The Brothers Grim: FFC Interviews Danny & Michael Philippou

by Walter Chaw Australia-born Danny and Michael Philippou are on the vanguard of a new extreme cinema. We are Batman and they are Bane, raised in the outer dark of the Internet while we, Gen-X, the builders of this digital Pandora’s Box, are merely the idiots who made it possible. I don’t entirely understand how the Philippous do what they do, just as I don’t understand how modern culture has metastasized archetypes, exposition, video editing, et al. into the viral, mob sentience of an Internet that already better represents how we imagined “artificial intelligence” than the hallucinating algorithms of generative harvesters.

Though the Brothers have only two features–Talk to Me and the even more phenomenal Bring Her Back, now in theatres–under their belt, they came to prominence through the cruel tutelage of over a billion eyes judging the comedic horror videos they created for their YouTube channel, “RackaRacka.” We had the Movie Brats and their cachet as the first crop of filmmakers who grew up watching films and went to school to learn how to make them. Now, here’s this generation raised on a firehose of everything all at once. No wonder the Philippous’ first two films are about lost children seeking out an identity and new rituals of grieving sufficient to the current moment of our existential despair.

I interviewed the Philippous over Zoom, starting out by telling them how my mother was involved with a cult when my dad died and foisted its rituals on his funeral ceremony–a specific trauma the Philippous mercilessly trigger in a particular scene from Bring Her Back. I asked them about the exquisite art of suffering.

DANNY PHILIPPOU: It’s always the funnest part when you’re developing a mythology or looking at the occult. We love building out our backstories. A huge part of that was interviewing a bunch of people that actually practice what we would call the occult and perform these rituals as part of their everyday.
MICHAEL PHILIPPOU: It is interesting that there’s all these different ways different cultures deal with death. You know, we were raised specifically in the Greek Orthodox tradition, and that has as a part of the grieving process the open casket, and you come up and you kiss the forehead of the deceased.
DP: I remember as a kid it made me really uncomfortable. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be around that. And so we wanted to be tapping into that horror. In our writing process, we wanted to look at every single different thing we found to be odd or uncomfortable. And there was like one culture where they actually dig up their dead and they, like, have them as guests as if they’re alive. Sort of a step beyond the Irish Wake. And they party with them and they eat dinner with them, actual corpses. I just find all that stuff really fascinating. 

FILM FREAK CENTRAL: Do you incorporate some of your own trauma as an outsider, an alien, in your own culture?
DP: Absolutely. So much of this stuff is personal. Our grandfather passed away when we were 13 in our house, and I remember so vividly the vomit in my dad’s beard when he was trying to give him CPR. I remember being terrified of going into that room where he died. That room was always associated with that death, that image of my dad in the absolute limit of his grief and fear. That stuff is so uncomfortable to think about or talk about. Everyone has something like that, and it’s really just a part of our childhood and a part of who we are. The fear in our films is… It’s about translating that into emotion and image, is the best way I can describe it, if that makes sense. Yeah… Yeah.

Let’s focus in on that idea of discomfort. How important is it for you guys to make your audience uncomfortable when dealing with uncomfortable topics?
MP: Well, I mean, it’s a horror film: you’re signing up for anything. I like that they’re a bit unflinching, or that if you go into one of our films to sort of expect anything, like to not sugarcoat anything. So, like, those are really confronting experiences. Horror can be a really confronting genre, but it also can be beautiful and cathartic and (searches for the right word) fun? Anyway, it’s a way to express the darkest emotions or the darkest things or even things that you can’t talk about, things that are hard to talk about in any other context, right? So the only way to really express them or to get them off of your shoulders is to put them into art.

Do you mean film as therapy?
DP: It’s so interesting because everyone’s relationship with media and storytelling is different. This generation specifically has grown up completely like it feels more discombobulated. It’s so ADHD, because everything that everyone’s processing is coming at you so quick.
MP: A lot of people from the older generation will look down on the younger generation and be like, “Oh, you don’t know how to tell a real story. You don’t know these films and this tradition and how to do this stuff for real.” But just because our media is different doesn’t mean the stories that are being told are any less viable.
DP: I always look at, like, how film people would look down on the digital people, or, like, “Oh, that’s easy that you get to do 3-D [animation]. We had to draw this stuff by hand.” And then the same with YouTubers who look down on the TikTok generation to be like, oh, you only have to do, like, a ten-second thing. But then when I was a YouTuber, a lot of the film people looked down on us: Oh, you got to do this all yourself–you don’t know what it’s really like, like we haven’t earned it or something. To the point of suggesting what we’re doing in different media isn’t even real art somehow.

