It’s hard to believe it’s been six years since directors, Michael and Peter Spierig came out with their debut, “Undead”. It contained an ambitious epic scale and impressive visual effects which were created by the brothers themselves on their home computers. On their upcoming second feature, “Daybreakers”, the Spierig brothers now have studio backing (Lionsgate) and reputable names such as Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill. You’d think with all this behind their sophomore film that they might have watered down their vision for Hollywood. One couldn’t be more wrong. The brothers have created a truly audacious, imaginative horror/sci-fi hybrid that is everything the “Underworld” franchise tries to be but in less than two hours. We chatted with the directors about their efforts to bring this long in the making effort to the big screen.

BD: How did you come up with the story and the unique world within it?

Michael: We just came up with the initial idea which is the world of vampires. That’s where it started. We spent a couple of years just nutting out ideas like ok, so if it’s a world of vampires but its not your traditional post-apocalyptic world where everything is destroyed and civilization is completely run down. What if it’s a world where they accept this whole new thing called vampirism and they try to go back to their normal lives. It was fun to just play around and say okay, how do they drive during the daytime? They have a camera on the cars. How they walk around during the daytime? We got all these underground tunnels. The script evolved just through playing around in the world. Once we found who the protagonist was, everything sort of started to evolve. I think the last character we came up with was the Sam Neil character. I don’t think his character existed up until the final draft. The short answer is we created the world first and everything else started to piece together.

BD: There is a lot packed into this film. Was there initially a longer cut or perhaps a plan for future installments?

Peter: I’d love to go back to the world and explore other ideas. We had so many ideas. There isn’t a longer cut but there was a lot of ideas we had to remove from the script.

Michael: We had things like vampire animals. It’s briefly mentioned in the film about how all the forest fires start and people eating animals, turning into vampires and them not knowing any better and burning down forests. We really want to start to show all of that stuff. Unfortunately, you have to get to the core of your story and those things get stripped away. There’s lots of stuff we’d like to delve into further.

Peter: We spent a lot of time working out how things became the way they are. We have a lot of material for the film before the film and also, the film after the film.

BD: You’ve spent 3 years in bringing this film to the screen. Why so long?

Peter: We finished shooting in 2007. We were in post-production. It took quite a long time. What happened was we actually had a test screening which went really well and Lionsgate felt like they had to find the right date. The summer is just jam-packed and even now, right until the end of the year, is just as packed. They want to make sure “Daybreakers” has a weekend which would give it a chance to find its audience. So it took a long time because we were just trying to find the right release date. Also, we tweaked very minor things after the test screening. All studios are looking for is a weekend where their movie can stand out. There are like two or three movies every weekend. You just got to find one that isn’t within your genre.

BD: Like the whole “Halloween II” and “The Final Destination” debacle.

Peter: Exactly. We were originally going to open around that kind of date and Lionsgate were aware that all these movies were coming out. They thought we can’t go anywhere near that now and they were absolutely right. A film lives and dies by the date.

BD: Just like with “Undead”, you worked on some of the visual effects for “Daybreakers”. How much of it was your doing?

Michael: There are 500 visual effects in the film and we did 350 of them. Now to be fair about it, we did some really complex stuff but the majority of the really complicated things like character animation or the blood farm stuff, we didn’t do. We did a lot of digital city shots, removing wires and dots. We did it purely out of necessity. It wasn’t like saying yes; please, we’d like to do 350 visual effects. We pretty much ran out of money and we had no choice.

BD: I was extremely impressed by the scale of your film. How big was the budget?

Michael: The budget is less than “District 9”. We made every cent count.

Peter: Australian filmmakers come from low budget because we don’t have money. I’m guessing similar thing with Canadian filmmakers.

BD: There isn’t much of a Canadian film scene anymore, I’m afraid.

Peter: We have a similar thing in Australia where there’s a lot of films nobody wants to see. There is an industry in that we have bright people that come out of Australia. We have, really I think, some of the best actors in the world coming out of Australia but we don’t have much of a film industry in that it’s sustainable and people want to see an Aussie film. Australians don’t want to see Australians onscreen. That’s the attitude. It’s a shame. It’s not a great situation to be in but that’s what happened with our film industry.

BD: Coming from low budget, what are the challenges of working on a studio film?

Michael: I think the funny thing is people call this a studio film but it really wasn’t and that’s not any disrespect towards Lionsgate at all. They were really good to us on this film. They were heavily involved in helping us edit the script and get it to a shootable level. When it came to the production, they basically just left us alone like a completely independent film.

Peter: I think Lionsgate work on the basis if they are going to get a filmmaker to make a film, it’s because of what they bring to it. They want a filmmaker because they have a specific idea. They are respectful of that.

Michael: Another good thing is when you shoot a movie in Australia, it’s pretty far away. It’s hard to get on a plane to visit.

BD: What’s next on your agenda?

Peter: We are developing a project for Warner Brothers called Captain Blood, based on the Rafael Sabatini novel. We are changing it into a science fiction film. So it’s pirates in space.

Michael: But don’t think Ice Pirates. It’s not Ice Pirates.