The Spierig Brothers, identical twins Michael and Peter Spierig, are German-born Australian directors of Undead, Daybreakers, Predestination, Jigsaw and Winchester.
Quick Specs
| Who | identical twins Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig |
| Origin | born in Germany, raised in Queensland, Australia |
| Education | Queensland College of Art (Michael in graphic design, Peter in film) |
| Started in | short films and TV commercials |
| First feature | Undead (2003) |
| Horror and genre | Undead (2003), Daybreakers (2009), Jigsaw (2017), Winchester (2018), Fall 2: Deadpoint (2026) |
| Science fiction | Predestination (2014) |
| Honors | FIPRESCI Award, Melbourne International Film Festival 2003 (Undead); AFI Award for Best Visual Effects (Daybreakers); John Hinde Award for Science-Fiction Writing (Predestination) |
| Division of labor | Peter scored Predestination and Winchester; Michael builds the animatics |
Who They Are
Michael and Peter Spierig are identical twins, born in Germany, who moved to Australia with their parents and grew up in Queensland in the 1980s and 1990s, obsessed with movies. Brisbane has been home base for most of their lives. They studied at the Queensland College of Art, Michael in graphic design and Peter in film, and made about 20 short films together, including a homemade trilogy of zombie shorts: Attack of the Undead, Rampage of the Undead and Massacre of the Undead.
Their calling card was The Big Picture (2000), a 13-minute short they wrote, directed and produced, about a woman who sees her possible future on her television. Commercials paid the bills. They directed TV ads for three years and applied for film funding “over and over again and we were never accepted,” as Michael put it. So they paid for the feature themselves.
The Work, and What They Did in It
Undead (2003) was made almost entirely by two people. The brothers wrote, directed, produced and edited it, supervised the visual effects, and Peter did the sound, under their own company, Spierigfilm. Meteorites hit Berkeley, a small Queensland fishing town, and turn the locals into zombies; a beauty queen (Felicity Mason) and a gun nut (Mungo McKay) lead the survivors into a story that turns into an alien invasion. “Peter and I spent our life savings on the project,” Michael said. They skipped pre-sales on purpose: “We wanted complete control over our first film.” There was no government money.
They shot it in 2001 on Super 16mm, never more than two takes, with a crew where “there was no one on set who had made a feature film before.” Then they did nearly all of the roughly 300 effects shots themselves on home computers. “We were averaging about 15 to 20 crashes a day on all three computers,” Michael said. The climactic flight through the clouds took more than a year to animate and render. Peter’s summary: “You make this thing in your parents’ backyard and you edit on Windows 98, and you just don’t think anyone is going to see it.”
People did. At the 2003 Melbourne International Film Festival, Undead won the FIPRESCI critics’ award “for daring to be everything that Australian films are not supposed to be: part of a popular, disreputable genre.” Lions Gate picked it up for North America. Most reviews were unkind and it made little at the Australian box office, but it became a cult calling card, and the brothers oversaw a remastered Blu-ray for its 20th anniversary.
Daybreakers (2009) came out of that Lionsgate relationship. Michael tells it this way: he wrote the idea on a napkin in a meeting, a world where vampires are the dominant species and have learned to adapt. They wrote and directed it and supervised the effects. It’s 2019, ten years after a plague from an infected bat turned most of humanity into vampires. Humans are farmed for blood while scientists race for a substitute, starving vampires degenerate into bat-like “subsiders,” and the world runs at night, with underground walkways, UV-shielded cars and blood stirred into the coffee.
They built that world on paper first. “We wrote a very detailed history of the world and how the plague began,” Peter said, about three years of work, with a drawn timeline before any script pages. Ethan Hawke played vampire hematologist Edward Dalton, with Willem Dafoe as a cured ex-vampire called Elvis and Sam Neill as a blood-corporation boss. Hawke saw what they were up to: “It’s such a fun allegory to how, as a culture, we are vampires, sucking dry our natural resources.” Weta Workshop handled the creatures, but the brothers still did about 350 effects shots themselves. They shot mostly in South East Queensland, including a night in central Brisbane where they reversed the traffic, and the hardest part, Peter said, was “all the drunk people coming out of the club.” The film premiered at Toronto in September 2009, opened in the US on January 8, 2010, grossed $51.4 million worldwide on about $20 million, and won the AFI Award for Best Visual Effects.
Two big jobs followed that never got made: a Captain Blood remake set in outer space for Warner Bros., won with an animatic of a pirate battle in space, and The Power of the Dark Crystal, a 3D sequel to Jim Henson’s film announced in 2010.
Predestination (2014) is the one they’re proudest of. They wrote, directed and produced it from Robert A. Heinlein’s short story “—All You Zombies—” (written in 1958, published in 1959), and Peter composed the score. Peter read the story first and pushed it on Michael, whose first reaction was “I don’t get it.” To adapt it, they put the story’s format straight into screenplay form, got 30 pages, and then grew a thriller out of one line about the “Fizzle” bomber.