When, in fact, the function of stories hasn’t essentially changed for us across our evolutionary history.
DP: A story is a story. That goes right back to the beginning of time. Story is so important. It’s how you communicate over every different form it’s taken over time. It’s just part of human nature. Every time you speak with someone, it’s basically you’re telling a story.

You have an entire mythology embedded in this film that you don’t tell. How do you decide what to withhold?
MP: So we want to approach everything like the characters are being dropped into this world in this moment, so whatever mythology they understand is what we’re seeing. I don’t think we need the origin or the search engine scene or the college professor scene. Like with Talk to Me and the hand, the kids don’t know exactly where it came from. They’re in over their heads.

I remember as a kid, the popular thing was pass-out games where we’d try to make each other actually lose consciousness. Not smart.
DP: (laughs) And these kids, they’ve got full body possessions. They’re making up rules that they think make sense. So that makes sense for what they know of the story, and it leaves room for the rest of us to understand how there’s another part to this story that we don’t know. We used the same approach with Bring Her Back–like, you only ever know bits and pieces of anything, right? And then you fill in the rest. For this one, the point of view is with the kids coming into this house [after] the first part of the ritual has happened already. And it’s not like there’s nothing there. We’ve made up an entire backstory for it–we filmed the ritual in detail, and everyone knew what they were up to and why this and why that, but for the kids? It doesn’t matter about all that.
MP: We fully thought it out, though–we have our mythology Bible written. We recorded the entire tape. We’ve built out the website that Laura bought this thing from. I just love having little hints at that, an entire machinery in place for you to stumble into. More exciting to me is that you can sort of piece it together, as opposed to having been given it.

Tell me about the circle.
MP: Well, the circle is… It’s, it’s representative of a lot of things, like the cycle of abuse, the cycle of grief. Andy’s dad abused him, so in turn, he abused Piper, and on one level, the whole film is about, Will you ever be able to break out of the cycle of abuse and the cycle of grief? The circle, which is symbolic of a few things, to be able to break out of that is so important for each of these characters. Laura, too. That’s why, at the end, by seeing that Piper can escape the cycle of abuse, Oliver is able to–whether they ultimately do or not[.] You need to see that there’s hope–however slim or however hopeless it seems from inside the circle–to be outside of the circle.

Did you do a different sound design for inside the circle/inside the house? It was making me deeply uncomfortable.
DP: (laughs) That’s so cool you noticed that! It’s layered, the sound design. We were obsessed with it, tweaking it all the way to release–bringing up the levels of these ambient noises. Being able to play with all the different parts of the medium is so exciting. We love telling stories through music, sound, things that aren’t just visual. You can manipulate things in so many different ways that you maybe don’t even clock when you’re watching it. Even the sound of the water–we layered in echoes and little noises in there so you don’t notice it, because you know what water sounds like in a pool, and so these other noises sneak in, controlling that sound so that water can feel terrifying or can feel really calming and relaxing. Like, why am I anxious listening to water in a shower right now? Why is the sound of rain against this window making me nuts?
MP: The circle and the cycle are just things that universally came out of talking to a lot of people that were dealing with an extreme grief. They all describe how suddenly they’re in a noise vacuum where some things are hyperreal and others you don’t even notice anymore. A terrible thing happens, and they’re dropped inside this circle. And it’s not just their perceptions that change, they feel like they’re at a first step again in whatever process they need to go through to be okay again. There are days they will feel like they’re working through their stuff, and then they always come back to the same spot, and all that stuff that felt like progress was really they were just going around the inside of this fucked-up circle.
DP: The idea of a never-ending grief cycle to me is terrifying. This was a way of literally putting it onto the screen that she’s closed herself in. She’s not seeing anybody else, and she’s bringing these people into her fucked-up world.

