Following the success of their debut zombie horror film, UNDEAD, writer/directors Peter and Michael Spierig decided to take on the vampire genre with their sci-fi thriller, DAYBREAKERS. But instead of referencing the familiar gothic strains of Bram Stoker or Anne Rice, the brothers ushered vampires into the future, imagining a sleek, not-too-distant world in which everyone, from school-children to CEOs, is a bloodsucker. “DAYBREAKERS questions how we would adapt if we all became vampires tomorrow,” explains Michael Spierig. “It twists the rules of typical vampire movies without discarding or disrespecting what we love about the genre.”
The Spierigs’ ingenuity and sly sense of humor is on full display during the film’s opening sequence, which depicts vampires commuting to work in the dark and lining up for shots of blood at Starbuck’s. “Instead of hiding out in caves, castles, or traditional underground dwellings, vampires have chosen to accept their place in life (or death) and returned to the suburbs,” says Peter Spierig. “They have continued on with their day-to-day, or now, night-to-night existence only with slight vampire modifications.”
But being at the top of the food chain has its perils. Human beings – the vampires’ only food supply – comprise only about 5% of earth’s total population, and their numbers are rapidly dwindling. The mass panic of a population on the brink of exhausting its once-plentiful resources has obvious relevance to our current global state. “DAYBREAKERS is a lot like the great science fiction films that were made during the 1950s,” posits producer Chris Brown. “They commented on what happened politically in their time, in terms of communism or the bomb. And so it’s exciting that DAYBREAKERS does the same thing. There’s plenty of blood and violence to please genre fans, but the movie has something to say.”
“There’s something almost punk rock about the old genre movies and I felt that immediately with DAYBREAKERS,” adds Ethan Hawke, who plays Ed Dalton, a hematologist who is also a vampire. “There’s this kind of deep counterculture vein running through it.”
“We love this genre; it’s what we grew up on,” avows Michael Spierig. “Ever since we can remember, sci-fi/horror movies have fascinated and excited us. Not just because of the visceral thrills a good horror picture can evoke, but because, quite simply, the creative possibilities are endless.”
After selling a 16-page treatment of DAYBREAKERS to Lionsgate, Michael and Peter Spierig developed the script with the company for over two years. Producer Chris Brown was stunned by the first draft he read. “It was such an original idea.
Genre is great fun, but the thing that made this script so exciting is that it was a new take on a very established form.” From the moment of their first meeting, Peter and Michael Spierig knew they had found the ideal producer in Brown. “All our references were the same and we’d all seen the same movies,” says Brown. “In fact, I think I may have seen even more horror movies than they had! The three of us are huge sci-fi/horror fans so that first meeting was like a genre convention!”
When it came to casting the part of Ed Dalton, the brothers dreamed of having Ethan Hawke commit to the role, having written the part with the star in mind. “We’ve always really liked the choices Ethan has made as an actor,” explains Michael Spierig. “He picks very interesting films. He’s intelligent, vulnerable and interesting. We didn’t know if he’d be interested or not, but he was the one we always wanted.”
Hawke admits he was initially wary of committing to a genre project, but the script’s thematic complexity appealed to him immediately. “I had absolutely no intention of liking it,” he recalls. “I decided that I’d give it ten pages, and by page five I knew that I was going to do it. I could tell right away that the story was completely unique and a lot of fun. It’s my hope that the movie will work with people who are determined not to like sci-fi/horror movies, as I was, and that those who do like them will really love this one.”
The unlikely hero of DAYBREAKERS, Ed Dalton is a vampire hematologist who’s charged with inventing a human blood substitute before the human food supply runs out and vampires starve to death. Unlike most others of his kind, Dalton is morally conflicted about his condition. Though he craves human blood, he refuses to drink it, gradually weakening himself on a second-rate diet of animal blood. “I think Peter and Michael will tell you Ed’s journey is the Phoenix story,” Hawke says. “He’s dead and he rises from the ashes. It’s about how you go from being the walking dead to an awake and alive human being, which is a pertinent allegory for all of us.”
On set, Peter and Michael Spierig were thrilled with everything Hawke was able to contribute to the process. “Ethan doesn’t just walk in and deliver the lines,” says Peter. “He brings with him some very smart ideas. He’s a director and writer as well as an actor, so he understands story and character very well.”
Hawke reports that DAYBREAKERS was his first experience working with two directors simultaneously, a process he found unexpectedly enjoyable. “I’ve always thought that if there were two directors, one must really be the director and the other more the writer, but Peter and Michael are both very much the director,” he says. “The first day one of them came up to me and said, ‘You know, I loved that, when you touched your ear.’ But then the other one came up and said, ‘Don’t touch your ear!’ I welcomed that, though, because it made me realize that there’s no right or wrong way; there’s just a preference. There’s a certain kind of freedom in that.”
Once Hawke was cast, the brothers approached Willem Dafoe for the role of Elvis, having long admired the actor for the diversity of his film roles. “I always look at the character and what he does, and then I ask myself if that’s the kind of adventure I’d like to take as an actor,” says Dafoe. “Sometimes in a genre movie like this, the filmmakers are far more interested in the special effects than in the actors. But the Spierig brothers are very personal filmmakers. Their first feature was made by maxing out credit cards and shooting in their backyard and making it however they could. These guys aren’t careerists. They just feel very deeply about making movies and this is the language they know best.”
