Interview With Yoann-Karl Whissell And Anouk Whissell, Directors Of ‘Wake Up’

I’ve been a fan of Yoann-Karl Whissell and Anouk Whissell, the sibling duo behind RKSS (Roadkill Superstars), since I first saw Summer of 84 (2018). I then immediately had to watch their feature film debut, Turbo Kid (2015), and it was clear that they knew what they were doing. Their new film, Wake Up, is about a group of young activists who take over an Ikea-like warehouse store after hours, only to have their protest turn more violent than they expected.

In an attempt to draw attention to the environmental crisis, young activists decide to invade and vandalize a furniture store. The protest quickly turns into a massacre when they find themselves trapped with a hunting-obsessed night guard.

To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with Yoann-Karl and Anouk about why they wanted to direct the film, filming on an island, Turbo Kid 2, and more!

**Author/Editor Note: The third member of RKSS, François Simard, is no longer part of the group and he did not have any part in making the film. **

PopHorror: I’m a big fan of your work so I was super excited for Wake Up. It was a lot of fun so I’m excited to talk to you about it today.

Yoann-Karl Whissell: Oh, thank god! Otherwise, it would have been a terrible interview! “I hated it! I hate you people! I want to hunt you down.”

PopHorror: Right?! All of my questions are for both of you. What intrigued you about the script and made you want to be a part of the project?

Yoann-Karl Whissell: Many things. The general message of it was very in line with the story we wanted to tell and message that we want to pass through our films. But Anouk always says it’s better, how visual it was.

Anouk Whissell: Yeah, when we read it, it was very visual, very well written at that point that you could imagine all the set pieces. Even the masks and everything, even then when we read it, we could imagine all the masks and what we wanted them to look like. It’s all the visuals, the message, and it was a modern film as well, with modern people and it’s something I feel like we haven’t really tackled yet. All of these were very exciting to us.

Yoann-Karl Whissell: And tackling modern issues like we did in all our films, it pushed it really in front of the film and that’s something that was very interesting. We always aim to entertain first, like if you had a bad day, your boss yelled at you and you had a flat tire and you finally come home, if we can make you forget for an hour and a half that shitty day, then we’ve done our job. But after you forgot about that, if we can make you think as well, we like to do that too. We don’t want to hammer it. We want to entertain you first. Forget about the world because it’s a crazy world right now. We all need a little bit of space to take care of our mental health.

PopHorror: You mentioned the general message of the film, and it does deal with a lot of heavy issues like activism, animal rights, and animals versus humans with the deforestation of the rainforest. It uses violence to fight violence. These weren’t really peaceful protestors. How did you convey your vision to your cast and crew? And was there any real-life protest that you used for inspiration?

Yoann-Karl Whissell: Actual real-life protest? Not off the top of my head but maybe we did when we were working with the characters and everything, and I forgot. But it’s the film where we had the most prep or rehearsal time with the actors. They were young actors. Most of them this was their first film so to have that time was really great. To be able to build their whole life, what we did we build their whole life – why this activism is really important to you may be a little… Like you’re so worried about the world but it’s not as important to you because you’re still a kid. Because if they’re all the same, they all have the same goal, it makes for a very flat movie. All of them have their own agendas and how they see it. They’re all worried for the environment but for some of them, it’s also about having fun. And they should be allowed to have fun because yes, there are horrors right now in the world, but you’re still kids and you should be allowed to be kids still. And you should be allowed to laugh and do silly things as a kid.

Anouk Whissell: It was important for us that each of these characters had different motivations behind it and some of them don’t want to go into violence. Some of them want and some of them are more impacted as well, like personally and their families and their personal life. It was all a balance of representing as well, kind of like the reality of everybody kind of deals with it.

Yoann-Karl Whissell: The reality of a high school group of friends that have different motivations and different ideas about things, but they all mean well. It’s scary and it’s easy to get angry at everything that’s happening and where the world is going. It’s easy to be angry. 

PopHorror: Absolutely.

Yoann-Karl Whissell: Especially now. I don’t know. I have young kids and like, I’m scared. I’m scared. I’m scared for the future.

PopHorror: I think we all are, honestly. Was there anything that you were adamant about keeping in the film, no matter what?

