Boy Kills World is an absolute riot. Out now in cinemas, the over-the-top action-comedy is a barrage of masterfully crafted violence and absurdly hilarious gags as it follows Bill Skarsgård’s deaf-mute Boy on his quest for revenge on the autocratic van der Koy family who killed his mother and sister. The first of the van der Koy clan that Boy has to face off with is Glen, the family’s suit-wearing mouthpiece, brought to life on screen by local boytjie and fan-favourite actor Sharlto Copley.
This past Friday, on the day of Boy Kills World’s cinema release, we got to chat with the South African thespian, who is also currently to be seen on the big screen in Dev Patel’s Monkey Man. In both films, Copley plays characters that you wouldn’t quite call evil outright – although the smarmy Glen van der Koy certainly comes much closer to that definition than underground fight promoter Tiger in Monkey Man – but they’re definitely not good either. After his breakout as xenophobic Wikus van der Merwe in District 9, Copley has gone on to play a string of memorable characters with dubious morals. But when I asked the actor, he pointed out that “there’s nothing really that appeals to me about the bad guys.”
I like to play characters that I think are entertaining. I don’t particularly like to play serious bad villains. I find that quite heavy. Certainly, this movie, Boy Kills World, is very light and tongue in cheek in its tone. It’s very video game-y and characters are larger than life… a lot of the villains or more slimy characters can often be more entertaining because they do things that good well-behaved, well-mannered people are not allowed to do.
During a past interview, when asked about Skarsgård’s casting as Boy, Copley joked that he only knew the young actor as Pennywise the clown in Andre Muschietti’s two It films. When I asked Copley if he really hadn’t known Skarsgård’s other work, he laughingly revealed that he had just been “making fun” of Americans being scared of a clown in a drain.
We’re from Africa, bro! You’re not going to scare me with a movie where there’s a clown in my drain. There’s a lot of other scarier things going on here and none of them have clowns hiding in drains!
Clownery aside, Copley was very impressed with Skarsgård’s commitment to the role of Boy, which was fully on display as the 33-year-old Swedish actor did most of the film’s brutally physical action himself.
He ended up doing a fantastic job really. He just went all in on it. It’s a fun performance and it’s challenging.
Despite an early face-off, Glenn van der Koy doesn’t really get in on the action like Boy does. Was Copley perhaps jealous that he didn’t get to show off some more physicality on-screen?
No, no, no, no, no! I’ve done my time with some fighting, man. Like, yeah no, I’m good, hey? [laughs] I’ve had enough. The body’s not willing. When it’s right I’ll do it again, but I was very happy to come and wear a suit and just use my mouth to fight!
On top of the action, there was another filmmaking challenge in that not only is Boy deaf and mute, but the character relies on an internal narrator (voiced by H. John Benjamin) that he borrows from his favourite childhood video game. Copley feels that Skarsgård and director Moritz Mohr handled this balancing act “superbly”.
One of the things that drew me to this film was the idea your main protagonist has given himself this inner voice from a video game. How’s that going to work? Can you sustain that for a full movie? It’s just something different.
Obviously, Benjamin would not have been on-set recording Boy’s inner voice live, meaning it would need to be edited in later. Similarly, there’s so much VFX and editing work in the film – not to mention an absolutely bonkers script – that the actors on set would have to just trust that the filmmakers would eventually be able to wrangle it all together. Despite the fact that Boy Kills World is Mohr’s feature film debut though, Copley had no real concerns.
There wasn’t any [worry] because we had seen the short that Moritz [had done]. He already proved that he knew what he was doing and could make a cool sequence and cool characters.
The short Copley is referring to is the proof of concept short pre-viz reel that Morris and action director/stunt coordinator Dawid Szatarski initially came up with to pitch their ideas to potential investors and producers. It was this reel that blew away local production studio Nthibah Pictures and also caught the eye of one rather big name: Sam Raimi. The massively popular Evil Dead and Spider-Man director came on board as one of the producers, which helped to the get the ball rolling. But was Raimi on set guiding things to his vision?
No. It’s very Hollywood to use big names to get stuff made. Or once it’s made, as was the case with Monkey Man where Jordan Peele helped us with that and picked it up and put his name on it and sort of gave it his stamp of approval. In [Boy Kill World’s] case, it was the two producers, Simon Swart and Wayne Fitzjohn from Nthibah Pictures that were the guys that were on set and really doing a lot on set creative producing work. They were getting heavily involved in the film creatively as well, to a level producers normally don’t go.
Some of you may read that and get concerned about the dreaded “studio meddling” we also hear about, but Copley assured this was not a negative in this case. The producers were simply “very passionate” and that especially showed in the unprecedented capital they were able to raise.
It’s a massive deal for South African that this movie is funded from South Africa. It’s by far the largest budget of any film that a South African company has made. It’s not a South African story, but it’s South African money and that never happens. In that sense, it’s a big step forward for South Africa.
The “South African money” part is a very important distinction here. If you follow the industry, you would know that South Africa – and Cape Town, in particular – has seen a giant boom of international TV productions using local studios, outdoor locations, stunt crew, etc. But that is almost exclusively in the realm of television and not feature films. Given what a gigantic global success the Oscar-winning District 9 was, it’s a bit puzzling that it’s taken this long for another feature film of that scale to be made here.
I think film is very hard to make work as a business. It’s exceptionally difficult. So when you have situation like Hollywood – obviously the main western filmmaking hub – struggle to make money on their films… and they are picking the best talent from anywhere in the world that think can make a film that will make money, they’ll take it. They really will take you from any country, in some obscure place in the world, and itf they think you’re talented, they’ll give you a crack. For South Africa to compete with that when we’ve got a relatively small [industry]? You’ve got a lot of good talent here, but the kind of directors or producers that are going to produce hit after hit after hit? There’s not a lot of them in the world, let alone in South Africa. That’s where you really need guys like Wayne and Simon and the guys at Nthibah Pictures, the financiers here, to take a chance and invest in the talent that is available.
Rather candidly, Copley also pointed out that, unfortunately, you can’t also just make a South African movie for South Africans. Boy Kills World was shot here and any local worth their salt will recognize the many Cape Town locales as well as the various local actors on screen, but that’s about as South African as it gets. And it all just comes down to our market size.
With this film, the South African market is largely irrelevant in that sense from a box office point of view. The film’s budget is such, that whether South African come to watch or not is not going to be the defining aspect of whether this is a good business decision. You really have to be quite clear as to whether you’re making a movie that you’re hoping is going to travel internationally or just work for the local market.
At the time of writing, Boy Kills World has unfortunately not had a good box office debut both in South African and internationally, earning just $1.9 million so far. That is a very, very low figure, but hopefully some strong word of mouth will turn some of those fortunes around, though chances of it making back that historic budget seems all but impossible right now. And that’s a huge shame. On the flip side, Boy Kills World feels like it was tailor-made to become a cult fan favourite film, what with its unhinged visuals and bone-breaking action. Several films of a similar mold bombed at the box office only to find a dedicated audience later. At the very least, let’s hope for the same fate.
Boy Kills World is in cinemas now, having released on 26 April.