By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Opening today from Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate, BOY KILLS WORLD is a bloody, funny and all-out insane postapocalyptic revenge thriller. The team who brought it to life includes producers Wayne Fitzjohn and Simon Swart of South Africa-based Nthibah Pictures, who shared with RUE MORGUE the details of the film’s creation.
Directed by Moritz Mohr, based on his short film, and scripted by Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers, BOY KILLS WORLD stars Bill Skarsgård (IT) in the title role, a young man whose family was murdered when he was a child. The perpetrator was Hilda Ven Der Koy (Famke Janssen), ruler of this dystopian world, and the attack left Boy deaf and mute. He was rescued by a Shaman (Yayan Ruhian) who subjected him to brutal, sadistic training that turned Boy into a fighting machine. Now he’s out for vengeance, guided by an inner voice (H. Jon Benjamin) derived from his favorite childhood fighting game, but he’s going to have to punch, kick and slash through a lot of bizarre characters to get to Hilda. (See our review here.) Also starring Jessica Rothe (the HAPPY DEATH DAY films), Michelle Dockery, Brett Gelman, Isaiah Mustafa, Sharlto Copley and Andrew Koji, BOY KILLS WORLD also counts genre veterans Sam Raimi and Roy Lee among its producing team.
How did you first get involved with BOY KILLS WORLD? Did you see the short film Mohr had made?
WAYNE FITZJOHN: The short version is, we saw the short, we read the script and we said yes within 12 hours. The longer version is, I had just had neck surgery, so I wasn’t feeling great, and I was chatting to the team in the heat of lockdown. They were all super-somber, and I asked, “Does anyone have anything else to add?” And they were like, “We’re just so broken that we can’t do BOY KILLS WORLD.” I said, “What’s BOY KILLS WORLD?” and they told me, “It’s this super-zany, cool script, and the short is amazing.” And I was like, “Well, if it’s so good, why don’t I even know about it? Why can’t we do it?” They said, “This is going to be a very, very hardcore R, probably NC-17, and it’s just not what we do.” And I said, “Well, why is it not what we do?” Anyway, they showed me the short, and I was so nauseous after watching it because my blood pressure had still not recovered post-surgery, but it was an instant “We’ve got to do this,” and literally 12 hours later, we greenlighted it.
How did you get hooked up with Sam Raimi and his team?
FITZJOHN: They reached out to us. We were in post on REDEEMING LOVE, and they heard through the grapevine that there’s this production house out there that takes a movie from end to end, and self-distributes, and we put up our own cash.
SIMON SWART: Christian Mercuri from Capstone Pictures was very instrumental in the introduction, because he knew we were looking for stuff that was original and a little audacious, and not run-of-the-mill. So he was sharing with us projects that came his way, and he was part of that introduction. And when we read the script and saw the short, we felt this project was not like anything we’d ever seen before. It had a homage aspect where it paid tribute to all the great movies everybody grew up with; it was kind of a mashup of our favorite genres in a way that felt fresh.
FITZJOHN: And to be perfectly honest, after two years of dealing with romantic drama on REDEEMING LOVE, I needed to pivot to something different. It was such a crazy project, and it just felt right.
How involved were you with casting, and what led to Bill Skarsgård getting the lead?
FITZJOHN: We were completely hands-on on all things, including casting. The usual suspects were thrown around by the sales agent saying, “We need to look at…” I won’t mention any names, but we did talk to some of the big A-league boys. I think it was Roy Lee who suggested, “What about Bill Skarsgård?” and when we first heard that, to be honest, that didn’t really strike us. You know, he’s not exactly a boy, he’s 6-foot-4–a pretty significant man. And then the irony of that was it got us talking about, “This kind of reminds me of that story about the baby elephant that’s tied to the stake and pulls and pulls and pulls and can’t get away. And then by the time it’s a big bull elephant, it doesn’t even try to pull the stake, which it could probably do in no time.” And that’s essentially Boy’s story, the way he’s been so programmed by Shaman. He should be the champion, but he cedes the king role to Shaman, who’s about half his size by the time he’s grown up. So it just felt right.
SWART: When we spoke to Bill, he was so excited about playing a true action role. He’s a massive martial arts fan, and so capable. He was like, “Yeah, I want to do the training, and as many of my own stunts as you guys will let me.” We said, “Well, that’s great, Bill, but remember, your character has no lines, you have no dialogue.” And he said, “Yeah, that’s what really gets me about this role.” He studied the old Charlie Chaplin silent movies; he not only prepared his body and learned the martial arts part, but if you look at the range of emotion on his face, there are some little homages to classic Chaplin as well.
The rest of the ensemble was very much the same, finding the right people to bring these wacky characters to life. When we interviewed the actors, as well as our heads of department, we told them, “Wave your crazy flag! However you bring these characters to life, just lean into your creative inspiration.”
FITZJOHN: Getting back to Bill, if you see what he does under all the prosthetics in IT, you still know what he’s thinking and feeling. He’s one of a kind, and if Hollywood hasn’t recognized that he’s a big star yet, I believe they’re going to after this movie.
What went into getting Skarsgård in shape and choreographing his fight scenes?