Sam Neill had never played a vampire before, yet he jumped at the chance to play Bromley, the corrupt president of a corporation that farms humans for their blood. Says Neill, “The thing that really made me laugh and made me want to read the rest of the script was the thought of all these vampires lining up at Starbucks to have their shot of blood. It seemed to be a ridiculously cool universe. I had a great deal of fun with the role.”
Bromley’s human daughter, Alison, is played by newcomer Isabel Lucas, known to Australian audiences for her work on the local television series, “Home and Away.” “Michael and I had never seen Isabel’s show,” admits Peter Spierig, “but after the audition it was clear that she was the standout. She brought an honesty and a vulnerability to her role.” Lucas’ character, who has been in hiding with the human rebels for over ten years, eventually comes face to face with her vampire father in a chilling familial showdown. “It was a joy to watch Isabel work with Sam,” says Michael Spierig. “She really held her own, and given where her character goes and the kind of choices she has to make, Isabel committed to the part completely.”
Australian actors Claudia Karvan and Michael Dorman complete the lead cast. “Claudia is a big television star in Australia but not that well known outside the country,” explains Brown. “I think she’s going to be a big revelation. She brought an enormous amount of experience to the film and was a great balance between Ethan and Willem. And Michael is a very exciting new talent. When we were looking for someone to play Ethan’s brother he came in and tested and just blew us away. He was fantastic.”
The directors admit they were initially intimidated by the thought of working with such experienced actors as Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill. But their fears quickly dissipated. “It was terrifying for about five minutes,” laughs Michael Spierig. “And then you realize that you’re behind schedule and over budget, and you’ve just got to get on with it. All the cast were very down to earth, so they made it easy for us. They all came ready to work.”
The brother’s meticulous preparation also helped the production, which commenced in 2007 in Queensland, Australia, run as smoothly as possible. “Their vision of how the film should look and what they wanted to achieve didn’t ever change from the first time I spoke to them,” avows Brown. “They did their own full, animated previews of the sequences they wanted to shoot; they storyboarded every single frame of the film and they did their own special effects. And that’s just the technical side. They also wrote the script, so of course they had a unique understanding of the characters and always communicated their ideas extremely clearly.”
Designer George Liddle served as both production designer and costume designer on DAYBREAKERS, which enabled him to create a seamless aesthetic for the film. Liddle explains that he and the directors consciously avoided anything resembling the gothic style of typical vampire stories. “We wanted a world that was recognizable to our own, with some futuristic accents,” he says. “We spent a lot of time looking at books and photographs together for reference points. Our vampire world is very cold, with greys and black and white, and the costumes reflect that. We made the sets quite modern and hard-edged, using blocks of grey and black fitted with fluorescent strip lights. And then the human world – the sanctuary – has a lot more warmth and tone.”
Director of photography Ben Nott worked closely with Liddle, designing much of the lighting into the sets themselves so that few, if any, external light sources were necessary. Says Nott, “Every cameraman forms a relationship with the designer that is paramount to the outcome of the film. George’s work is always fantastic and I was very pleased to have the opportunity to work with him.”
In another departure from the norm, Nott and the directors made an aesthetic choice to shoot the film digitally using the Genesis system. “We felt that the digital image had a clean sterility to it, which worked well for the vampire world,” explains Nott. “It’s quite a hedonistic world in that they smoke, they drink and they don’t care. And so we wanted their world to be fairly devoid of color. We chose a cool, monochromatic pallet.”
Special make-up effects designer Steve Boyle had one of the biggest tasks on the production: to create an army of vampires, as well as several “subsiders” – vampires that have fed off the blood of other vampires and turned into maniacal, bat-like creatures. Recalls Boyle, “Peter and Michael told me to think of all the vampire movies I’d ever seen and then to forget everything! They wanted to focus on the humanity of these creatures. We viewed the subsiders as desperately sick people, like serious drug addicts. They have bite marks on their arms as a result of feeding off their own blood, wings, and protruding backs.”
To create the subsider, Boyle designed a full-body set of prosthetics using latex foam and silicon that took about eleven hours to apply to the actor. He explains, “Our actor had to start completely naked on a harness and then the suit was completely glued on – no zips – with wings, contact lenses, teeth. The only parts of him not glued up were his heels and the inside of his ears. It was a massive process, but very effective. The biggest challenge was to get it all done in time.”
Boyle also designed over 250 sets of fangs and 250 sets of contact lenses. “Once the actors were cast, we would fit their eyes and I would then design the lenses around the three different stages, from healthy vampire to sick vampire to subsider, and that’s when their eyes would become really blood shot,” explains Boyle. “We decided that the healthy vampire teeth should be fairly subtle, and then we moved to the strike teeth which were a little bit more aggressive and then finally to the horrible, rotten subsider teeth.”
Boyle reports that Peter and Michael were the best of collaborators and that they allowed him an enormous amount of creative input. “I knew that whenever I delivered the make-up effect it would be shot well, in the way it’s supposed to be shot,” he says. “They really understand the process and how long it needs to take, and what you can and can’t hide.”
The result is a vampire film like no other. Thanks to the talents of its dedicated cast and crew, DAYBREAKERS manages to expand the creative possibilities of a continually evolving, well-loved genre. “We feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to actually create the world we imagined,” says Peter Spierig. “We set out to give everything that genre fans want from a vampire movie, but serve it up in a way they’ve never seen before. I think we definitely succeeded in that.”
