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From Blowing Up Toasters to a Seven-Figure A24 Deal

In January, one movie exploded out of the anonymous ranks of microbudget indie passion projects playing in competition at Sundance — with no name recognition, no bankable stars, no distribution deal — to become arguably the breakthrough discovery of the festival. Talk to Me is an Australian supernatural horror–thriller in which bored suburban teens chronicle demonic possessions and the conjurings of spirits (achieved by shaking the embalmed hand of a “powerful medium”) on social media for shits and giggles. The movie’s co-directors? Danny and Michael Philippou, excitable 30-year-old Adelaide-born twins who have amassed a body of award-winning, pop-culture skewering, comically violent videos (as well as a passionate, 6.74 million–strong YouTube following) under the nom de vlog RackaRacka.

In the days leading up to Talk to Me’s premiere at Sundance’s ghouls-and-gore-leaning Midnight section, the first-time feature filmmakers were fêted widely by agents, producers, and production execs; the brothers stayed up multiple nights fielding offers from studios and production companies, including Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and the low-budget juggernaut Blumhouse. Then, upon its ecstatic Egyptian Theatre public debut (at which no less an eminence than fright-film phenom Ari Aster sat front-row center), the movie triggered an all-out bidding war — Neon, Universal, Searchlight, and Sony among those in the running. Suddenly, Steven Spielberg, horrormeister James Wan, and Stephen King were blowing up the brothers’ phones with requests for screening links. And in perhaps the foremost indication they had crossed an invisible threshold in Hollywood, the town’s major talent agencies began hotly competing to sign them (with the powerhouse WME walking away with bragging rights). Deal-wise, the Philippous threw in their lot with art-house cool-kid studio A24, which will theatrically release Talk to Me on July 28.

We started getting these creative notes steering it into this stereotypical, boring direction. I’m like, Dude, I’m so bored listening to this.

January’s head-spinning series of events seemed to herald the arrival of a new filmmaking force in the form of two fast-talking film bros from the literal other end of the earth. But on a sunny summer afternoon at Los Angeles’s Hollywood Forever cemetery recently, the Philippous were momentarily less fixated on the birth of their new career iteration than on the dearly departed. “Is it all filmmakers in the cemetery?” Michael asks, stepping out of a chauffeur-driven car with a pair of oversize earphones wrapped around his neck. Danny follows, his hair currently a bright magenta. Together, we gaze at the cowboy-hatted bust of Burt Reynolds, rocker Johnny Ramone shredding on an electric guitar, and the bronze likeness of Toto from The Wizard of Oz.

We wend our way around Hollywood Forever’s artificial lake, and the brothers explain how they came to their calling: through picking up a video camera at age 8 and convincing neighborhood kids in the Adelaide suburb of Pooraka (the name RackaRacka pays oblique homage to their hometown) to act out cartoonishly violent scenes of backyard wrestling and homemade horror. “In the beginning, it was like Lord of the Flies,” Michael says. “We’d get together every weekend and just beat the shit out of each other.” As teens, the two taught themselves the rudiments of filmmaking via a series of shorts they called The Evil Flamingo (a “rip-off of Chucky,” Danny explains) and ten “seasons” of their never-aired Buffy the Vampire Slayer spoof, Tamuffy. Before they’d graduated from high school, the brothers had begun developing a knack for going viral. They filmed fake “fail” videos, in which they stuck knives into a toaster and seemingly blew them up, for example, and caught the attention of American late-night talk shows, including Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Conan. “We were just posting,” says Michael. “We did one video, went to sleep. Woke up the next day, it was at 500,000 views. At the end of that day, it was 1.5 million. We got 100,000 subscribers. And the news wanted to talk to us.”

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While working unpaid, low-level jobs on local productinos, they found inventive ways to subsidize their art — experimental-drug trials among them. “I would take these random pharmaceuticals, then just constantly get my blood taken to test what the side effects were,” remembers Danny. “That’s how I got money to buy my first camera.”

