Daybreakers has all the pieces of a great film. Its sole and constant disappointment is that it does not behave like one. The writer-director team of Peter and Michael Speirig diligently assemble a darkly brilliant vision of a future ruled by vampires, but the narrative that inhabits it is built from bombastic lines and cliché drama fitting a blockbuster action flick. They take a piece of art and use it for a newsstand-caliber comic book.
One of the artists lending a grim shine to the film is Ethan Hawke, who I interviewed at the SLS Hotel. The SLS was an ideal venue for Daybreakers-a stark setting with blank, geometric furnishings that suggest both luxury and sterility-and Hawke conveys this aesthetic of chill immortality well in the film. A dramatic actor, his resumé finds him at the center of artistic visions such as Waking Life and Gattica. In Daybreakers, he is a striking model for both the timeless, retro imagery of the vampire world and for the agony of resurrection that the story of humanity's rebirth requires.
Daybreakers is a lucid attempt to envision a new form for the vampire story. Even though it ultimately is dragged down by its trite narrative, Hawke's performance does transcend. Like the twin brother creators of Daybreakers, Ethan Hawke came to the film for something new.
"I wanted to do something new," Hawke says. "I saw Undead [the Speirig brothers' first film] and I watched 10 minutes of it and I thought it was terrible. So I sat down and watched it with [my younger brothers], and then I thought it was genius. I didn't really understand this genre so much. My first movie was with Joe Dante, and all of what Joe used to talk about with Roger Corman, and those kind of genre pictures-The Howling and Piranha-he used to talk really passionately about the power of genre film, what it could be. I used to fancy myself a dramatic actor, and had just finished The Coast of Utopia with Tom Stoppard, which is about nine hours about Russian radicals, and so it seemed like a vampire movie sounded like a lot of fun."
Hawke points out what is best about Daybreakers: The visionary diligence the Speirig brothers bring to crafting an image of the vampire-ruled Earth. "There's a vision there, and one of the things that impressed me is how disciplined they are. Now I can see how the Coen brothers and the Warchowski brothers have been so successful. A lot of people who are super gifted, and have that kind of vision and imagination; with that comes an arrogance. [With brothers], the brother beats that out of the other brother. When you have a twin brother on set, [criticism] happens a lot; they force each other to be better."
This scrupulous editing shows in so crisp and clear a film as Daybreakers. "There's a level of imagination at work. [The Speirig brothers] thought what this world would really be like. They've thought through the analogy aspect, and how it would work as a straight-up genre film."
I ask what new aspect Daybreakers might bring to the vampire genre. Hawke replies, "It's new because it's the first post-adolescent vampire film in awhile. And it's new for the genre, in that it's not inundated with Christian superstition. It's rooted in sci-fi. I think that's really fun. It's part futuristic movie, part vampire movie, part film noir, in that it looks like a Bogart film."
Hawke's originality of performance in this picture came in part from avoiding researching vampires. "I find it really scary," he says of vampires. "I'd like to meet the actor who spent a year biting people so they could really know what that's like. The genius of the vampire movie, for me, is what it's like to live your life without a fear of death. I think that's the appeal of it. What I liked about this movie was taking vampires and putting them in the real world-having jobs, and something simple as being able to smoke all the time. Why wouldn't you? I find I really enjoy that element of it."
Immortality is attractive to Hawke. "Absolutely. What's that great Woody Allen line? 'I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.'"
Hawke is not so keen on the bloody cost of vampiric longevity. Getting bathed in gore was his least favorite part of the film. "Can you imagine being soaked in blood, and sitting and trying to have lunch or talk on your cell phone?" With a burly budget to spend on special effects, the Speirig brothers imagine this for us. Daybreakers is awash in red corn syrup and vinyl intestine, in order to feed its action-flick appetite.
But Hawke did like those action scenes and recalls the scene of his combat with a mutant vampire in his sleek kitchen as, "really fun." Of the creature crafting that made up the exquisitely awful mutants-given the punny moniker "subsiders" in the film due to lack of blood being the cause for their change into mindless monsters-Hawke says, "those guys who make up those creatures are real artists. They're kind of exciting to be around. It's a very crazy, artistic world. What I felt so proud about this movie is that that's a real guy. It's an actor figuring out how to do it-to swing upside down. That was my favorite scene in the movie."
And that kind of jump-kicks-and-crossbows situation is the stock and trade of the story. Nevertheless, elements of a concept film are still strong in Daybreakers, and Hawke speaks of its political message. "It's pretty self-evident in this film. The idea that we're running out of our resources is something that we see regularly. The joke is that the resources are human beings. But, draining the blood dry, of the Earth, is something we talk of all the time, and I think that's fascinating. We are vampires. Every great fortune is made at the cost of something else."
I then asked how Hawke identified with his own character's vampiric appetites. "Vampiric appetites. That's a title for a short story." Hawke said. "I think it should be said that my vampiric appetites can never be satiated." Having established that, he went on to say of his co-star, "One of the things I thought was great about this, was working with Willem Dafoe, who has the last great vampire movie, Shadow of the Vampire. He kind of conjured his Klaus Kinski. This film, he's not really a vampire, but he's very believable as an ex-vampire; a recovered vampire. I was very, very happy to do the film with him."
Happiness is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Ethan Hawke's appreciation of his chill role in Daybreakers. "There's a whole history of theater actors making their living in genre movies-like Alec Guinness in Star Wars. I kind of took pride in that legacy." And in the case of Daybreakers, a visionary piece locked into the strident formula of the action-horror genre, he finds a redemptive light. In a filmmaker, Hawke appreciates one who "is curious and excited about life, and about making entertainment for people that is in the service of something; of fully exploring this art form and what it can do.
"The Speirig brothers, their creativity is stunning. They're so hungry. They love movies so much." Hawke declares. Daybreakers declares it too, in the exquisite attention paid to every cold white image and hard shadow they compose the vampire world of. Given the chance to show as much care to lifting the narrative out of the genre, the Speirig brothers could contribute a work to horror film that is both fresh and immortal.
Matthew Funk is a professional writer in marketing for corporate America, a writing mentor and the author of several manuscripts that illuminate the beauty of human extremes. A graduate of the Professional Writing MFA at USC, his work is also featured on his Web site.
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