“I hope young teenage girls see a power in this young girl that they can take into their lives. Shanika is this teenager turning into a woman turning into a warrior, which is incredibly important to me. My job in life is to embarrass the shit out of my children. “Her’s and Tyson’s is a dysfunctional relationship. She seemed like an emerging warrior figure. “Yeah, the beautiful vampire is not what we were after. “There’s an overreaction to these sort of pouty teenage fucking guys with eyeliner – and there’s nothing wrong with wearing eyeliner, guys: that’s total rock ’n’ roll – but the real wet blanket kind of vampire.” įirebite’s vamps are freaky I loved the heavy prosthetics. Vampire stories have such a large following. The song remains the same, but it’s just turning it into a different key that’s more palatable to a wider audience.” “I love all forms of genre – except for torture porn shit, I hate that crap – so it was kind of like: Turn that anger into an energy. So it pissed me off, but I’ve made a lot of worthy films so I was kind of like: What can I do with this? Well, what if I turn into 11 vampires? The history books are always written by the coloniser. I’m sure there are plenty of historians out there that have a much straighter reason for it. The fact that a disease was carried over in vials seems like an intentional move… When we talk about Australia Day, well, that was a day these bottles of smallpox rocked up. “When I learnt about that, which wasn’t that long ago, 10 or 15 years ago, it made me incredibly angry. What drew you to vampire mythology to tell this story about the vials of smallpox that were brought over with the First Fleet in 1788? READ MORE: Tropical Fuck Storm: “The anxiety we were exuding for so many years caught up with the rest of the world”.And that was the attitude walking into the writers’ room, let alone the actual directing of it.” We’ve got shitloads of money off the Americans, let’s just try and get fired. Like: ‘Right, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna get Australian music only, and if it’s a band I’ve never heard of, I’m interested’. What were the tonal references for Firebite?
Chaotic but lovable, the duo protect Blackfullas from the predations of the last remaining vampire colony, who lurk in deserted mine shafts. In Firebite, two Indigenous vampire hunters Tyson (Rob Collins) and Shanika (Shantae Barnes-Cowan) cruise around dusty Opal City in a beat-up Subaru WRX. “It’s like rock n’ roll: you can dance to it or you can read the lyrics and learn from it,” Thornton says. With grotesque prosthetics, a striking desert backdrop, and a messy, hearty surrogate father-daughter relationship, Firebite is a fun, comical romp with a sombre history buried in its foundations. Luckily for audiences, Firebite will still premiere today (December 16) on AMC+, the streaming platform of the network behind Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead.
“If we get fired by AMC, we’re doing our job,” the Kaytetye filmmaker ( Sweet Country, Samson and Delilah) tells NME of how he and his team made the new vampire-desert horror series.
If there was a phrase to summarise how Warwick Thornton approached his new series Firebite, it’s ‘no fucks given’.