After high school, a one-year filmmaking course called MAPS taught them the basics. But they honed the rest of their craft through plain trial and error, learning visual effects, sound design, color correction, and cinematography while making dozens of YouTube shorts with titles like “Attacked by the McDonald’s Manager,” “Teaching Kids How to Fight!,” and “Builders of the Apocalypse.” (Referencing comic-book characters and fast food, video games and professional wrestling, RackaRacka content tends to showcase lowbrow humor with surprisingly high production values: goofily engrossing shortform guerrilla videos with stirring musical cues and eye-popping VFX that more often than not feature one or both Philippou brothers in some state of humiliation or danger.) “We didn’t want to rely on anyone else,” says Danny. Their greatest challenge, as Michael puts it, was to repeatedly “make nothing look like something” — and to make it cinematic.

Did any filmmakers in particular inspire their output in those early days? “The energy of Racka is inspired by Xena: Warrior Princess, which I am so obsessed with,” answers Danny.

In 2012, the pair ventured beyond the fizzy action-comedy-horror mayhem of their RackaRacka personae to film the short Deluge, about a farmer and his son enmeshed in a suicide cult. Also around that time, Michael served as a production assistant and Danny interned on writer-director Jennifer Kent’s Adelaide-set art-house horror hit The Babadook. Kent’s way of working was a revelation. “She was the first director I saw that cared about what she was making,” Michael says. “It didn’t matter how long it took. It was like, We’re going to keep going until we get the shot. Every night, she’d obsess over the next day. She would not break from her vision, no matter what.”

Actor Joe Bird in Talk to Me.Photo: A24

Owing to what they describe as “impostor syndrome or something,” however, the brothers didn’t necessarily expect to have their debut feature accepted to Sundance. Causeway presold distribution rights to various international territories with a promo reel that screened around the Cannes Film Market the May before but only hoped for an offer in the $500,000 range for North American rights. “We submitted it to Sundance and were like, Cool. Anyway,” says Michael. “There was, in our mind, not even a flicker of a chance.” The Philippous still seem thunderstruck by the reception — and the offers — they and the film received in Utah.

Causeway and the Philippous turned down a larger offer from a competing studio to release Talk to Me with A24 — a company that has consistently punched above its weight, putting out genre movies originally launched at Sundance (Aster’s Hereditary and director Robert Eggers’s The Witch among them) — for a reportedly “high seven figures” sum. “A whole bunch of companies made offers. One made a bigger offer than the A24 one,” says Danny. “The turning point for us was everyone else was faces on calls. A24 met with us in person. They made an offer, left. Then they got even more people, one of the CEOs of the company; they all flew back from New York to Sundance to speak to us again. That sort of thing was like, Oh, fuck. These people are committed!” (In a statement to Vulture, A24 said, “We were blown away with the film and made an offer as soon as we left the theater.”)

In the final lead-up to Talk to Me’s release, the brothers have been unfaltering in their commitment to their day job. Last month, under the guise of RackaRacka, the Philippous attended Anaheim, California’s VidCon, a distinctly Gen-Z-leaning, Comic-Con-esque massing of creators from across TikTok and YouTube, to meet and greet fans. And despite their burgeoning acclaim as Serious Filmmakers, the brothers have no intention of forsaking their digital renown. “We’re never going to walk away from YouTube,” Michael says. “That’s how we came up. We want to give back to fans because they’re the ones who helped us get here.”

In another indication of the brothers’ ambition, the conclusion of Talk to Me leaves the door ajar for further sequelization in what has the very real potential to become a long-running franchise for A24 à la Wan’s Saw. The Philippous say they would jump at the chance to do a follow-up installment. Toward that end, they’ve already drafted a “mythology bible,” filling in blanks surrounding a TTM cinematic universe. “We really want to do an action film, really badly want to do another horror film,” Danny says. “But our goals are just to keep making stuff.”

“Man, we have scripts and scripts. We’ve got ideas. We got character. We got scenes,” Michael continues. “It’s to an annoying point; we’ve got to start making stuff. The bigger ideas, we’ve just brushed the surface. We’re ready to go. Sign us up.”