“That’s kind of a challenge: How do you play a peacenik vampire?”
Ethan Hawke’s played his fair share of vulnerable guys – I’m thinking first and foremost of the mopey lovelorn chap from Before Sunset, sulking as he sails down the river Seine – but the actor says nothing quite prepared him to stand at the center of Michael and Peter Spierig’s Daybreakers, opening in theaters Friday. “Vampire or no vampire, it’s strange to be the hero of an action film who’s essentially nonviolent. The whole thrust of action films are men who are cool because they have the power to hurt others, but not here. That’s why I think the film’s so interesting.” (More on Techland: The best characters of the decade)
I saw Daybreakers back before Christmas, and what has lingered with me most since is less an appreciation for its violence – of which there’s plenty – than its intellect. This is a smart movie, with details overflowing in the periphery – a thriller that uses vampire lore as a lens to analyze numerous issues confronting a modern society on the brink. And everything skews expectations. Hawke plays Edward – yep, another Edward – a blood scientist who really doesn’t want to be a vampire at all. His brother turned him so that he wouldn’t be hunted down by a vampire majority running low on its primary food supply: Humans. Now Edward is working desperately to find a blood substitute – something that will stave off the impending mass starvation. All around him, we see the details of a power structure built around a vampire society. No longer confined to the shadows, vampires walk the halls of power. They run the corporations. They lead the comfortable life.
Humanity no longer rouses during the day but at night, the biggest corporations are not oil companies but blood banks, and vampires are no longer predators but the homeless men lining the streets, holding up signs: “Will work for blood.”
That’s the kind of vampire flick this is – toying with all the traditional elements we’re used to. I loved seeing the vampires in suits and ties, as well as the vampires who break into houses in search of spare blood. I loved the vampire army, and the way that they go out on human reconnaissance missions. I like the way the movie deals with all those vampire conventions of wooden stakes, sunlight and mirrors. When Edward eventually teams up with the leaders of a human resistance, who think they have found a cure for vampirism, Daybreakers enters foreign territory altogether. I felt like I was seeing a whole new chapter unfold in the vampire canon.
And yet it all comes back to Hawke, the reluctant hero – the vampire who’s trying to figure out how he can help his fellow fanged brethren rise above their base instincts. We put six good questions to the man:
You were the first one to sign on board to this project, and then the likes of Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill followed. Were you nervous at all, about jumping into a genre movie like this? I think some people are going to be surprised to see you as a vampire….
I was just afraid of making a bad genre movie. It’s been a while since there was a decent B-movie, the vampire genre has been made so gentle. And honestly, I think it’s kind of remarkable when you see something like Twilight that my daughter is able to love, but I wanted to go out and make a fun R-rated vampire movie that is meant to be rated R. The catch, though, with genre movies is that actors don’t really control the quality. You can contribute, but it’s really the directors that make a good genre movie. I had grown up reading comics and watching genre movies, and yet I had never really done one, but if you’re going to run around and chomp off vampire heads, you want it to be fun. (See Techland’s best sci-fi films of the decade)
The other reason I wanted to do this was that it was actually about something. It set out to make a point, and in that way it’s the best sort of genre film that has this sociopolitical current to it. This one’s about oil and health care and animal rights, about controlling medicine and the natural resources. It has the same sense of urgency that Gattaca had, and there’s a lot of things here to think about…
(Vote for Gattaca as one of the most underrated sci-fi masterpieces here)
Since, as you say, genre films come down to the directors, how did Michael and Peter prove to you they were the right ones to take a chance on? I read somewhere that you rented their film Undead and didn’t really like it.
Well the first time, I don’t think I watched more than seven minutes, but then I had my younger brothers over and they were watching the movie in the middle of the night, and I started wondering why they were laughing so hard. So I came down and watched the whole movie with them, and all of a sudden remembered that sense of humor. You know, Joe Dante and Roger Corman movies when I was kid, things like The Howling and Piranha and Gremlins.
Michael and Peter have the same kind of love of genre movies. And when you meet these young guys, you see that they have the exact same passion for movies that you see with someone like Richard Linklater. Watch Undead, and you see the same raw, rugged love of making movies that you can see in Slackers. When I finally met them, they had actually taken a picture of Julie [Delpy, from Before Sunrise] and turned her into a vampire, partly just to show me they were serious. And the more I talked with them, the more clear it was that they are smart enough to know the difference between good and bad characters, and to know the only way you make this movie believable is to get audiences to care about who lives and who dies. (See Techland’s complete coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show)
And did they deliver?
Oh yeah. They also had a great sense of how to be practical about things. When you have young filmmakers and these amazing original scripts, they imagine a world of ‘subsiders’ out there, but when you get down to brass tax, and realize that one subsider requires an actor to spend three days in makeup and it takes $150,000 to create, all of a sudden you don’t have 35 crawling around. Now it’s one. And what’s most amazing to me after seeing the film is that it’s only 96 minutes long but there’s so much going on here. They got really disciplined, and learned how to make the most out of each item rather than wasting a single dollar on a frame that had to be cut from the movie.
Your character comes off as something of the anti-vampire…
Vampire or no vampire, it’s strange to be the hero of an action film who’s essentially nonviolent. The whole thrust of action films are men who are cool because they have the power to hurt others, but not here. Here it’s more about the thinking man at the middle of it all, and in that way I thought it hailed back to something like Indiana Jones. I always loved the parts in that first film where you really saw the professor in him – I thought Raiders of the Lost Ark was so successful because it felt like he was actually this archaeologist who found himself in these crazy situations, and that’s kind of what I look like here. The scientist caught in the war. (2010 video games: See the titles we’re most excited to play)
Would you do another film like this – step into another genre perhaps?
I would love to do another. I’m as big a fan of Lord of the Rings as anybody – I like good writing and when you read something like Andrew Niccol’s script for Gattaca, it felt like reading a Beckett play for the first time. It felt awesome – like this is what they mean when they talk about art. When you find that kind of writing, that’s where actors are supposed to go, and if you have to go do Planet of the Apes to find that sort of story, then you do it.
So maybe some Lord of the Rings swinging of the swords in your future?
Hell yeah.
Would you work with the Spierigs again? They’re doing Captain Blood next, I believe…
Regardless of how well Daybreakers does, these guys made this movie that proves to the world they can make one hell of an entertaining movie. And I think they’re setting Captain Blood in outer space, right? I think that’s what I heard. I hope they say, ‘Let’s cast Ethan,’ I would love to work with those guys again.
Even though you play something of the anti-vampire here, honestly, did you have any surreal vampire moments? A double take while looking in the mirror, maybe, when you wore those teeth for the first time?
Oh man, my kids loved visiting the set and I would try to freak them out. They’d mostly just laugh. And then my daughter wanted to use the fangs for Halloween and she lost them.
Did the studio have to make you new ones?
Well, the movie was done shooting by then, but I was like: Hey, I wanted those!