Back To The Future With The Turbo Kid (Interview)

The Turbo Kid is a Canadian/New Zealand co-production which finds Kiwi producer Ant Timpson teaming up with Canadian directors Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell. A “retro-sci-fi” based in 1997, The Turbo Kid is a sweet-natured tribute to the 1980s with stylistic nods to Mad Max and BMX Bandits and an over-abundance of blood and gore. In addition to the film’s hero,The Kid and his terminally-optimistic sidekick, Apple, the film features veteran actor Michael Ironside as arch-villain Zeus. The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda found himself talking with all three directors of The Turbo Kid on a phone line to Canada.

Click here to listen to the Turbo Kid interview:

Or read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: Are you in Canada somewhere?

AW: Yeah near Montreal.

MD: Near Montreal, fantastic alrighty. Well I’m in Auckland, its freezing cold here and your film is about to be shown at the Film Festival here in the next couple of days. So I guess the first thing that I wanted to find out about is how the New Zealand connection came to be with Turbo Kid I know that you guys are kind of be co-produced by Ant Timpson Is that right?

YW: Yeah exactly. Ant Timpson and his partner Tim Riley. Ant discovered us when we participated on the ABCs Of Death Contest. Our short finished first in the contest.

AW: In the public vote.

YW: In the public vote and Ant wrote to us to know if we wanted to know if we wanted to transform that short into a feature.

FS: Unfortunately we didn’t win but to have Ant help us to do our first feature and we ended up winning more, yeah.

MD: Yeah, right. You seem to have done all right anyway. So what is it what’s Ant’s connection as far as how this film was made? Is he just helping distribute it or did he have anything to do with the actual content of the film.

FS: Well he’s the producer.

AW: He helped from the beginning of the, of the development of the script and until the distribution, yeah.

YW: Yeah. He really wanted to do a cool production with Canada.

MD: Right.

YW: And yeah. So the New Zealand Film Commission and Citizen Canada both came on board and that’s how we ended up making the movie. We’re really lucky. Like the whole, I would say experience took 3 years, which is not a lot.

MD: Right, right.

YW: Including the short film.

MD: Right.

YW: From the short film to the presenting the film at Sundance, it took 3 years.

MD: I guess that New Zealand has a tradition of kind of gory movies. Peter Jackson got his start making films along those lines.

YW: He’s a huge influence on us. We love Peter Jackson we grew up on Braindead and Bad Taste. I would say Braindead is the reason we’re filmmakers now.

AW: Yeah.

YW: Were huge fans

FS: Yeah that movie blew our minds when we were teenagers. Like when he came to Canada, like everybody was talking about, like everybody had the VHS. We love that film.

MD: So how do the three of you…I mean usually there’s one director for a film and people have this impression that it’s kind of one person’s vision. There’s three of you working together. How does that happen?

YW: We’ve been doing shorts together for over ten years. So we developed a way of working together where we knew how to organise ourselves.

AW: Yeah. We really had like one vision for the 3 of us and we argue on paper when we’re writing the script, when we’re doing the storyboard and then when we’re on set it’s really we are all going in the same direction. Yeah. So I don’t know, we can have all connect together. We have the same inspiration, the same background so it has worked.

FS: The first time we made a movie together, it was just like a bunch of friends making a movie and I think we like that kind of spirit and we want to keep it.

AW: Yeah.

YW: Right. Even on set for Turbo Kid, we wanted really to feel like a family on set, that everybody was happy and everybody would come together to make that film possible and I think we achieved it. Like we all became friends, we all stayed in touch. It’s something pretty special.

MD: Right. Do each of you have a specific kind of skills or fortes that you specialize in that you bring to the filmmaking process?

FS: Well we got a little bit of everything, every one of us but on set we’ll split work. We don’t want, we want to avoid chaos and we don’t want people who don’t know who to ask if they have questions. So Yoann will be more with the actors. I will be behind the camera with our storyboard and Anouk is also…

AW: I think I have a connection between the two of them overseeing and also mostly people will come to me for questions and everything.

YW: Yeah Anouk is the director of directors.

MD: Like you said the Turbo Kid started out as a short film called T is for Turbo. So what was involved in transforming it from like a 5 or 6 minute short to a feature length film?

YW: From the beginning we knew we needed a heart to the story to have a real story and when the story would be solid then we could add all the settings, all the craziness around it.

FS: Yeah because the short is only a fight scene like we already had a cool concept. It’s like Mad Max but on BMX.

MD: Right.

FS: But we really needed something like a cute love story because you can do all the gore you want if you want if you don’t care about the characters. It’s kind of boring.

MD: Right.

YW: People will tune out. You don’t fall in love, if you don’t fall in love with the characters, people will tune out on your characters.

AW: Yeah so we had to extend a lot of the universe and find the rule of the universe and everything, so yeah.

MD: Okay. So the character of Apple obviously fills that void and she’s a pretty eccentric character. Was there an inspiration for her? Where did this character come from?