The film depends on one actor playing both selves of its central character. They seriously considered casting two people, then auditioned “every interesting actress in Australia” and did make-up tests turning the finalists into men. Sarah Snook got it after their longtime make-up effects artist Steve Boyle looked at her audition and told them, “Yes I can do it. I promise we can do it.” She spent four hours in the make-up chair each morning. Hawke had signed a day or two after reading the script and didn’t know Snook; he asked if they believed in her, and when they said yes, he said, “Then let’s do it.” They shot in Melbourne in about 32 days, mostly in one bar set, “almost like shooting a play,” using split screens and doubles instead of big effects. Peter wrote the music during the edit, so the film was cut to its real score.
It earned nine AACTA nominations and won four: Best Actress for Snook, plus cinematography, editing and production design. The brothers won the John Hinde Award for science-fiction writing. The US release was small, but the film’s reputation keeps growing. “It’s definitely the best film we’ve made so far,” Michael said, and Peter called it “the only project we’ve ever done where we were completely left alone.”
Jigsaw (2017), the eighth Saw film, was a directing job only; Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger wrote it. They knew Leigh Whannell and James Wan, and Lionsgate called them in to read a “secret script.” “It was brought to us, we didn’t originate the project,” they said, and Peter compared it to playing in “someone else’s sandpit.” Their aim was a version “not quite as vicious and more fun… It’s Saw for 2017,” in Michael’s words, and producer Mark Burg said that was exactly the brief: a Saw movie that didn’t feel like a Saw movie. It was the fastest job they had done, often with each brother shooting at opposite ends of the same soundstage. Set ten years after John Kramer’s death, with Tobin Bell back, it opened on October 27, 2017, and grossed over $100 million on a reported $10 million despite mixed reviews.
Winchester (2018) started as a Tom Vaughan script at Hammer; the brothers came on in 2014 to rewrite and direct, and share the writing credit with Vaughan. Peter scored it. What hooked them was Sarah Winchester herself. After touring the San Jose house they rewrote the script around it and recast Sarah as an inventor, “a woman plagued by her family’s legacy.” “We fell in love with the character of Sarah Winchester, as did Helen,” Michael said: Helen Mirren played her, with Jason Clarke as a skeptical psychiatrist and Snook as her niece.
Most of it wasn’t shot in the Winchester Mystery House. They filmed from March to May 2017, mainly at Docklands Studios in Melbourne, with Victorian mansions standing in for San Jose. At the real house they shot exteriors and certain rooms, closing the attraction for several days and casting half a dozen staff as extras. Their production designer measured everything, and they rebuilt the rooms on Australian soundstages and the front facade on a farm. Reviews were poor, but the producer called it a financial success, with worldwide grosses reported in the mid-$40 millions and higher.
After a seven-year gap between features they came back with Fall 2: Deadpoint, the sequel to the 2022 climbing thriller Fall, which they directed from a script by Scott Mann and Jonathan Frank. It was shot in Thailand and released in the US on September 2, 2026. They have also wrapped Headless on the Gold Coast, an action-horror film written by Shayne Armstrong, Shane Krause and Noel O’Riordan that turns the Headless Horseman into a motorcycle-riding ghoul on desert highways, starring Mel Jarnson and Ryan Corr.
Cool Verified Facts
- Undead’s 300-odd effects shots were done on home computers that crashed 15 to 20 times a day each.
- On Daybreakers, with Weta on the creatures and a $20 million budget, they still did about 350 effects shots themselves.
- The Big Picture survives as an extra on the Daybreakers Blu-ray.
- Their Winchester production designer measured the real Winchester house so precisely that the Australian soundstage rooms looked exactly the same, Michael said.
- Mark Burg, producer of Jigsaw: “My biggest issue with them was telling them apart.”
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
- No lead brother. Peter in 2003: “It’s a 50/50 split. Michael has a graphic design background, so he would spend more time on the design aspects of the film and I’ll spend more time operating the camera. But the writing, directing, editing, producing is all very much a collaboration.” They have said the same thing in every interview since.
- Preparation is the method. For their first two films “they’re like telephone books of storyboards. We storyboarded every single frame of the film.” They plot the whole story on a board, split up the scenes, draft separately and reconvene.
- Two directors, two units. On a tight schedule they split up and shoot at the same time, which, Michael says, “producers like because it’s double the production value.” They did it on Daybreakers, Jigsaw and Fall 2.
- Do the effects yourself. “Okay, I’m going to have to do all of these visual effects myself, because we can’t afford it,” Peter said of small budgets. Peter scored Predestination and Winchester; Michael builds the animatics.
- A repeat company. Cinematographer Ben Nott has shot every feature since Daybreakers, production designer Matthew Putland goes back to Undead, and make-up artist Steve Boyle has been with them since the shorts. “It’s like a family of crew,” Michael said.
- Genre mash-ups are the house style: zombies plus aliens plus Western gunplay, vampires inside a resource-war dystopia, a time-travel paradox inside a noir bar-room confession.
Why They Matter
The Spierigs are proof that you can start a career in horror from a bedroom. Two Brisbane twins with no studio connections paid for a zombie film with ad money, rendered it on crashing home computers, and won a critics’ prize for daring to be what Australian films weren’t supposed to be. The same hands-on model scaled up to a Lionsgate vampire film whose world is still among the most complete “what if the vampires won” visions on screen. Then they made Predestination for very little, and it has become a fixture of the time-travel canon. Studios keep hiring them to refresh properties without breaking them, and they arrive the way they always have: storyboards done, a second unit built in, and the same crew.