Meet the Roadkill Superstars. Their new film Turbo Kid has been called “Mad Max on a BMX” and is a campy 1980s throwback packed with vintage tech and blood and guts. Stylistically they’re not too different from Robert Rodriguez, except they have much smaller budgets and a taste for science fiction. Not exactly what you’d expect from three sweet writer/directors from Canada, but that mix of heart and hellfire is what makes them—and their movie—so unique.
The Roadkill Superstars (aka François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell) are also just a bunch of nerds committed to doing what they love. “Being a geek is very liberating,” says Simard, “because it just means you are very passionate about something and you did it as much as you want. We are huge geeks and I am proud of my geekness.”
After a strong debut at the Sundance Film Festival (we named them three of our heroes the fest), the gang is taking Turbo Kid to South by Southwest this week, where undoubtedly the genre-film-loving crowd will eat up the movie’s dytopia-flavored action.
Here are a few things you should know about the Roadkill Superstars.
Team RKSS Is a Modern Family
Anouk and Yoann-Karl are brother and sister, and François and Anouk have been a couple for 15 years. The trio has been making short films together for more than a decade. “Over the years we’ve made some sort of hive mind where we share a brain,” says Simard. “We love the same things. We grew up with the same things … the fact that we are three, we are like a band. We have each other through good and tough times.”
And while many people have a hard time surviving long holiday weekends with their families, Team RKSS says their unique bond is a boon to the creative process, even when disagreements inevitably surface. “When we write we all come with our ideas. We stand up and act out scenes together to see if everything works,” says Simard. “We do get into yelling spats from time to time for five minutes and then someone goes ‘OK, I’ve got what you mean!'”
This constant workshopping also gives the team an advantage when it’s time to move the idea beyond the hive. Yoann-Karl explains that by defending your creative process in advance, it’s easier to bring cogent arguments to a room of outsiders later on. “When we come to present that idea we really know it from top to bottom,” he says, “and are able to explain it.”
Turbo Kid Is Not Actually for Kids
Don’t let the name and the whimsical production stills fool you. Turbo Kid falls into solid R-rating territory with plenty of flailing disemboweled corpses, fountains of blood pumping from sliced arteries, and wanton profanity.
RKSS likes things gory and absolutely not subtle, and staying faithful to their hive mind’s DNA with Turbo Kid was crucial. “Be true to yourself. Be genuine,” says Yoann-Karl. “Do what makes you happy and make it as often as you can.” And when your true self makes short films like Demonitron: The Sixth Dimension, you’ve got a pretty uncompromising aesthetic to uphold.
However, RKSS Isn’t Just About Campy Blood and Guts
Despite the predilection for on-screen savagery, the only thing actually bleeding from the trio is enthusiasm and gratitude. “We love to give hugs. Like, really,” says Simard. “We aim to please and we want people to go out of Turbo Kid with a big smile on their face and be happy for the rest of the day.”
If that sounds like the opposite reaction you’d have to a movie packed with savagery and death, you’re not alone there. But the Roadkill Superstars snuck a light-touch love story into Turbo Kid, an unlikely coupling between the titular Kid (Munro Chambers) and his android companion, Apple (Laurence Leboeuf). The trio knew that their full-length movie couldn’t sustain itself on cartoon violence alone, and so they gave it a soul in the form of young love (or at least young bashful affection).
“You have to make hard choices to be able to tell the whole story,” says Simard, discussing the differences between short-form and long-form storytelling. “For the feature film we knew that we needed to have a heart for a story, and we had a cute little love story. It was the first time we wrote love.”
The Roadkill Superstars Found One of Their Superstars By Chance
On top of all the blood and guts and young love, there’s one other sweet surprise in Turbo Kid: The mega-villain crime boss, Zeus, is played by genre hero Michael Ironside. It’s a near-perfect role for the actor, and it’s a casting that came by very fortuitous means for the Roadkill Superstars.
“We went to the Toronto International Film Festival and Michael just walked in,” says Simard. “He comes in and we’re all just looking at each other going ‘Zeus just walked in!’ So we went to our producer and said we wrote the character for him and we want him for the film.”
Turbo Kid Is a Lot Like Whiplash
Well… Not really. But similar to the critical and awards darling from director Damian Chazelle, Turbo Kid premiered at Sundance, was based on a short film, and had directors pulling double duty as screenplay writers. How’s that for the can-do spirit of independent cinema?
Turbo Kid was born as T is for Turbo, a short film entered into Drafthouse Films’ ABC’s of Death competition in 2012, and it almost didn’t happen at all. The trio had already participated in various short film competitions and didn’t want to keep trudging down the same road, but fortunately for us all, they changed their minds. T is for Turbo took third place in its bracket of the competition, and even though it wasn’t included in the feature-length ABCs of Death horror anthology (that honor went to category winner T is for Toilet), the entry from Roadkill Superstars fared pretty well. It is still the most popular entry from the T category, and, oh yeah, launched its creators into the Sundance and SXSW film festivals.
All the attention on their films has kept Simard and the Whissells extremely busy in 2015, but they don’t mind at all.
“It’s still a lot of work every day, but it’s a dream. We fought for it,” says Yoann-Karl. “All the years making shorts and we wanted to do at least one wonderful feature, and now that we’ve done Sundance we have a lot of opportunities. We don’t mind going around the world. We love being busy.”
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