YW: I don’t know if there was a specific inspiration for her but we wanted her to be out there like right in the middle of all that craziness and death. She’s always happy, she always looks on the bright side of life. She has a little bit I think of us in her as well, so…

FS: If we could name a movie maybe Terry two thousand…

YW: Maybe, yeah…

MD: You guys yourselves appear in the film. Is it difficult to appear in your own film?

YW: No we always create small roles in our film, it’s always fun.

FS: Yes but for the full feature we took smaller roles because we weren’t so, what’s the word…

AW: We were very busy?

FS: Yeah.

AW: Yeah so and we didn’t sleep a lot during this shoot so.

YW: Yeah there was never a lot of days do to be able to do Turbo Kid so not a lot of sleep, a lot of work.

MD: Right. It seems like you guys are fairly obsessed with the 80s, the films and the music and the things that go along with Rubik’s Cube and VHS tapes. What is it that fascinates you so much about that decade?

YW: There were the best movies.

AW: Yeah and it’s our childhood. So I don’t know its nostalgia really.

FS: We really grew up in the 80s. So it’s like all that we love, put it in a blender.

YW: Yeah. Turbo Kid is really a love letter to the movies we grew up with.

FS: It’s really not a spoof, I don’t see it as a parody but a homage to all the movies and even the old school video games and Saturday morning cartoons.

YW: Yeah we wanted the movie to be genuine.

AW: Every reference is there for a reason for the other purpose of the story. Also it’s not to throw at the screen.

FS: We never wanted to wink at the screen.

MD: Right.

FS: To tell people see, remember that scene.

MD: Right. I do enjoy the scene where you’re burning the VHS tapes for fuel, I thought that was….

YW: 35mm film can.

MD: Oh right.

YW: And the Kids has a small 16mm can for like real. I don’t know maybe a method of our technology is always evolving and changing.

MD: Right. Now must have been quite a coup for you to be able to get Michael Ironside to appear in the film. How did that occur?

YW: It was completely random. We wrote the character for him like but we always thought like it would be almost be impossible.

FS: It would be a dream to have Michael. But yeah we thought it would be impossible. But yeah totally random. We met him at the Cocktail in Toronto.

MD: Right.

FS: And yeah, he just was walking the place and we look at each other, ‘Oh my God Michael Ironside is here and we need to talk to him’. So we go to see our producer and we say, ’We wrote the character for him, we have to talk to him about a project’, and said, ‘OK good’. So we go with her in front of Michael and she goes, ‘I’m producing a film, these are the directors, they’re going to pitch this film to you,’ and she left. And we live-pitched to Michael and he loved the project, he wanted to read the script and the rest is history. He really liked the script and called us right away.

MD: Cool, very good. What was it like to actually direct him? Did you have, was there an actual interaction between you or did he pretty much knew what he needed to do?

YW: We worked together nearly every day that he was on set. He was great. We had a lot of fun with him and he seemed impressive, but he’s a big teddy bear.

FS: He’s been in more than 200 movies. So he knows, he knows his shit like if you don’t know what you’re doing he will tell you.

AW: He will tell you, yeah.

MD: Right.

FS: Yeah he was a bit impressive because he was in character all the time.

MD: Right.

YW: Yeah, he’s mental.

FS: So once he puts on the suit he’s in character until he takes off the suit. But really he’s, when you know him he’s a big teddy bear and we’d become very close with him and he’s become some kind of mentor to us for our career.

YW: He’s given us a lot of advice, helping us meet the right people and he’s been great to us.

MD: Very cool. Now what are the features of the film is there is a lot of creative ways in which you kill off a lot of the characters. I was wondering do the three of you kind of sitting around a table and kind of push each other on to come up with the various ways of decapitating and eviscerating folks?

YW: All the time, we do it all the time and we go crazier and crazier and crazier and crazier.

AW: Yeah.

FS: Yeah I would say we had to, like every day since it’s an ND movie we had to cut stuff every day, so we cut at least half of the gore we wanted to do.

MD: Right.

FS: But that’s a good thing, it means Turbo Kid 2 basically writes itself now.

MD: Right. You could always add them on to the DVD. extras I guess. So I know the film showed at Sundance and it’s doing the festival round, it’s going to be here at the festival but then it gets a cinematic release in August, is that right?

YW: Yeah on the 20^th of August.

MD: Right.

YW: I think worldwide.

MD: So how do you guys feel about that, I mean it’s your first film it’s getting a wide showing. What kind of response do you expect?

FS: It Is surreal. Like we’re rocking, like we’re basically almost all sold in every country now I think.

AW: So we really hope that people will support us now that it’s going in theatres.

FS: It’s really a dream come true and we really hope it’s a success and we really want to do a sequel.

YW: Yeah it is really important in indie film to support them because it’s…how much we do on the market will make the film live longer and we don’t have the same budget as the big production for marketing. So if you like the film tell your friends, tell everybody you know, make your Grandma watch it. I mean everybody needs to see it. So support independent films because if you want, if you want see original, weird, different stories, well it’s being done on the Indie film circuit right now. So support your Indie films and you’ll keep getting directors making weird films for you, it’s basically voting with your money.

Click here for more info on screenings of The Turbo Kid at the NZIFF