You almost wouldn’t peg YouTubers-turned-directors Danny and Michael Philippou as the type to create a horror film focused on a haunted hand sculpture that possesses a teenage girl and ruins her life. But their flair for the dramatic and hilarious as kids was quickly parlayed into terror territory as they got older, and now they’re making their feature-film debut with the new A24 horror flick Talk to Me.
As children in their native Australia, they found themselves leaning toward making wacky videos instead of hitting the neighborhood streets. The drive to do it came from their souls, of course, but it was fostered by their friend’s older sister, Nellie, with whom the twins shared a unique and important bond.
“She was really, really nurturing and sort of pushed us more in that filmmaking direction,” Danny gushed about her to IGN. “We had someone that was interested in what we’re doing, and we had someone to share it with.”
It’s clear their connection with her inspired the onscreen bond between their film’s protagonist, Mia (Sophie Wilde), and her best friend’s little brother, Riley (Joe Bird). It’s a sweet connection that becomes the foundation for much of the film’s emotional side, and it’s no wonder it has such strong roots in Danny and Michael’s realities.
“That was really exciting for us just to make and edit these things and then premiere them to her every week. Pre-YouTube, we’re just kids,” Michael added. “Having something like that was really inspiring. It was really motivating. It helped us to become more inspired to make better stuff to show her and impress her. We always just loved it and we had a big group of friends. If they wanted to hang out, we were just filming, so [filming with us is] what they had to do.”
Nellie introduced the pair to Sundance before they even knew what it really was. She, almost omnipotently, predicted in their childhood days that Danny and Michael would make it to the famed festival—and as fate would have it, they ended up having the world premiere for Talk to Me there this past January. Ten years prior, Nellie moved to the Salt Lake City area, so their reunion at the festival was unsurprisingly “surreal,” according to Danny. It sounds like a moment that makes one stop and think about what’s achievable, and what life truly has in store for us.
The film is a culmination of everything the pair have worked toward throughout the years on YouTube. Their channel, RackaRacka, where they’ve made a name for themselves since late 2013, has amassed over 6.5 million subscribers to date, with a slew of videos that regularly surpass a million views apiece. Talk to Me is decidedly different from what their subscribers usually go for, and no, those folks aren’t necessarily the target audience—but everything they’ve done with YouTube thus far has paved the way for them to stand tall where they are now. One of their early videos, 2015’s “Marvel vs DC,” was the first time the pair led a real crew and directed a proper production. A pre-pandemic video from 2019 called “How I ended up in HOSPITAL (surgery needed)” centered on a huge stunt that went wrong, forcing the brothers to think on their feet in order to finish it (and yes, Michael completed the video shoot in his hospital gown).
Their Talk to Me set got ‘pretty chaotic’ at times because they just had to ‘apply the YouTube energy’ for a bunch of scenes.
It’s hard not to see the internet era of their work as something akin to the Dogme 95 movement, a naturalistic approach to filmmaking that was the brainchild of Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Turns out, they agree with the comparison. “Our style I call ‘Racka Dogma,’ which is: never use lighting equipment, always shoot on this specific camera with this specific lens, we set up our own rules,” Danny explained with a smile. “And you never had to be tied to a story. You can always break outside of that. You never had to be tied to any particular narrative. There were no walls; it was just like, whenever you could imagine, you could do.”
Things are different for them on set now as they cement themselves into mainstream filmmaking, but they maintain that their Talk to Me set got “pretty chaotic” at times because they just had to “apply the YouTube energy” for a bunch of scenes. “It was YouTube, the buttons were off,” Michael laughed when reminiscing about the film’s deliciously sinister montage—there’s only one and you’ll know it when you see it. “It was so much fun to shoot. You could really, really feel the energy of what that room was like. We had two hours to shoot 50 setups. We had two cameras and a boombox and that was it.”
Between the chaos of the montage and the film’s penultimate scene inside a hospital corridor, the duo found their backs “up against the wall” with time and money in a quest to get the shots they needed. The hospital corridor scene shot the same day as a particularly gnarly (and technically tough) scene in a hospital bathroom—again, you’ll know it when you see it—and the Philippou brothers found themselves trying to make the best of a difficult day on set, probably one of the first of many to come.
But with as much pressure as there was making the movie, there was equally as much fun and collaboration in being able to create something with the same DIY spirit of RackaRacka but at a higher scale.
Then there was the film’s brilliant cast, whose capabilities Michael notes are “way better than us trying to squeeze a performance out of our friends or family for a video.” Bird, Alexandra Jensen, and Lord of the Rings alum Miranda Otto come together as a flawed yet loveable family unit, while Otis Dhanji is the picture of a secretly insecure teen-dream boyfriend and Zoe Terakes takes on an intimidating yet complicated portrayal of a teen bully expertly versed in peer pressure.
“Having an amazing cast, they elevate the material so much,” Michael noted—which brought the conversation around to Wilde, the force-of-nature lead of Talk to Me’s macabre story. For Danny and Michael, breaking down “every single scene and line of dialogue” with her was key to unlocking the power of Wilde’s character. They even collaborated with her on her costumes and her dialogue, allowing her to have command over what felt right, which in turn led the three of them to “find the character together.”
“Sophie connects with the character and empathizes with the character. She understands and that’s why her emotional range is so good,” Danny explained of what Wilde brought to the heart of the film. “She understands the subtleties of every single emotion. So breaking down the character with her and running through scenes brought a life to it that we never had on the page.”
Their next project, however, already had quite a life before they got their hands on it. The Philippou brothers are slated to helm a new film adaptation of Street Fighter, the beloved combat video game property that burst onto the scene nearly 40 years ago. It’s obvious they’re excited to take larger leaps, but worry about their staying power in the industry, as most first-timers are.
“We always want to be creating movies. It’s what we think about as soon as we wake up, right until we go to bed. It’s all we think about all day every day,” Danny said. “We’re so thankful to be in this position where people are interested in what we want to make next—but they do say the second film is more important than your first because it proves that you’re not just a flash in the pan.”
Sure, the Philippou brothers may be Jake and Logan Paul-adjacent creators online. They hang with a similar crew, get up to similar antics. Time will tell if they’re one-hit wonders or flashes in the pan – I personally love what they’re doing – but if you’re looking for that pan to take on a life of its own, smash up some flesh, draw blood, and put it on film, they’re definitely the ones to make that happen.
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