SILENT BUT DEADLY

BOY KILLS WORLD Bill Skarsgård keeps it quiet for a coming-of-rage comedy actioner…

It’s a revenge fantasy about a deaf assassin… It’s a cocktail of anime action, Looney Tunes comedy and video-game violence… A dystopian satire and a psychological coming-of-age story… It’s Crank in The Hunger Games. It’s The Raid playing Fortnite… Luckily, director Moritz Mohr didn’t have to pitch Boy Kills World to anyone – he just skipped straight to making the trailer himself.

‘Basically me and Dawe [Szatarski] decided we needed to do something cool. Something fun. Something we could actually stand behind,’ says Mohr, speaking from his home in Berlin, of his debut feature. ‘Dawe is this great martial artist – at this point he’d already worked on [the] Kingsman [movies], in the stunt department – so we just made a trailer together. We shot it in four days, it took us almost a year to finish it, and since nobody got paid, it was super rough. But then I just took a gamble. I flew to LA, I slept on a friend’s couch and I showed it to anyone who would watch it. A few days later I was sitting with Sam Raimi. Six years after that… here we are!’

It was a bumpy six years, the production bouncing between studios and twice halted by the pandemic. But by convincing Hollywood’s original DIY expert to produce, Mohr could at least glory in Raimi’s advice to pour all of his own obsessions into the final film. ‘It was insane, because Evil Dead II is one of my favourite movies,’ he grins. ‘We talked a lot about what we loved. I love old kung-fu movies. I love Asian cinema. I play a lot of video games and I read a lot of manga. Anime is a big influence. But also shitty little Saturday-morning cartoons that I loved growing up. I knew I wanted to make a revenge movie with a deaf protagonist, but that was literally the one constant.’

Originally imagining someone younger for the lead, Mohr eventually landed on Bill Skarsgård – drawn to his silent menace as Pennywise in the It horror franchise. ‘He’s almost two metres tall, and that’s not very boyish,’ laughs Mohr. ‘But at the same time, he’s literally perfect for this. He has this childlike innocence. And he can fight. We did this little test with him – just some weapons training, some knife combinations – and I was like, “Holy fucking shit.” He has these really long limbs and it just looked super fucking cool. It looked fresh.’

Orphaned as a child by a corrupt elite (including Sharlto Copley, Famke Janssen and Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery) who stage state executions on reality game shows, ‘Boy’ loses his hearing and his voice along with his family, before escaping into the jungle to learn fighting skills from a lone guru (The Raid’s Yayan Ruhian). What he doesn’t lose, though, is his inner monologue. In the version screened to positive reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival, the voiceover was provided by Skarsgård himself. Since then, the decision has been made to opt for the other commentary that was recorded, the hook being that it’s modelled on the last voice Boy heard – that of a 90s-style arcade beat-’em-up game.

‘I particularly related, as someone who has been through all that, as a deaf assassin…’ says H. Jon Benjamin, deadpanning with the same baritone he brings to Bob’s Burgers and Archer. ‘No, they sent me the trailer and it just looked really good. By the time I got the script I was already committed.’

Narrating Skarsgård’s every move, Benjamin found a voice that was somewhere between Mortal Kombat and Bob Belcher; a character who slips in and out of fantasy to deal with his own trauma even as he’s stabbing goons.

‘The jokes are easy. But getting to the more emotional stuff was a little bit harder, trying to create a version of this person who feels kind of childlike,’ says Benjamin. ‘I think having the opportunity to do it a bunch of times helped. But I also had a total visceral reaction to some stuff, too. I remember seeing the scene where they drop an anvil on the guy’s head and being like, “Jesus. Oh, God.” I’m sure they have that take in the film, too.’

Anvils dropped on heads. Goats wielding sledgehammers. Dancing pineapples, killer cartoon pirates and one fight built around the frozen nose of a snowman. Coming up with funny, fresh action set pieces was a lot easier than actually pulling them off.

‘You just… come up with shit. And then you go like, “Oh no, wait, they did that. We need to do something else,”’ shrugs Mohr, laughing. ‘There was originally this big scene where Boy rides through the city on a horse, and then the first trailer for John Wick 3 came out… I’m madly in love with the action scenes in this film. It was all the rest that was super challenging: making sure we told the story properly.’

For the most part, that meant making a film where breathless martial-arts corridor fights felt at home alongside hallucinations of dead siblings. Where a running joke about macarons rides with violent political satire. Where a nod to Chaplin’s City Lights comes showered in blood. ‘It’s weird if I say it, but I was really just crossing my fingers and hoping it would work,’ laughs Mohr. ‘We knew we were doing the splits on this film – hopefully the audience laughs, and hopefully, maybe, they’ll even cry as well.’

BOY KILLS WORLD OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 26 APRIL.

‘I’m madly in love with the action scenes in this film’

MORITZ MOHR