Oi! Warning - Development

Development

When they started the project, the Reding brothers wanted to authentically portray youths from fringe subcultures like "skinheads (non-political Oi!skins), squatters, modern-primitives and tribes ... who all just do what they like ... Their own way of fun, fights, sorrows and desires. What we didn´t want to do was: showing stereotypes of youth-culture, like the drug-abusing "problemchild" or the sexually overpowered "teenager", we all know so well from television." According to them, they then drew a 600-picture storyboard and started choosing actors.

For the actors themselves, the Reding brothers demanded people who were "absolutely, 100% believable on the big screen ... This is the reason why the actresses and actors in OI!WARNING are a good mixture of non-professionals and professionals": male leads Sascha Backhaus and Simon Goerts were non-professionals, whilst female lead Sandra Borgmann was an established actress when the project started. A problem was money, because the Oi! Warning production was very low budget. It took over five years to complete, because the Reding brothers frequently had to stop filming until they had earned enough money to continue.

In the film, there is a concert in which the fictional Oi-group Roimkommando (the real life punk band Smegma) holds a concert, to which Oi-skins led by Koma (Goerts) violently mosh to. On the DVD commentary track, the Redings explain that they could not use the sexually charged word Smegma in a film which was meant to be seen by teenagers, so they had to change the name of the band. In addition, all the Oi skinhead extras were real Oi skinheads, who demanded beer as compensation when they slowly grew weary of filming. In addition, they moshed so hard that Goerts was often knocked out of the middle and the scene had to be reshot.