Daybreakers may have dropped out of the top 10 films in its second weekend, but if you haven’t had a chance to see it, it’s worth it — especially if you are a fan of action films. The film, written and directed by twin brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, injects a surge of originality into a tired genre, with some of the more creative action sequences we’ve seen in a long time. While so many of the films of the past year gobbled up gigantic budgets to create action sequences to dress up purely formula films, Daybreakers’ filmmakers managed to have me jump, squirm, and flinch from the first moment of the movie. Ethan Hawke, Sam Neill, and Willem Dafoe all lend the film a gravitas that you don’t often get in a genre pic, and it’s clear that the brothers take the responsibility of making a vampire film extremely seriously. The twins proudly state that they’ve seen every vampire film ever made and that their take is faithful to the vampire genre but original in its additions to the myths.

Late last week, I had the privilege of sitting down with Peter and Michael to talk about filmmaking and their experiences on Daybreakers.

30 NINJAS: One of the most impressive accomplishments of Daybreakers is the judicious and strategic use of violence and gore. Can you talk a little bit about how and when you chose to have violence erupt into the otherwise sterile world of the vampires?

MICHAEL SPIERIG: We spent a lot of time storyboarding, doing animatic, and choreographing things like that well in advance. In terms of when to put it in the movie and how to play it out, because of the fantasy element of vampires, we were able to heighten some of that violence, and there is quite a bit of blood — there is quite a lot of blood. One of the things we wanted to do was to create some really big [audience] jumps too and to pick those moments very carefully. The movie basically opens with a jump — the first image — and we wanted to do that so the audience was on their toes from the opening frame. Another [gory example] is the operating scene that doesn’t end well for the patient. For that we did the final moment of that scene all in one shot. If you are not cutting away, it becomes far more startling. You are in that shot and you can’t see any blood rigs — you can’t see anything — [because] we remove all that in post-production, and it is just scary, because you just don’t see that coming at all.

PETER SPIERIG: Oftentimes, violence can be boring if it is so continuous and repetitive. With our film we space it out and then give it to you hard and fast — really, sort of quickly — and then we sort of settle down and then we bring it back again. It’s sort of this rhythm of a song where you try to play it out and spread it out through the course of this story rather than just so much all the time. It has to flow, it has to build, get big, and then die down so the audience can breathe. It is important for an audience to [breathe], even with this constant slaughter, [or] they can’t take a moment to breathe. It becomes white noise.

30 NINJAS: Isn’t it tempting to one-up the last death, though?

PS: Well, you still do that in a way. The bad guy needs to get it good, you know? The whole thing that we try to do was try to come up with different ideas for the action pieces. For example, the car chase in the film. We did not have a huge budget to do this massive car chase with lots of things exploding, but the one thing we did have was we had something different. We had a vampire driving a car that has video cameras guiding his way (because it is daytime driving). Then we thought, OK, we shoot those out and he is blind, then we make bullet holes in the car. [The beams of light coming through those holes] are like laser beams that he can get singed from, and now there is that new threat. I have seen every other vampire movie that’s ever been made and I have never seen that done before. The trick is to find new things to do that nobody has seen before. And the great thing about it is, it’s cheap because the actors are in a studio in a blacked-out car; you don’t have to put them on low loaders and have them drive around with stunt drivers and all that. It is in a stage, and they never left the stage for any other car chase.

30 NINJAS: What was the most challenging moment with Ethan Hawke on the set?

MS: The great thing is, he is challenging, and in the best possible way. In other words, he challenges you to make it better, and we did the same with him. He wouldn’t just settle for turning up on set and delivering the lines and going into his trailer. He really was trying to push it to make it better and better all the time, and we were so thrilled that he would do this genre picture. He does not do that many genre pictures.

30 NINJAS: Can you give me a specific moment or scene in particular that you felt like he evolved your original ideas?

MS: We sat around at a table read (where all the actors sit there and we read the script), and at the end of it, he and another actress (Claudia Karvan) said to Michael and I, “This script is great, but here are the problems …” and he was right, he was totally right. There were some elements that were underdeveloped. There were moments that we were missing, a few beats that we were missing with the characters. One scene in particular [came out of this discussion], where Ethan and Claudia are in the car and Claudia gives Ethan some of her blood. There was never a scene where there was that kind of connection [in our original script]. They both said, “It would be good if we could do this,” and we totally agreed. It is a nice little character piece; just a little addition to show that there is a connection between the two of them.