FITZJOHN: That was a pretty significant task. Our stunt coordinator, Dawid Szatarski, is incredible in terms of how he thinks. He thinks in movement. Dawid basically invented a fighting style for Bill, given his lankiness; he wanted him to move with big sweeping motions, and they spent quite a bit of time in Berlin doing the training. We also hired a really good fitness/strength coach, a nutritionist, who basically lived with Bill for about nine months getting him ready. I didn’t stay too far from Bill during production, and I would watch him do a 12-hour shoot and then go and do a two-hour calisthenics workout on the roof. I mean, the guy would work out during lunch breaks. He never stopped; I’d never seen anything like that commitment. He became Boy.
SWART: Dawid was also our 2nd unit director. I think he has three or four credits on the movie; he actually has a great cameo as VDK Dawe, the one soldier who just won’t go down. Bill’s relationship with Dawid was very special, and there were times when Dawid would go to Bill saying, “So, do you think you can do this stunt?” and Bill would go, “Of course I can do this stunt,” and we were like, “No, you can’t do this stunt!” There were many moments when I would have to tell Bill, “No, no, you’ve got to use a double for this, because if you twist your ankle or something at this stage of the shoot…” But Bill was up for anything; he was like, “Well, then don’t challenge me,” you know? “Don’t dare me.” And we were like, “We’re not daring you!”
FITZJOHN: If we’re honest, Bill did the bulk of it; it’s not a battle we won in the end. Outside of the stupid, crazy stuff, like when we were throwing Boy down from a double-story balcony, he pretty much did everything.
I’ve heard that Skarsgård originally did Boy’s voiceovers himself, before H. Jon Benjamin came in and took over. Can you talk about the reasons and that process?
FITZJOHN: It was always going to be H. Jon Benjamin. I mean, Moritz called it at the same time, when we were casting. The short had this Marlboro Man voiceover that just doesn’t match with Boy. And even with Bill’s versatility, we needed to explore something like that. He did an amazing job, but the audiences wanted the almost bipolar nature of it.
SWART: It’s the absurdity of his inner voice, right? So in the short it’s the Marlboro Man, and Boy gets his voice from an old cigarette commercial. For the feature, we recorded Bill, which did give us a great connection to his character, but we found that we lost the absurdity of where his inner voice comes from. It took something away from the physical performance and the storytelling.
FITZJOHN: And also, given the nature of the story, the humor of H. Jon Benjamin gives us a reprieve, in a good way, from a pretty dark, dramatic and violent story.
Getting back to the ratings concern, did you think that might become a serious problem considering all the blood and violence in the film?
FITZJOHN: Yeah, that was a very real possibility. But we knew we were going there, and we chose our market very carefully, and we weren’t going to compromise on that. And if that hurt us ratings-wise… The movie calls for a certain degree of graphic violence, but it’s also deeply satirical in that way. There’s been a pretty formidable rise of fascism in the world of late, and we hope there’s some semblance of a commentary on that in this movie, because if we don’t check it soon, we could potentially make some of the mistakes of the past.
SWART: It is a revenge movie, and we always knew it was going to be rated R, reading the script and seeing the short. Moritz describes it as a fucked-up fairy tale, and that’s what we were going for, but if there is a message in the movie, it’s all about thinking for yourself and not believing everything you’re told. And if you take extreme action based on what you’re told, you might be wrong.
What was the messiest scene to shoot?
FITZJOHN: Well, I know for sure the one that made everybody ooh and aah from the cringe factor was the scene with the cheese grater. I was manning that 2nd unit set while many of my colleagues were at the 1st unit, and I genuinely didn’t know how we were going to show this to the audience, because even knowing what was going on, I was looking away. It was sincerely visceral, and now, the way it’s been edited, it’s actually pretty funny, but we still get oohs and aahs. I think it will go down as one of the more memorable scenes. But the boss fight at the end, which I don’t want to say too much about–that one, I challenge you to tell me a more extreme boss showdown than that one. That most certainly has the most blood, without a doubt.
It was recently announced that you’re doing a BOY KILLS WORLD spinoff series; what’s that all about?
FITZJOHN: It’s not a BOY KILLS WORLD series; it’s inspired by the game within the film. Boy gets his inner voice from his favorite childhood video game, SUPER DRAGON PUNCH FORCE 2. And so we decided right from the get-go, when we read the script, that we needed to build this game. But we needed to go very retro, 16-bit, on the game in the movie, to make it ’80s nostalgic, and we didn’t want to come out with a game like that. So we upgraded the actual game we’re releasing to SUPER DRAGON PUNCH FORCE 3 [see gameplay trailer below]. It has its own story, and we see it as an extension of the overall universe. The game is coming out at the same time as the movie, and I believe there’s nothing else out there like it.
SWART: And of course, the announcer in the game is H. Jon Benjamin.
FITZJOHN: And we did announce that SUPER DRAGON PUNCH FORCE 3 is getting an eight-part animated series. It’s a completely original IP inspired by the game, and not connected to BOY KILLS WORLD. We’ve got Mario Carvalhal, a writer on THE SEARCH FOR WONDLA, the John Lasseter/Skydance/Netflix series, doing this. I just read the pilot script, and I’m pretty excited to bring this one to life. It’s going to be very cool, and I think the fans will enjoy where we’re going with this. We’d like to keep expanding, and see what we can build in terms of original content, because we feel that’s required at the moment.
