tired worker proclaims), they face an irritating wait for their hotel-dispatched driver, Krishna (Samrat Chakrabarti).

Things don’t go smoothly with the adoption, either. As the agency continues to put off their appointment, long-unresolved relationship issues start to surface. Fiona and Ben ultimately grate on each other’s nerves to the point of separation.
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The Spierig Bros. on Daybreakers!...

Back in 2002, the Spierig brothers brought the beloved zombie movie
Undead to the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness gala. This year they are back with their take on the vampire genre. Brothers Michael and Peter Spierig have once again created an original take on a timely monster that is sure to have genre fans excited and happy since they most certainly do it justice. This time with a bigger budget and bigger stars, the likes of Ethan Hawke, Sam Neill and Willem Dafoe join the brothers in Daybreakers a vampire film where the vampires are the civilians and the humans are the minority.

The day after the successful premiere of the film at TIFF, I had a chance to chat to the very exhausted Michael and Peter about who came up with the idea first, a potentially fatal disease the cast and crew got and what we can expect next from the duo.

ShockTillYouDrop.com: Who came up with the idea for Daybeakers first?

Michael: Well, perhaps it was I who came up with the original idea. We were just chatting about vampire films and I threw out there, well, what if we turn the tables a little bit and the whole world has been dominated by vampires. And instead of it being post apocalyptic vampire film, let’s put them back in their homes and have them try to live as normal vampire folk. The fun in that is we can add vampire modifications to lifestyles like driving during the daytime with blacked out windows and using video cameras to see where they are going.
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The Waiting City review by The Hollywood Reporter...

The journey looks like an overly familiar one as “The Waiting City” begins. Westerners confronting, then being rejuvenated by the mysterious East is by now a cliche. Yet Sydney-based writer-director Claire McCarthy proves too smart to fall into that trap. She appreciates and, even better, understands the power Indian spiritualism can have on foreigners, and so has made a persuasive, intimate account of a couple’s encounter with the subcontinent.

By this description alone, you understand this is no “Monsoon Wedding” or even “City of Joy.” While the film’s grip on a viewer dramatically increases as the story moves deeper and deeper into an experience that exposes a couple’s troubled relationship, McCarthy makes no concessions to commercial considerations. The film is solely designed for festivals and art venues but word of mouth should help “The Waiting City” reach a receptive audience.

Radha Mitchell and Joel Edgerton play a 30-something Australian couple, who comes to Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) to claim an adopted daughter, Lakshmi. Red tape delays things so they are forced to wait in this exotic and often trying city.
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Toronto Mini: ‘Daybreakers’ inventive ...

I wasn’t crazy about the first film by the Spierig Brothers, but I respected it as a piece of independent filmmaking just in terms of what they accomplished and how much it cost. It’s a very, very tiny film, but there are some gigantic moments and images in it that had an almost Gilliam-esque approach to effects work. I remember writing at the time that I had faith that if they ever had some greater resources behind them and a better script, they had a really good movie in them.

“Daybreakers” is, for the most part, that movie.

I’m impressed by the gore noir look of the movie, set in a world about 20 years from now, once vampires have completely taken over the world. They don’t just outnumber humans… it’s gotten to the point where humans are basically extinct except for giant private blood farms. It’s reached the point of crisis, so Edward (Ethan Hawke) works with a research time to develop a blood substitute that can keep the vampire population alive. Those that starve, unable to find real blood, become monsters, crazed and powerful. The last pockets of humans have been driven completely underground. It looks like everyone’s going extinct at the same time, with no hope.

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Jeffrey Dean Morgan Joins Red Dawn...

Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a very, very busy man. Having shot the thriller The Resident earlier this year, Dean Morgan moved immediately into production of the DC/Vertigo comic book adaptation The Losers, currently shooting in Puerto Rico. Now word comes from the actor himself that he’ll be taking a role in the upcoming remake of the 1984 John Milius cult classic, Red Dawn.

“I’m jumping back in,” Dean Morgan reveals to ComingSoon.net, ” I go to work on something about ten days after I’ve finished shooting ['The Losers']… It’s a remake of a movie that I love… ‘Red Dawn.’ I just love that f**king movie, ever since I was a kid.”

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TIFF – Collider Reviews Daybreakers...

Vampires are all the rage these days, between the tween thrust of Twilight and the sexual abandon of True Blood. But Daybreakers is not like its current brethren – it’s a classic vamp movie that follows some beloved myths while also introducing the genre to a whole new world of deadly circumstances. One, I might add, that doesn’t have any diamond-studded bloodsuckers. Read on to see why you should see Daybreakers.

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Isabel Lucas hits Italian Vogue...

For Isabel Lucas the jump from Summer Bay to Transformers 2 was a big one and it seems the young Aussie is only set to keep jumping.

For someone whose career started off playing a washed up (literally; her Home and Away character Tasha was found washed up on the beach) blonde, there have certainly been some drastic changes in Lucas’s life and we’re not just referring to her hair colour.

The bohemian beauty (currently staring in an ad for Daylesford- Victoria) has been honored not only with a cover and editorial in Italian Vogue, but VIP invitations from Karl Lagerfeld to sit front and centre at his Chanel show in Paris.

To top it all off her seatmate was non-other than the hugely successful photographer Mario Testino and she later posed for photographs with Mr Lagerfeld himself.

Lucas now joins the ranks of previous Italian Vogue covergirls, fellow Aussie Gemma Ward, UK IT girl Agyness Deyn and our favourite waif, Kate Moss.