30 NINJAS: Your budget was fairly low for an action film. If you’d had 10 million extra dollars, what would you have spent it on? Would you have changed anything?

PS: Yes! First of all I would have shown the world more. We had so much more of the world, and secondly there would have been a massive sub-siders fight, like these big bat creatures. That is what we … it was scripted! We were about to shoot it, and we completely ran out of money. We were ready to shoot, and then we just couldn’t afford it.

30 NINJAS: You’ve gained a reputation for planning everything out carefully, but can you give me an example of when you needed to rethink and change your plans while you were shooting?

MS: I think there were a few beats at the end of the movie, like a few motivational things that happened to the characters towards the end of the film that evolved. I’m just trying to think what I can say without giving away the ending …

PS: There is a sequence in the movie with this convoy of humans and the vampires who are hunting them. That was a very different sequence; it was going to be set in the snow, in a lodge in the snow, and it was just too expensive. It was never going to happen. We did animatics, we started the process of making that scene happen and it was just too costly, so we had to rewrite that whole sequence while we were shooting and come up with a new way of doing it. We only had one day to shoot that entire action scene. It was all we could afford to do. So we shot with four cameras and blocked it in a way that, I think there were three different sets of blocking for the entire sequence (we did it in three stages) and just shot it incredibly quickly. I’ve never shot anything that quickly that involves action and that kind of stuff. You literally are moving so fast that you can’t watch the tape back because there is just no time. That was crazy, but thankfully it all kind of panned out. It’s a very, very tense kind of day. The other thing that we did which really helped was we set it all in the studio, so it wasn’t at night. We did not have weather problems or anything like that so we could shoot incredibly quickly. But that sequence was very, very different up until we started shooting, and then we had to completely change it.

30 NINJAS: You had a pretty small visual effects team on the film. A lot of what you did were “practical effects,” but can you tell me a bit about your experience with the visual effects? You completed a number of them yourselves, right?

MS: Yeah, we did about 350 visual effects in this movie, and there were two other companies doing visual effects. Postmodern and Kanuka Studio were fantastic, and they did a lot of the blood farms. A lot of the really, really complicated stuff. Pete and I don’t really have any training in visual effects; we’ve sort of just done it as a hobby and out of necessity. We learned a lot doing the visual effects on our first movie, and it was purely a cost-saving exercise on this film to do the visual effects. The way we learned is just by watching other movies and seeing how they did it.

We would read tutorials and get up in the morning knowing that we had to do this visual effect. We would go online and read these tutorials, and by the end of the day we would have the shot finished. And we did that a lot, we would buy domestic software (Photoshop, After effects, Light Wave 3D); they are all pretty basic, but basic software is pretty sophisticated these days. And with just those three packages there is so much you can do — we were building wide shots of the city in the computer. I was doing that on the computer I have at home. Michael was working on his laptop. It was crazy!

30 NINJAS: Are there going to be any zombies or vampires in Captain Blood?

PS: No.

30 NINJAS: No space virus?

MS: That’s an idea; we might have to steal that one off you!

More On Daybreakers — Ninjas Interview Sharp-Fanged Ethan Hawke on Daybreakers: “There’s Something Beautiful About Everybody Eating Everybody”

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Ninjas Interview Sharp-Fanged Ethan Hawke on Daybreakers: “There’s Something Beautiful About Everybody Eating Everybody”
• First Daybreakers Trailer
• Exclusive Video Interview: Black Dynamite Star Michael Jai White and Director Scott Sanders
• New Daybreakers Trailer
• Exclusive Interview: G.I. Joe’s Visual Effects Guru (Part 1)
• Exclusive Interview: 2012‘s VFX Geniuses Reveal How They Flooded the Himalayas (and Sent That Poor Monk Scurrying for His Snorkel) (Part 2)