Every July in Montreal, a certain kind of moviegoer thrills and quivers at the arrival of the Fantasia International Film Festival. It has often been said Fantasia is less like a film festival than a sporting event – and not just any sporting event, but a Super Bowl or a World Cup final. At raucous midnight screenings, the crowds scream and cheer, for the festival’s many slashers in particular, greeting each wound and laceration with the galvanic applause of a touchdown or head-butted goal. This year, the holiday spirit of stadium and pitch extended to the sports fan’s sense of local pride. Fantasia, for the first time in its nearly 20 years, had a home team: Turbo Kid, the inaugural production of the festival’s international co-production market. The sold-out theatre celebrated its premiere as if it were the overtime victory of the regional squad.
Turbo Kid, which will open in theatres across the country on Aug. 28, is the work of co-directors Yoann-Karl Whissell, Anouk Whissell and François Simard, long-time collaborators who together operate under the representatively distasteful name Roadkill Superstar. (They go by the diminutive RKSS, which must help at meetings.) For a decade now, the trio has been producing low-budget exploitation shorts with titles such as Ninja Eliminator and Demonitron: The Sixth Dimension, which should indicate a good idea of the presiding sensibility. It was one of these shorts that legitimized their claim to superstar status.
In 2011, Drafthouse Films held a contest to find one of the 26 short films that would constitute its anthology feature The ABCs of Death: Amateur directors were invited to develop and submit an original four-minute short and the Internet was left to decide. T for Turbo, as RKSS dubbed their submission, won the popular vote by a considerable margin, and while the producers ultimately went with another selection, they approached RKSS with an offer to expand their entry to feature length. With partial financing from New Zealand secured by the ABCs of Death connection, only one challenge remained for the full-sized Turbo Kid’s gathering force: Find a Canadian partner.
By this time it was 2012. And Fantasia, meanwhile, was set in just a few weeks to launch Frontières@Fantasia, the first edition of the festival’s production market. The RKSS crew hastened to assemble a professional treatment in time for the initial meetings – and did such a good job that they found eager producers immediately.
T for Turbo had an irresistible panache. It also boasted, happily, an easy-to-sell concept: “Mad Max meets BMX,” as Yoann-Karl puts it. But how could the manic vigour of a four-minute sci-fi pastiche be sustained over the course of a 90-minute feature?
“T for Turbo was basically one set piece,” Anouk recalls. “It was just an action scene with a lot of blood and gore. To make it a full feature, we had to expand the story, come up with additional characters – and give it heart.”
The submission guidelines for the ABCs of Death contest specified that directors ought to seize “the holy shit factor,” and the RKSS effort does indeed have that. But the trio understood that only goes so far.
“We didn’t want to do gore for an hour and a half,” Yoann-Karl says. “We knew that if we wanted to expand this thing, we needed some heart.”
In its original conception, the Turbo world is a two-dimensional throwback: a vaguely defined post-apocalypse with laser guns and meat grinders, steampunk gewgaws and wasteland frontiers. What enlivens the feature – other than the gore, of which there remains plenty – is the relationship between its two young heroes, The Kid (Munro Chambers) and Apple (Laurence Leboeuf).
“It’s a very cute love story,” Yoann-Karl says. “You can do all the gore you want, but if you don’t care for the characters, it’s boring. People will tune it out.”
Love and gore notwithstanding, Turbo Kid’s most distinctive feature is its period setting: “the future,” as its opening narration intones, “of 1997.” Retrofuturism here manifests itself as a blinding eighties nostalgia, as every prop, title card and musical cue seems a relic of that era’s Day-Glo science fiction. This was very much the idea.
“We wanted Turbo Kid to feel like a long-lost kids movie,” Simard explains, and that has become the defining refrain in interviews. Although they’re quick to clarify that what they’re doing is not parodic. “We didn’t want to make this a spoof,” Simard says. “It’s a love letter to childhood and the movies we grew up with. Me, as a kid, I would have loved Turbo Kid. I was watching so many movies like that.”
It’s a nice thought, though it isn’t quite true: You would be hard-pressed to find a kids movie from any era quite so violent or crude. The filmmakers maintain that their brand of carnage is always amusing rather than disturbing, but the central gimmick, besides the patina of eighties flair, is pretty clearly the contrast between the appearance of a family-friendly subject and the stylized adult bloodshed that continues to interrupt it.
“I think when we were kids we were exposed to a lot of violent movies,” Anouk concedes.
Yoann-Karl agrees: “We were traumatized by RoboCop. We saw it way too early – and then kept watching it every weekend.”
And it certainly seems to be Paul Verhoeven rather than Steven Spielberg who looms over the proceedings.
That, of course, is just how the Fantasia crowds like it. And just how did they like it in Montreal? “It was like a rock concert,” Simard says, laughing.
The trio are still awed by the response – although they knew from experience what sort of thing to expect. “We’re Fantasia babies. We actually grew up at the festival, watching seven films a day, 50 to 60 movies a summer. It was completely mental.”
It’s fitting that Fantasia mainstays should return after so many years as the toast of the festival. And the fans did everything they could to make them feel welcome and at home. “The crowds are always loud, but I don’t remember them ever being this loud,” Yoann-Karl says. “It was basically the highlight of our life.”