Australian twins Danny and Michael Philippou may be able to claim 1.5 billion views on their high-energy, anarchic YouTube channel Rackaracka, but when filming their first feature, horror Talk To Me, that didn’t always work to their favour.
“On set with the crew, sometimes some of them didn’t think we really knew what we were doing. We bring a different energy to set and run it in a different way. We’re a bit more rogue,” says Danny Philippou.
“There’s a montage sequence in the film, that required 50 set-ups in two hours. Our first AD [assistant director] told us it was mathematically impossible to achieve that. But we knew if we adapted our YouTube style to that scene… it was chaos on the set, but there was beauty in the chaos. Cameras flying around and us screaming in different directions – it was super rogue and the camera crew were like, what the hell is happening?”
This ‘rogue’ approach worked – Talk To Me was one of the hits of Sundance, where it received its international premiere in January, with the film’s UK sales agent Bankside securing worldwide sell-out for the title, including A24 signing a seven-figure deal for North American distribution rights (Bankside is a frequent contributor with the film’s producers, in-demand Australian outfit Causeway Films).
Altitude had already pounced on the title at Cannes in 2022 and is releasing the film in the UK and Ireland today, at an ambitious 430+ sites, with the UK-based distributor putting tickets on sale earlier than usual and cutting a 12A trailer of the certificate 15 film to capitalise on the recent ’Barbenheimer’ uplift in cinema attendance.
“We lost $1m out of the budget”
The debut feature filmmakers were bold enough to make some daring choice in pre-production.
“We initially had eight weeks to do the shoot, when we were going to do it with a studio,” says Philippou. “And by casting Sophie [Wilde], because she wasn’t a ‘name’, we lost $1m out of the budget as well. Our eight-week shoot turned into a five-week shoot.”
Walking away from a studio deal – Philippou declines to reveal which one – was driven by a concern they would lose creative control. “They started giving some creative notes, which I thought was moving us into more of a generic direction. I was scared of that. And they were starting to hint that it might not be shot in Australia, but in America.
“Our producer Samantha Jennings made us feel comfortable making that decision. It felt right. The studio was really nice, I just wouldn’t know how to direct things I wasn’t 100% personally connected to. It was a protective thing.”
Financiers for the independent film, which shot in 2022 after a pandemic-induced delay, include Screen Australia, the UK’s Head Gear Films, Adelaide Film Festival, the UK’s Metrol Technology and Australia’s Kojo Studios. The twins and Jennings re-invested some of their fees back into the budget to make up for money lost in their steadfast casting of the relatively unknown Wilde as the lead, Mia (she had initially auditioned for the part of Mia’s best friend, Haley).
The brothers had crewed on 2014 psychological horror The Babadook, which is where they met one half of the Causeway duo, producer Kristina Ceyton. They met Jennings on a workshop set up by Screen Australia for YouTubers to team up with script editors. “Samantha’s script notes blew us away. I couldn’t believe how amazing she was.”
When Philippou, who co-wrote the script with Bill Hinzman, had a first draft penned of Talk To Me in 2018, he sent it to Jennings, and Causeway signed up.
For the brothers’ next projects – an action film and another horror, Bring Her Back, both at script stage – Causeway will be their go-to. “I would never make a film without them. Every film, going forward, is with Causeway,” affirms Philippou.
Human touch
Talk To Me follows a group of Australian teenagers who discover how to conjure spirits using an embalmed hand – and find themselves addicted to the thrill, until they take it too far, with one leaving the door to the spirit world open. Miranda Otto, Alexandra Jensen and Joe Bird co-star with Wilde.
Inspiration came from seeing a neighbour with whom the brothers had grown up experimenting with drugs. “He was having a negative reaction to the drugs he was taking. He was on the floor convulsing. The kids he was with weren’t helping – they were just filming and laughing at him. I remember seeing that footage, and it really sticking with me.”
This, coupled with a short film from friend Daley Pearson about a group of teens who use possession to get high, laid the foundation for Talk To Me’s concept.
It wasn’t until the second draft that the hand entered the narrative, drawn from a place of personal trauma. “I was in a car accident when I was 16,” recalls Philippou. “I cut my eye open and fractured my spine. The doctors were coming in and trying to work out why I couldn’t stop shaking. They were turning on the heaters, giving me blankets, but then my sister came to visit me and she held my hand and the shaking stop. I wasn’t shaking because I was cold – I was shaking because I was in shock, and the touch of someone I loved brought me out of it.”
The division of labour between the twins saw Danny as scriptwriter, while Michael focused on overseeing sound and music. They say they worked harmoniously on set, but in the edit suite they would “butt heads constantly”.
The twins opted mostly for make-up, prosthetics and wire rigs to create scenes of the spirits unveiling themselves. Luckily for actor Otis Dhanji, who passionately kisses a dog at one point, visual effects were employed as needed. “We built a puppeteer head of the dog that he snogged, and then there was a shot of the dog kissing the trainer’s hand, and we merged the two. We always used VFX to blend things together,” laughs Philippou. “No dogs were kissed.”
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