22 Things We Learned from the Turbo Kid Commentary

One of the many joys of film festivals is discovering new talents through their debut features, and Sundance 2015 offered a few that immediately made us fans including Robert Eggers’ The Witch, Tali Shalom-Ezer’s Princess, and RKSS’ Turbo Kid.

RKSS — a collective made up of Anouk Whissell, Francois Simard, and Yoann-Karl Whissell — have spent years making short films, and their first feature is every bit the gory, goofy, and entertaining adventure those shorts would have you expect. It was one of last year’s genre highlights, and it just recently hit home video. The new Blu-ray is loaded with special features including a commentary track with all three writers/directors — two tracks actually, one in French and one in English. I’m a mono-lingual American, so I gave a listen to the latter.

Keep reading to see what I heard on the Turbo Kid commentary.

Turbo Kid (2015)

Commentator: Anouk Whissell, Francois Simard, Yoann-Karl Whissell (directors/writers)

1. Every movie opens with production company logos, but Turbo Kid opens with a whopping fourteen company logos. It earned chuckles when I saw the film at the festival, but it’s a necessity. “That movie was done with a lot of love,” says Yoann, “and a lot of people joined in to make it possible.”

2. The opening salt tank effect was filmed in New Zealand and accomplished with a tank of salt water and milk injections. Most of the film was shot in Montreal.

3. Anouk created The Kid’s (Munro Chambers) journal/art book. She doesn’t seem too proud of the drawings, but the others point out that “you needed to feel like the kid drew it.”

4. Anouk and Francois are fans of duct tape and sing its praises including how it can fix anything, to which Yoann replies “It can’t fix a broken heart.”

5. The rat creature that scratches The Kid is an homage to Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive. The first attempt at creating the rat’s screeching was too adorable to the point that they felt bad for its demise, so they redid it to make the little bastard sound less cute.

6. Edwin Wright, the actor who plays Skeletron, makes a cameo at 5:54 as the man walking past The Kid. It was important for them to make his face visible seeing as Skeletron stays masked through the entire movie.

7. The white-bearded man judging the arm wrestling competition is the Whissells’ father.

8. Bagu is a reference to a character in Zelda 2, but apparently it’s also a nod to The Goonies? “In the French version there’s a character named Bagu.” What?!

9. They filmed in the springtime, but it was the worst to hit Montreal in ninety years. “It was minus ten [degrees] every day.”

10. Michael Ironside “tested” the fledgling directors in the early days of the production. “He wanted to make sure we knew where we going and stay true to our vision.”

11. The scene where Apple (Laurence Leboeuf) appears in The Kid’s bunker is trimmed substantially here for pacing, but they’d love to restore it in a possible director’s cut. “Maybe one day we’ll do like the Blade Runner thing and have seven types of cuts for Turbo Kid.”