Before horror film Talk to Me, its twin directors were Aussie YouTube pranksters
Talk to Me concerns a preserved hand which enables those who touch the object to be temporarily possessed by a dead person. Starring Sophie Wilde as a grief-stricken young woman who takes advantage of the object's power with awful consequences, this Australian film was a hit at the most recent Sundance festival and may well be the most frightening horror movie released this year. It is certainly the only one to have been co-directed by a man, Michael Philippou, who once drove around in a car filled with water as a prank.
"I just did it as a joke," Philippou tells EW today. "It turned into this whole big thing!"
Philippou directed Talk to Me with his twin brother, Danny, the pair having developed a love for horror while growing up in the Australian city of Adelaide. "We used to always watch what we weren't supposed to watch," Danny, 30, says. "It feels like a rite of passage, a coming-of-age thing, to watch something that's going to haunt you and scare the s--- out of you for the rest of your life."
While still at high school, the pair started to make short videos and, in 2013, launched the RackaRacka YouTube channel to showcase the pranks and violent effects-filled pop culture lampoons they made with their friends. The RackaRacka team's first online viral hit was 2014's "Harry Potter VS Star Wars," a face-off between characters from the two franchises that would go on to score 34 million views. "It was just us experimenting with different filmmaking techniques," Danny says of the RackaRacka videos. "We were all just practicing a lot of stunts and VFX. It was a training ground for us as filmmakers."
The pair received further training when they both secured jobs on director Jennifer Kent's 2014 horror classic The Babadook, with Michael working as a runner while Danny toiled in the lighting department. Michael recalls how he would volunteer to work on films for the thrill of being on set. "No one would turn away a free pair of hands," he says. "So, I would do all these shoots for free. One of the producers said, 'Next film you will be paid.' And that was The Babadook. It was the first time I saw a director really care about what she was making. Jen cared about every single frame. She wasn't just there for a paycheck. She was there to create art, and I really admired that about her."
While continuing to work on the RackaRacka videos, Danny developed the script for what would become Talk to Me. "The Youtube stuff was very specific content made for a very specific audience," he says. "I didn't feel like I could be truly creative or personal on that stuff. Writing Talk to Me was like a personal, therapeutic [process]."
Early in 2019, Michael volunteered to star in a RakkaRakka prank clip which found him driving a customized Ford Laser that was filled with water to a local store. "That thing, was not even my idea," he says. "It was getting made in the background for six months. I just was the one driving." After RakkaRakka posted the video, the police became interested in the incident and subsequently charged Michael with driving in a reckless or dangerous manner, and failing to wear a seatbelt, amongst other offenses.
Danny recalls the fallout from the prank as "a very odd time," saying, "We were in the middle of writing the film and setting up pre-production, while my brother was getting arrested for this f---ing underwater car stuff. We ended up pleading guilty to some of the charges, but not some of the others, and we pretty much just got some fines at the end of the day."
Wilde had only a vague knowledge of the RackaRacka output when the actress signed on to star in the film. "I remember maybe watching one or two videos, but I wasn't a RackaRacka stan or anything," she says in an interview which took place before the current SAG-AFTRA strike. "After I got the audition, I looked up their YouTube content and was like, Okay! I'm interested to see what this would be like!"
And what was her experience of working with a couple of viral-stars-turned-filmmakers? "They're crazy, but in the best way," she says. "I'm so in love with the two of them. They bring this frenetic energy to set, which is really exciting to be a part of. They care so much about filmmaking and their actors and the environment they're making on set. You're making a horror film, and it's quite heavy content, but it's countered by their lightness and their energy and their enthusiasm."
Talk to Me received rave reviews out of Sundance and was swiftly bought by A24, which previously released the horror films Hereditary, Midsommar, and X. Michael describes the film's reception at the Utah-based festival as "completely surreal."
"This whole thing has been a door that we've been trying to open our whole lives and Sundance just blew it right open," he remarks.
The brothers are currently working on another horror script from Danny called Bring Her Back, as well as various other projects, including a new Street Fighter movie. "The horror film's the closest, but we have about 15 other films too," Michael says.
While the director may not be able to answer the question as to which one he and Danny will make next, Michael is ideally placed to respond to another query: What exactly is it like to drive a car filled with water? "Braking, things take 10 times longer to slow down," the filmmaker says. "But we knew [that], and we were going very slow and only hit a few bystanders."
"Joking!" he quickly adds. "We hit nobody! We hit nobody!"
Talk to Me hits theaters this Friday.
Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.
Related content: