Hawke's hoping Daybreakers finds an audience thirsty for a vampire film not meant for teens. Lionsgate picked up the script back in 2004, and filming took place on Daybreakers in 2007 - before vampires became the new in thing. "You know, it's kind of funny about the whole collective consciousness," explained Hawke at the LA press day for the Lionsgate film. "I got this script, I remember, when I was doing a Tom Stoppard play, and it seemed like the most radically different and new thing at that moment. Tom was like, 'It's time for a good vampire movie.' I had no awareness of any of this stuff. And it's been fascinating to watch it all explode, knowing I just finished making a vampire movie. But the truth is, that's how it is with genre movies. Like the Western will explode and be in style for a little while, and then there'll be too [many] Westerns and nobody will want to see one."
Hawke added, "It's an R-rated vampire movie. I remember being a kid and sleeping over at my friend's house and staying up late and watching Nosferatu. Vampire movies are supposed to be secret and bad. They should be rated R."
Since the vampire genre hadn't exploded when Hawke read the script, that definitely wasn't what drew him to the project. "I had been sent the script, and the script came with the DVD of the Undead. And I didn't read the script and I popped in the Undead. I watched about 10 minutes of it, and it was like, 'That movie sucks.' And then it was some holiday or something, and my brothers were in town, and they started watching it in the middle of the night," explained Hawke. "They just started howling with laughter. I came downstairs and I watched the whole movie with them and I got it."
"I didn't get the sense of humor of that movie, and I had kind of forgotten the sense of humor of this genre and what's possible inside a genre movie. And it got me thinking about when I first started acting with Joe Dante. He had just made The Howling and Piranha and Gremlins, and he had a real passion for these movies and really taught me about them. And so then I read the script and when I read the script, you realize that there's something... The best of what this genre has to offer, which is... First of all, it's original, meaning that it's not based on a graphic novel or some '60s TV show or a comic book that came out a million years ago. It has real originality. And I think the best genre movies have a metaphor or analogy at work in the subtext of them, and this idea of people destroying all their resources and not caring until they were all gone is a really powerful. It kind of fuels the way that the sci-fi element of it works. So by the time I met them, I was really impressed. And when you meet them, they have that kind of irrepressible curiosity and love of movies that I think is required if you're going to make a good film."
Asked what he thinks is the most prominent metaphor in Daybreakers, Hawke replied, "When an analogy is really singing, it's what you want it to be. I made a joke that this could be the #1 movie for PETA advocates, you know? It could be a huge animal rights champion film, in a certain way of thinking. Maybe in another way, it's... Oil is the most obvious one. Sucking the blood dry. You know, there's that great Neil Young song years ago, "Vampire Blues." This idea that we're literally sucking the earth dry, and the idea of oil as the earth's blood has not started from this movie. But the movie wouldn't be good at all if that's the only thing that was interesting about it. The movie works as a flat-out genre movie. It just happens to have something else at play. You know, Gattaca was a similar way, too. It works as just a basic sci-fi movie, but there was obviously all these themes at work underneath it."
Page 2: Ethan Hawke on the Vampire Genre and Brooklyn's Finest
