SILENT BUT DEADLY

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.’