In a world where the term “post-superhero” is gaining prominence, the renaissance of the old-school all-out action movie seems to be ready to satisfy our urges for a cinematic spectacle. Right at the forefront of it is the Sam Raimi-produced Boy Kills World — a vengeance story that pushes the limits of its genre to hilarious and often revolting effects. Starring Bill Skarsgård, it's also the directorial debut of Moritz Mohr.
Ahead of its UK theatrical release, FILMHOUNDS spoke with Moritz about gore, shaky cam, and classic Hong Kong cinema.
Evil Dead is one of my favourite films, and because this is your first feature, but also because Sam Raimi is a producer, I kept making parallels between the gore, the comedy aspects and things like that. Did it feel like a perfect fit for you too?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, in film school the first movie I made was a zombie movie, and the first scene in that movie was a Sam Raimi Evil Dead reference. Meeting him was meeting one of my absolute heroes. Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness are two of my all-time favourites, and there are a lot of things that, when you watch the movie, that are inspired by this man.
How fricking weird was it that he actually produced two movies this year with a cheese grater sequence?
I wanted to ask which one came first, actually.
When we shot it, Zainab Azizi (Sam's producer) was like, “Oh, didn't I tell you we also have a cheese grater shot in Evil Dead Rise?” — the cheese grater even plays quite a big role in all of the marketing. I went to the premiere in LA and they gave out these little cheese graters with red gummy worms attached to them. When I watched the film though I realised it was pretty short — it's horrifying but it is pretty short and we certainly have a different style and approach to it, so I didn't feel bad about it.
I started to wonder if it was a reference to something I'd just missed for all these years. How hands-on is Sam as a producer?
He's actually not that hands-on. He really gives the director their space, and supports them in their creativity rather than giving a direction himself. He was super involved in the writing process, and in the editing process, but with shooting he was very hands-offish.
There seems to be some inspiration taken from classic Hong Kong kung fu movies — Drunken Master and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin were the ones I kept coming back to. To an extent, Riki-Oh as well — that's another one of my favourite films and I kept relating the gore back to it.
Yeah absolutely — we choked a guy with his guts. That's the scene that just lives rent-free in my head. I'm definitely inspired by Riki-Oh and a bunch of other similar movies because those are my favourite movies to watch. These old Hong Kong movies, the heroic bloodshed stuff — John Woo was literally the reason I got into filmmaking in the first place.
When I watched A Better Tomorrow for the first time and saw that teahouse scene when he walked in for the first time, it was just like “Oh my God that's the best thing I've ever seen.” That's when I went from liking movies to loving movies. People ask me about my reference but I feel like there are a few that are very obvious to pinpoint, but it's more that it's all in there in spirit.
It's definitely a vibe thing — I was thinking of it as if it was like Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, but made by the people who made Riki-Oh.
I can get behind that, definitely. Park Chan-wook is one of my favourite directors, I love every single one of his movies. The Vengeance Trilogy has three movies in it, and they all have their own specific twist and spin on the vengeance tale. When we started making a vengeance movie, we decided we were going to do something that is not like your classic vengeance movie. We felt we needed to twist it in a way to make it special, and that thought definitely comes from that.
I think maybe the thing I loved most was that it felt like a Hong Kong movie aesthetically — and what I mean by that is that you don't use any cheap tricks, there are so many action sequences where the camera just lingers and there aren't a bunch of cuts to present anything as more than it is. Do you think that's something you learned from those old classics?
We spoke a lot about this — about what we like about action cinema. A lot of people hate on shaky cam, but sometimes shaky cam is a beautiful tool to do something. But sometimes it's not. There shouldn't be a dogma about what you can and can't do, and obviously we want to show as much as we can of the action to make it feel authentic and fun. That's something we really tried to do, but I understand that sometimes you need to cheat.
We were doing some fancy camerawork as well, some crazy camerawork. We weren't just classicly putting the camera on a tripod and letting the actors do the work, we wanted the camera to turn the actor's performance into something bigger. That's when it works best, when you don't have to hide anything with the camera, but when it supports the actor.
Speaking of the actors, the cast is amazing. Were any of the characters written specifically with any of them in mind?
The casting process actually took like a year. But, to the credit of all of our actors, they made these characters their own and that's why it feels like that. We have such an amazing cast and they all gave their characters life. I love those characters more now than I did on paper.
Here's something weird. Maybe I'll regret telling this story later but, who cares? At one point, for Basho (Andrew Koji), it looked like we might get Chow Yun-fat. I was over the moon, but then it didn't work out and slightly after that Andrew Koji came on board. On the first call we had with him he was already in character, and I cannot tell you how happy I am that it worked out like this. I think he gave so much life to Basho, and I couldn't have anticipated that. The reason he wears a brace on his leg is because Chow Yun-fat wears one in A Better Tomorrow, but I couldn't even imagine Andrew not being Basho now.
Boy Kills World is in cinemas now.
