09/02/2021 - We talked to the Dutch filmmaker, who has attempted to reach a broader audience with his new film

Celebrating its world premiere in the Limelight section of IFFR, David Verbeek's Dutch-Taiwanese co-production Dead & Beautiful [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: David Verbeek
film profile], about a group of super-rich friends, proves that while money can't buy you happiness, it can accidentally get you some fangs.

Cineuropa: We are so used to all these vampire tropes that even your characters address them openly in the film. What made you want to come back to them?
David Verbeek: At one point, one of them says: “We are not in a movie.” He says that on screen, in a movie. There is this whole meta level of it being fake and real, because if you are going to make something like a vampire film in 2020, you have to approach it differently. These super, super wealthy kids, known in Chinese as “the second generation” of the rich, were my starting point. You have a lot of them in cities like Beijing or Shanghai, and that's where the idea materialised more than ten years ago. Vampires have always been these mystical elites, stemming from our fear of the people in castles, in power. If you look at the world now, at this “1%” situation... Maybe that's why this genre keeps coming back. There is this tension between the people who have almost all the wealth and the rest of us, even in the years of Trump, when the USA had a millionaire president who mixed up facts and opinion.

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There are many stories about the games that rich people play – let's take the underrated modern classic Cruel Intentions, for example. They are so young and yet seem so bored.
Maybe extreme wealth accelerates time? Vampires are bored because they have lived for thousands of years, but if you are that rich and your only purpose is to entertain yourself, time also goes by very slowly [laughs]. They are not very likeable, but I didn't want to demonise them; I wanted to dig into the pain of such a lifestyle, this psychology of the hyper-elite. I guess that's why the film becomes more emotionally charged. They can't reach out to just anyone, as most people want to take advantage of them, so they stick together. Like most Hollywood celebrities end up doing, marrying each other and all. But they also compete, and they need to experience something new all the time. Which is why their friendships are kind of awkward, based on testing which feelings are real.

It's not very often that you get a film looking this glossy at a festival. Yours, to borrow the line from Project Runway, looks expensive. Or maybe even commercial?
We wanted it to look glossy and rich because that's just the world we are entering. At the same time, it was also an attempt for me to reach a broader audience. I didn't want to be elitist in any way and say: “Ok, I am going to make a film about these very rich people, only for a very niche, arthouse audience” [laughs]. I wanted it to be surprising and constantly one step ahead of the audience, who slowly realise that it's about a very uncomfortable headspace that these characters find themselves in, and it's actually because of their money. It was a conscious choice to make a “crossover” film, although I do hate the term, but it's still experimental. It can't really be defined as one genre. It's not a vampire film, it's not a teenage coming-of-age film, it's not an arthouse film. I don't know what it is!

This claustrophobic atmosphere of them being stuck in one bubble can also be funny. When the going gets tough, someone says: “I am going to call my helicopter!”
I’ve also called it a black comedy over the years. Again – what is it, really? You amplify a lot of things, but to so many who live this luxurious lifestyle, their world is small, and they are not open to different kinds of people. That's the thing – they don't interact with others. What's funny is that we made the film in Taiwan, and there isn't that much excessive wealth compared to mainland China. We wanted a spectacular villa for the main character to come home to, but when we looked at the actual homes of the rich in Taiwan, they live modestly. They don't like to show off their wealth. We ended up renting a place where the president was inaugurated 50 years ago. It created this surreal reality.

The way I see it, they are very much in search of their identity because it's hard to escape the shadow of their parents. Once they wake up with fangs, they try to project into it what they lack. One is not taken that seriously – he is the goofball, so what does he do? He takes from the vampire genre what he wants the most, and that means being able to mind-control someone at 7-Eleven. All of these ideas are borrowed from pop culture, things like True Blood or The Vampire Diaries. You need your film to be like an onion, which you peel layer after layer, and if a twist provides some psychological insight, that makes it satisfying.