In new A24 horror, Talk to Me, the greatest peril is not the supernatural force surrounding an uncanny hand – it’s the ability of teens to jump into dangerous situations with gusto. Ask filmmaking siblings Danny and Michael Philippou what their most harebrained plan was as kids, and the answer comes quickly: wrestling with barbed wire.
“We used to do a lot of backyard wrestling,” said Danny, “and Michael and I would always try to top each other, so everything we did would get progressively more and more violent to the point where we’d go to hospital. So that was pretty dumb.”
Michael nodded. “Sometimes you look back on the footage and you go, ‘Woah. You’re really testing fate with some of these leaps.'”They were really pushing fate’s patience when they replaced the ropes with barbed wire. “I tried to be Cactus Jack,” Michael said, “and I got a friend to powerbomb me into the ropes. But instead of throwing me into them, he sort of pummeled me straight to the floor. I felt the bottom of my back go into the floor, and I felt this weird jolt went up my back. I could have broken my spine.”
Of course, Danny had to try to outdo this with a florescent light tube match (which is exactly as dangerous as it sounds). “We’re breaking florescent lights, and then put all the shards of glass onto a board, and then I got chokeslammed into it. Then a minuscule shard of glass went in my arm and punctured a vein.” Because he was already covered in blood, he didn’t notice the wound until he was showering and saw that his arm was swelling. “I pressed it, and then blood spurted out like Spider-Man.”
There’s an incomparable thrill to getting away with the truly dangerous. Michael recalled, “There were some matches that were borderline suicidal, but if you survive you get the biggest rush ever. And I kind of feel that’s what’s happening with the kids in Talk to Me.”
“We were running around, being little criminals as kids, and every weekend we would make stuff and premiere it.” – Danny Philippou
Much of what happens in Talk to Me is because (as Danny explains) teens can be “unnecessarily cruel” – or, as Michael frames it, that they haven’t yet fully developed a moral compass. “People are doing things for attention because it seems right at the moment or through peer pressure [and] then you pay the consequences.”
At the same time, Talk to Me highlights the need for a good support system, something the brothers understand. For them it was Nelly, their friend’s older sister, who was the first person to really support them as teenage filmmakers. Danny said, “We were running around, being little criminals as kids, and every weekend we would make stuff and premiere it to her. It was so good to have someone you looked up to that was really supportive and really believed in you.”
It was Nelly that first told them about the Sundance Film Festival. Danny recalled, “She told us that one day we’d make it to Sundance. When she was 18 she moved away, and our reunion was 10 years later – at Sundance, for the premiere of Talk to Me.”
Austin Chronicle: This is a long way from working as an electrician on The Babadook.
Danny Philippou: (Laughs) I was doing work experience, and I was doing it for free. They said, “Do you want to keep working for free, and we’ll give you a credit?” and I went, “Hell, yeah!” So I was working, working, and working, and then on the credits it said “casual electrician: work experience” and I went, oh, no, that’s a terrible credit! But it’s very funny.
Michael Philippou: Hey, it’s a start.AC: The kids in Talk to Me have no clue what they’re facing. Like It Follows, they’re trying to work out the rules: but how much world building did you do about the hand and the spirits?
DP: We had a really thick mythology bible that broke down everyone who had the hand, where it came from, what its history is, what the rules are. The demons that connect with the kids are drawn to the kids’ emotions – anything they’re going through emotionally or their headspace, they’re drawing in specific spirits. And then there are these predator spirits utilizing this, and have found their in to take advantage of the hand and its connection between the living and the dead.
We did sprinkle it, and leave hints everywhere. There’s even little hints upon the hand. We’re just planting the seeds.
MP: There’s some negative reviews that say that we don’t know what we set up. We have the thickest back story. But that scene in a film where they go in the library and they go, ‘It comes from this,” we didn’t want to show that. That’s the part of the film we don’t like.
DP: We kind of fall asleep. We were going to do this with a Hollywood studio originally, but their notes were steering it that direction. “We need to investigate this, and explain this, and put together this,” but once we started exploring that it felt less character-driven.
AC: One of the big challenges for any storyteller is to make teens sound authentic, especially in their relationship to social media. So how did you make sure this didn’t feel like an adult’s version of what being a teen is?
DP: For the social media aspect, even before pre-production started, we were getting the rights to use Snapchat in the film – fighting hard. Even that brings a layer of authenticity so it’s not one of those fake, made-up apps like Snapbook or Facechat …
MP: And using the Apple phones.
DP: And really grounding it, and finding people whose voices feel authentic in those roles is a big thing.
MP: Speaking to people of that age, because of the way they communicate and they way they speak to each other.
DP: And James (Oliver) who plays James in the movie is James, my neighbor, in real life. So James is based on James, and listening to his relationship with our other neighbor, whose name is Riley, I know what their conversations are like. I know them. So you just have to base it on real people that you know.
We filmed a lot of our youth as well, and just seeing those dynamics between teenagers is a really interesting thing.
AC: And kids and teenagers today have so much of their life recorded and online. It just seems like carnage.
MP: It feels like teenagers these days aren’t able to make mistakes and grow from them and learn, because that stuff is immortalized. Say you get really drunk and do something stupid or say something stupid and it’s on camera, you can never really move on from it. That stuff can be brought up and used to attack you down the line.
You need to make mistakes to grow and learn and get set in the right ways. So I feel you have to have those moments, but you’re extra-punished for having them especially in the digital age.
Talk to Me is in theatres now. Read our review and find showtimes here.
This article appears in July 21 • 2023.
