Common wisdom in storytelling is to “write what you know.” For Australian twin filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou, that means writing about trauma.
Their new film Bring Her Back follows brother and sister Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) as they adjust to life with their now foster mother Laura (Sally Hawkins) and foster brother (Jonah Wren Phillips) following their father’s death. Laura is still processing some grief of her own over her dead daughter, and it soon becomes clear that she has some sinister designs for Andy and Piper.
“When you’re developing and writing something, whatever you’re going through at the time is automatically inherent in the material that you write,” Danny said during a question and answer session following a screening on May 6. “It’s like a really hard story to tell, but our cousin lost her two year old. My cousin was, like, the last person to let him go, and she didn’t look like she was ever going to be okay ever again. Looking at that, it gave me a big sense of anxiety. It was so heartbreaking and so awful, the idea of this cycle of grief that wouldn’t end, or she couldn’t let him go.”
Grief is a central theme in both of the Philippou brothers’ films Talk To Me and now Bring Her Back, which were written concurrently. Where the first film was more of a party movie, the brothers wanted Bring Her Back to be a character study and more of a psychological slow burn. Danny said that using horror as an outlet to express and explore their grief was very cathartic.
“We also lost a close family friend and there was nowhere to process that or put that, and then the film became this place that you sort of put those emotions,” he said. “It changed the script and the scenes that were written to be scary ended up sad, and it was the most expressive thing. It was just like directing through tears.”
The brothers also chose to shoot as much of the film as they could in chronological order so that the actors could follow along with and naturally build up to the emotional progression of the film.
“We tried to have the film as much as we can in chronicle chronological order to play out as the film progresses to help the kids build up to those bigger scenes, like Sora had never acted before, and then for for Sally to properly track the character,” Danny said.
Working with Hawkins was a dream come true for the brothers, who said that she was on the top of their list of actors to portray Laura, and that they were particularly excited because she had never done a “full blown horror role before.”
“She would buy items as Laura and give it to the production team, like ‘Could you put this in somewhere?'” Michael said. “She was so dedicated. I’ve never seen someone dissect a script like that and embody a character so strongly before. Every day you’re watching the footage, and there are many different versions of each scene.”
Danny said that they never expected Hawkins to agree to do the role and that if she did they would have to contend with someone who, along with her talent, brought a lot of ego to the set. To their surprise, Hawkins loved the script and was very humble, in constant communication with them and completely dedicated to the role.
“When she came on set, she was fully prepared, and in these wild head spaces, and you could always just keep recording, because she would never break character, even with stunts,” Michael said. “Like when she’s falling down and then the some people are trying to put a mat down in the rehearsals, she’s like, ‘I don’t need the mat for the rehearsals.’ And then we’ll do a rehearsal and she dives to the ground for every single take.”
“There were certain scenes where it was scary to approach her, she’d be so in it,” Danny added with a laugh, imitating Hawkins running crazily through the set. “you’d come up and try and give her a note and run away. She was just in it constantly.”
The brothers were also inspired by working with their younger actors, Billy and Sora, who they said bonded very closely.
“Billy was 12 years old when he acted in his first film, and Sora was 12 years old when she started shooting Bring Her Back,” Danny said. “He was really a big brother and a mentor for her. And they really trusted each other and leaned on each other.”
The brothers said that they were surprised at Sora’s transformation behind the scenes from being a shy girl who had never acted before to wanting to do her own stunts.
“We wanted a vision impaired person to play [Piper], and there wasn’t a big pool in Australia of 12 year old girls like that that want to act,” Michael said. “She’d never acted before, but we did a improv scene, then she just went in, and it was incredible. She was doubting herself whether she could pull it off. And we saw this amazing transformation throughout the shoot.”
Another major focus of the production was the use of practical effects. The brothers used two separate teams of effects artists and joked that they often treated the film like a competition and pitted the teams against each other. One of the teams was solely dedicated to Oliver’s transformation and effects throughout the film and getting Philipps comfortable with all the makeup, props and prosthetics.
“Trying to find a way to execute everything as practically as possible was always the funnest and the best challenges: how to execute the table, how to execute the knife, how to execute his stomach and his transformation,” Danny said. “And, you know, even, like, giving that option for the actor and his family, and it’s because both of his parents actors as well, and they helped, like, build his character and support him on set. We could get another actor to do it, because it’s gonna be a lot of prosthetics and everything, but he was so game and just wanted to do it.”
The brothers credit practical horror effects for sparking their desire to make films as children and even started a visual effects company for Bring Her Back but soon realized how much work was involved and called in other companies to help out, jokingly referring to it as a “learning experience.”
“It’s such a different experience watching [a film] to making it, and I think that’s what really drew us to filmmaking when we were kids was seeing these death scenes in movies that we weren’t allowed to watch,” Michael said. “It was almost like confronting them, in a way, by creating them. How do they do that? And that’s why I respect those old film like the older kind of horror films have the practical effects, like The Thing now still stands up.”