The glass noises, the pounding, the night noises…
DP: It’s such a rabbit hole that you can go down. We were working right up until the final second of delivering the film to pay all that stuff off. We were in the mix because there’s so much you can do. There’s 750 layers of sound in the film, and you can control all of it in Dolby Atmos. We wanted to create a way to tell the story through just sound and no dialogue at all–like, is that even possible? What story is the film telling now if you pull out all the dialogue? Can we tell it through the sound of a bug bumping up against glass? Or that noise of drawing on a window with blood? Also, with the music, we wanted to fracture it, to not fully complete things with the circle. There’s a lot of stuff that’s unresolved with Laura after all, and that’s gotta reflect in the sound design. There’s things in the music that do that, but we wanted to be sure it was in a subtle way.
MP: Working with the heads of every department is the best thing we do making movies. Everyone is so good at what they do. It’s always the most rewarding thing, even with costumes and stuff. The story that you can tell, the journey of a character through just their costume or the state of their costume. These departments, when it’s all working well, are trying to help you tell your story through their own specific expressions. All that stuff is so inspiring. We love that stuff.
DP: We love that it can be multi-layered and told in different ways. But it is a rabbit hole, an ADHD one. We got so obsessed with the sound of breathing–controlling the amount of breaths and losing this sort of breath and adding another kind here, and, like, while this demon or whatever is getting pushed out of Oliver, we can hear a little boy’s breath in and the demon’s breath out. Controlling not just the tempo or rhythm of a scene based on someone’s breath, but the story of that character in that moment: we got obsessed with that. What’s the audible? There’s a visual language of these close-ups of Piper touching these walls, so we elevated the sound there. Let’s do these zoom shots for Oliver. There’s a soul outside of his own body that’s looking at [him] from an outsider’s point of view. What’s the audible language that describes that? Laura watching these tapes and being obsessed with this inversion of the home videos. Getting lost in the static of that and bringing the static out. Using that as a sound design element to convey her mental state…

Tell me about the unknown and the Internet.
MP: That’s where fear spawns[.] When you don’t have the answers or you see a clip that really unnerves you, you’re like, wait, what’s the context of this? I think with things like Skinamarink, it’s like, this is fucking terrifying… What’s so terrifying about it? What’s the concept here? Where is all this based on? And there’s no exact narrative explaining it, and so you project your own fears onto it. The Internet, part of growing up with it, people would share around real murder clips. And they’ll be like, oh, look at this footage. Or look at this banned stuff. Or look at these UFO videos, these alien videos–real or not? And you’ve got no context where these things came from. But they stick with you in this really upsetting way. We haven’t really come to terms with how it molds people. This new age of this much information being put in your face without an arbiter of truth that’s reliable. Now we’re back in the Stone Age where anything could be true.
DP: That’s a big thing with Laura, is that there’s healthy ways to grieve, yeah? And the Internet can be a tool to find those things, but also a weapon to radicalize vulnerable people. And she’s not going through the paths to get better, she’s gone down this other rabbit hole, to the deep, to the dark web, to not coming to terms with her daughter’s loss. She’s being reassured that her desires are reasonable. She’s being told, “Actually, you don’t have to accept death.” There are other ways, see, all these other people agree with you, you’re not stuck! You’re not weird! You’re right, and everyone is trying to make you feel crazy, but you’re not crazy, they’re crazy. She’s gone down the rabbit hole. I went down that same rabbit hole when I was writing this thing, where I’m like, who wrote this spell book? Who’s that? Who bought this spell book? Who follows that person? Who does this person follow? Let me talk to that author. Let me talk to this person that’s following. That was part of the process as well.

Laura in Wonderland.
MP: And we all have access to it.

Does this provide an explanation in part of your fascination with dead tech?
MP: I think there’s a shot of Laura inside the bathroom when the left side of her is green and the other side is brown. That was the thinking driving her costume design: the idea that she’s a dying leaf going from these oranges to browns. In the flashback, we see her in greens. She’s got a foot in one world with the technology that’s current and alive, and it’s…healthy, in a way, compared against this inversion of it as well, where it’s decidedly unhealthy. The tech, we wanted it to be tied into her unhealthy way of grieving, and so by extension tied into those videos–those terrifying, context-less videos–that you just were not meant to see as a kid.
DP: Talk to Me was about new age, new technology, right? The kind no one understood completely, but we were using it anyway. Like getting into a pool without knowing what else is in it. Now, with our second movie, we thought a lot about bringing a different era into it— what’s maybe forbidden in the past now available in the present? That was interesting to us, how that ties into Laura’s story and our story, too. It reveals how obsessed I am with actual analog technology, too. None of that VHS stuff in the film was VFX. I was like, we have to shoot this stuff on an actual VHS camera: I want that snow to be real, those imperfections to be inherent in the tech. Our VFX guy, Jack, every scene that I would edit, he’d be adding these VHS scenes and doing 17 different versions of damage. He’s like, let me damage it here, and he’d go in physically and warp, distort. I was like, I want to go from this hanging to this real tense moment, but then I want to transition it into real 1990s video snow. It’s the rabbit hole. You can go down any of the rabbit holes. But it’s so fun to go down them.