Yoann-Karl Whissell: That’s what great about making indie films. There was never an issue of, “You’re going too far,” or anything. That’s half-true. On the production side, at one point, they were worried about the violence of the film, and they wanted us to be careful with it and not to be too gory. Gory would not have worked anyway. But if we’re not going to be gory, we’re going to be mean. Some of those kills are mean. There’s a meanness and a cruelty to it but I think it was necessary. The first kill I find is always a little bit harsh, but it gives a great tone for the rest of the film.

Anouk Whissell: On the technical side, there was one scene that when we read it, we really wanted that scene to shine because it was one of those scenes that we had never seen before. When we arrived in prep, that scene proved to be complicated technically. It was the one with the paint, the phosphorescent paint.

Yoann-Karl Whissell: The blacklight paint.

Anouk Whissell: Yeah, and it’s because we didn’t want to do the blacklight scene that we’ve seen before. We’ve seen a lot of super cool, shot with blacklight with the neon paint but we wanted it to be complete darkness, and it would be the paint that would shine and don’t have to have this light as a support. It wouldn’t work. It didn’t work as well because it would need to be tracked in the total darkness. This is one that we actually had to fight a bit because we knew the type of paint existed, but we were on an island, and it was super hard to get anything coming to us. Even construction material had to be shipped to that island for us to be able to build a set. And until the very last moment, we didn’t get the paint. When it got in, we were like, oh my god. There was a lot of, “You can do it with the other paint and blacklight. It’s going to be fine.”  And we were like, “No!”

Yoann-Karl Whissell: “It’s not going to look right!”

Anouk Whissell: It was our DP with us and also the scene why he wanted to make that film with us so we were all very passionate about that moment and we all made it happen.

Yoann-Karl Whissell: We looked for films that would have done something similar and no film had ever done it, that we found. That used actual light reflective paint. The way we did it, we would turn off the light completely but the paint was charged from the sun outside so it would shine for a while, and we had to choreograph the movement in between the cameras – because we used two cameras – and the crew so that nobody – it’s pitch black – would bump into each other. So, there was almost like a dance to it for the movement of cameras and everything and the actors. Everybody needed to do everything perfectly for it to work. We had little times in between shoots because you have to charge that light. You start doing it, then the lights start to dim from the paint. Everybody would run outside, stay in the sun and get that light in, come back in running, turn off the light, do it again and do it again. It was a nice challenge, but it gives us what we wanted because otherwise, with blacklight, the teeth are all super shiny, the eyes are super shiny, the skin is super shiny.

Anouk Whissell: You still have light, and we didn’t want that. It was supposed to be total darkness.

PopHorror: Well, I’m glad that you kept that in there because that was a really cool scene, and it paid off. 

Yoann-Karl Whissell: Thank you!

PopHorror: This is the million-dollar question that I’m sure you get asked all the time. Are we getting a Turbo Kid 2?

Yoann-Karl Whissell: We hope so! One day. Indie movies are always complicated. It’s always complicated.

Anouk Whissell: Turbo Kid 2 is an ambitious one as well.

Yoann-Karl Whissell: Yeah, so hopefully. Hopefully someday it happens. Hopefully before Munro (Chambers) is too old and is not Turbo Kid but Turbo Old Man.

PopHorror: Turbo Old Man isn’t quite as catchy as Turbo Kid.

Yoann-Karl Whissell: Doesn’t have that ring, right? We hope so. We have multiple projects in different levels of development, and some are more advanced, so it depends. It depends on the gods of cinema, if they shine on which project.

PopHorror: Fingers crossed! I have just one last question for you today. What is your favorite scary movie?

Yoann-Karl Whissell: This is the most brutal… We get asked that from time to time and I find it so hard. It’s so mean. It’s cruel. Because you know what happens. There’s so many genres of horror and I have a favorite one for every type, and even then, I’m not even sure in each type if they’re my favorite or it’s actually a list of 10 films. But gun to my head, like space alien comes down to Earth and puts a gun to my head and says, “We’ll blow up your planet! You have to choose one,” I’ll give the ultra-cliché, but it is one of the most amazing movies and my favorite movie in the world, I think it’s The Thing from John Carpenter. 

Anouk Whissell: I would have to agree with that. 

Yoann-Karl Whissell: Yeah, because we’re brother and sister! We love the same things!

Thank you so much to Anouk and Yoann-Karl for taking the time to speak with us. Wake Up is in theaters now!