Danny and Michael Philippou know how to fill up a room. Most debut film-makers are slightly tentative about being interviewed. How does this work? What attitude am I expected to strike? The raucous twins, sons of suburban Adelaide, require only a nudge to begin their clamorous duologue.
We’re talking about Talk to Me, their superb new horror film. It leans towards the teens-in-seance genre. But it’s grimmer than that suggests. And fresher. And odder. And has more to do with social media.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. We just wanted to try and modernise it a bit,” says Danny. “I feel that if the Ouija board were to work today then everybody would be doing it. There is this weird search for attention with social media. So that seems like a cool place to set it.”
Michael overlaps: “There are positives and negatives to social media. If you make a mistake with a drug or whatever, that isn’t forgotten. It is immortalised forever.”
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They should know. The brothers are already famous as creators of the RackaRacka YouTube channel. Their horror spoofs and stunts have drawn them two billion views and almost seven million subscribers. (I think that’s a lot.) Their breakthrough came with Harry Potter vs Star Wars, whose inspiration requires no further explanation, a little less than a decade ago. By 2017 they were sufficiently prominent to figure on Australian Financial Review’s list of the 10 most influential people in Australian culture.
Michael’s earlier comment reveals an equivocal attitude to the online life. But they have contributed to us ending up in this place. Fair?
“We did a lot of crazy film-maker stuff,” he says. “There was a lot of violence. Maybe that can contribute to a kid wanting to see an R-rated film or whatever. But we were just trying to make something that was fun and engaging to watch.”
The Philippous are a publicist’s dream. Danny (hair usefully dyed blond) and Michael (conveniently unshaven) bark merrily as they finish each other’s sentences. They fire out so much energy I wouldn’t be surprised to hear no generator was required on set. We are still making sense of these new routes to fame. A century ago directors made up their own rules. Much of the generation that emerged in the 1960s had been to film school. Television commercials offered informal training to the next batch. Then pop videos. So are YouTube and TikTok the new film schools?
“We were lucky enough in that, before the YouTube stuff, we had crewed on films before,” says Michael. “They are not going to turn down someone working for free. I had worked in every department. So I knew how a film set ran. If we had just gone straight from YouTube to a film set, it would, I think, have been a bit of a slap in the face.”
The film community probably still has a prejudice about those who come from the YouTube world (as they once did against those who came from commercials or music videos). There is an expectation that everything will be tricksy, jokey, busily cut and generally hopped-up. That doesn’t describe Talk to Me. The film follows a group of young people whose experiments with an embalmed hand cause them to rub up against the unhappily deceased. There are jump scares in here, but the film is also at home to an impressive creeping unease. There is a parallel – unavoidable but not overstressed – with teenage attitudes to recreational drug use. It is creatively ambiguous about the final catastrophe.
“We just wanted the kids to be in over their heads,” says Danny. “It’s as if they have this home-made bong and they don’t really know what they’re messing with. The rules aren’t ironed out. But it is about being in over your head. There is no expert there.”
Michael interjects: “We were going to do it with a studio, and it was a guaranteed theatrical release. They were giving notes, and it was taking it in that other direction. We need creative control. If not, then it becomes someone else’s vision. So we took a role of the dice and did it independently.”
Danny and Michael have been at the entertainment business for more than a decade. They are knocking on 30. But one is, nonetheless, impressed by their assurance. That roll of the dice really paid off. The film had its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it triggered an old-fashioned bidding war. In the end the increasingly influential A24 – Oscar best-picture winner for Moonlight and Everything Everywhere All at Once – grabbed the US rights. Reviews have been ecstatic. That must have been a satisfying experience.
“There was this weird hype around the film,” says Michael. “It was getting amped up for some reason. And I didn’t like that, because I’d rather people not go in expecting big things. And then we heard about all these distributors critics and directors that were going to be there.”
You know if a comedy is working because people laugh. You probably can also tell if a horror is working. Audience members rock back in their seats. They shriek. They gasp.
“The audience was so loud and so reactive,” says Danny adds. “It was alive. It was stressful.”
Michael says: “Every time someone would go off to the toilet the door would open and this light would shine on the whole crowd. Then they’d come back and the door would open again. Argh! This is taking them out of the movie! They’re going to hate it! It was just so stressful. Then the reviews came in and we heard all the reactions.”
We grew up together and we’ve made so much stuff together. We have a synchronised thing. Writing is different. I couldn’t write with Michael
— Danny Phillipou
Watching the Philippous speak gives us, perhaps, some insight into how they work on set. Their half of our conversation is a busy collaboration that moves at its own four-legged pace. They are bouncing notions to one another as if in a game of verbal squash. Of course, cinema has a long history of directing siblings. The Coens. The Dardennes. The Farrellys. The Maysleses. The Wachowskis. Why does that relationship work so well?
“Making a film is such a mammoth task,” says Michael. “It’s like a big symphony of all these different departments – visual, audio, script. If you have the same vision you can keep that united. Even if other people don’t see it, at least I know that Danny sees it.”
Danny adds: “We grew up together and we’ve made so much stuff together. We have a synchronised thing. Writing is different. I couldn’t write with Michael.”
His brother says: “I feel like it’s a bit of a cheat code.”
I wonder when they first realised they had become a phenomenon. It is hard to judge in that online world. A few thousand hits barely matters. Does half a million? When does that word “monetise” come into the conversation? It does seem as if Harry Potter vs Star Wars was the tipping point. The video is still there. Two blokes in suburban Australia pit lightsabres against magic wands. The fight-work and the effects are, considering their limited resources, genuinely extraordinary. Nobody watching that would be surprised to hear where the creators have ended up.
“It was literally that video on YouTube,” says Michael. “We went to bed and it was on 3,000 views. We woke up it was on 500,000 and, by the end of the day, it was at 1.5 million and we had 100,000 subscribers. We had put so much effort into stuff outside of YouTube that no one ever saw. We didn’t put so much effort into that. It was, like, three days’ work. We thought, What if we focus on that and see how it goes?”
Danny and Michael make it clear that they always saw the YouTube stuff as a way into film. This is where they wanted to be. And, despite their age and background, they have always loved the theatrical experience. Look where they have ended up. The distributors seem to have positioned Talk to Me as counterprogramming to the arrival, a week earlier, of Barbie and Oppenheimer. And the latest Mission: Impossible will also still be about.
“It’s horrifying,” says Danny with a broad grin. “I was, like, ‘Oh no, we’re going to get buried.’ I saw an article listing the top five films. It was our film and Oppenheimer. I thought, What the f**k are we doing next to a Christopher Nolan film? That is crazy. Everyone was ‘Barbieheimer, Barbieheimer!’ Is there no Talk-to-Meheimer?”
Just wait.
Talk to Me is in cinemas from Friday, July 28th