How do you know you’re chasing the right ones?
MP: We still have the exact same self-doubt as with Talk to Me. If anything, the pressure is bigger this time around. You never feel like you know what you’re doing. We’re always anxious. You always feel like you’re drowning.
DP: I feel like making a film takes years off of your life.
MP: I think if you care about something, like truly care about it, it’s so painful. It’s like you’re exposing… It’s like having a baby, and it’s getting taken out of your hands and in all these different directions for the consideration and critique of all these strangers who may or may not… (pauses) I don’t know, you feel like this thing you have given all of yourself to is now. You’re trying to keep it as this vision, and then it’s not yours anymore.
DP: But we’re so thankful. It’s a journey. Every movie is this journey.

Talk to me about representation in your films.
DP: It’s always those people that feel like you haven’t seen the story told too much. It’s so rare to see an authentically vision-impaired person on screen. Too often, vision-impairment is told through contact lenses in the eyes and people faking that. There’s a lived reality to casting people that you can’t put on–it’s something that you can’t and shouldn’t fake. People with every experience are out there, and they want to perform and they want to be part of a proper representation of their lives. That was the main point when we were casting Piper. We really want to have a vision-impaired girl. There’s an authenticity that comes with that. She can talk to her personal experience.
MP: We told Sora [Wong], you can change this dialogue, you can pick your costume. Whatever you can do to bring yourself into this character and make it feel real and lived-in, we’re all-in. We told her there is no such thing as bad takes. Don’t be embarrassed about trying things out and failing. I mean, there’s no such thing as failure here, we’re all collaborating and working together.

Were you this collaborative with your entire cast?
DP: That’s the thing where you work with a young actor. With any actor, you need to spend the time breaking down the script every single moment. Is there a thing that you relate to in this? Is there a thing where you can say, “This is my personal experience of this”? Can you relate to it on a level of, “This is what I’m getting out of this”? And as a director, you want them to find a way “in” to the material the way we have. What do you get out of this, and how are you relating to that? Every time, because you’re drawing from real places and real people, those actors connect to it in a real way that is sometimes more than you could possibly imagine.
MP: I think you have to stay fascinated with different points of view and different people–with how they perceive the world and how they experience the world. That’s what drew us to this project. The story came from a friend’s little sister, who’s blind. Her speaking about wanting to catch the bus but not being allowed to, and her wanting to experience the world as it is, not be sheltered. She needs to be able to confront the world and see the world for how it is.
DP: But being afraid, as well, what do you think seeing would be like? What do you think that experience would be like? You know what she said? She said, “I’m glad that I can’t see, because then I don’t have to see the ugly things in the world.” It was such an interesting statement that it became the thematic throughline for the entire film.

The bus stop scene has stuck with me.
DP: That bus stop scene, because there is this thing of Andy presenting the light side of the world and we shoot them in full light, but once Piper notices that she’s getting bullied or knows that these girls don’t like her, we have the bus come and put her into a shadow. There’s a darkness that comes over her, and Andy pulls her back out of it and into the light, and he’s telling her these fibs and presenting the world to her in this rose-colored way, but it’s just not so, and she knows it. That ties into the ending as well: We try to protect who we perceive to be vulnerable.

But who’s protecting us?
DP: It’s so rewarding to, through multiple drafts of the script, to find these small moments where your actors finish your thoughts. There’s the stuff with eyes that wasn’t complete without them, and the scene with the father where Andy needs to be Piper’s eyes, but he won’t look. He won’t face his father’s corpse, but he won’t face his father in life, either. He can’t look at it.

Is he trying to protect himself?
DP: Yeah, but doing that, he doesn’t protect anyone.

Two down. How do you keep it going?
MP: I think the important thing is to stay authentic and (searching for the right word) curious. Everyone has a point of view and a story and a way of conducting their lives. It’s like trusting yourself to share that way and not be predetermined by things in the past. And in approaching people with authenticity, you hope to inspire the same kind of authenticity in return.
DP: The more human interaction you have, the more inspiration you get for stories and things like that. Show your authenticity and show things in your way. That’s what makes things unique, you know, because there’s no one else that’s lived your experience and your life, so you get to tell stories your way.