Overview
When you've directed two movies about zombies — the first of which you've basically become synonymous with — and also dabbled with on-screen demons, what do you tackle next? If you're Australian Wyrmwood, Nekrotronic and Wyrmwood: Apocalypse filmmaker Kiah Roache-Turner, you do battle with another classic horror concept. Sting takes its moniker from The Hobbit. The fact that its human protagonist is called Charlotte is particularly telling, however. What better name to use in a movie about a giant spider that falls from the sky, is discovered by a curious 12-year-old, then makes its growing presence petrifyingly known?
Shot in the ABC studios in Sydney but set in a New York City apartment block in the thick of winter, Sting's nods elsewhere stretch across the film like a web. Lines recall Predator. Shots nod to Alien. "I pretty much copied that exact jump-scare from Alien, when Tom Skerritt goes into the air conditioning ducts, 100 percent," Roache-Turner tells Concrete Playground. He's loving about his influences, on- and off-screen. That affection for flicks gone by shows in the movie from the moment that its titular creature — he's named his spider well, too — first appears. Roache-Turner has also used himself and his own fear as a basis. Yes, he's afraid of spiders, as we almost all are.
"I didn't necessarily want to confront it. It's just my job is to think of the worst thing, the scariest thing, the most-disturbing thing that could happen to me, and then put it in a script and then make you guys watch it and hope that it scares people," says Roache-Turner. "That's kind of what I do. I just sit around thinking about things that disturb me and then I write about them — and it's good because if you take your nightmares out of here and you put it down onto paper, and you spend a couple of years making a spider movie, the hope is that you might become a little less arachnophobic. So it could be therapeutic."
Asked if making Sting ended up being cathartic, though, Roache-Turner has bad news for anyone thinking that they might cure their unease about eight-legged arthropods through filmmaking. "Not at all. No. I still hate spiders. Maybe it's worse now because I've had to look at so much footage of spiders, so now I'm doubly sure that I hate them," he shares.
Ten years back on Wyrmwood, which he calls "one of the best things I've ever done in my life", the writer/director put everything that he had into what swiftly became his calling card. "It was three-and-a-half years of production. I shot a lot of it in my mum's backyard. It was me and my brothers and my mates just putting on zombie makeup and having fun," Roache-Turner notes. "I can't tell you how fun it was, and I still think about it almost every day. It's a huge part of my life, and it's the reason why I'm here talking to you about a giant spider movie." He's happy that it keeps coming up. "No matter what I do, people go 'you made Wyrmwood'. I think that's how Sam Raimi must feel, too. He can make as many A Simple Plan movies as he wants. He can do as many Spider-Man movies as he wants. But he's always the guy that did Evil Dead, and that's me," he advises. Roache-Turner is also still giving his all with Sting, including by drawing upon his own family setup.
Charlotte, played by Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart's Alyla Browne, has an IRL analogue. So does her stepfather Ethan, with House of the Dragon and In Limbo's Ryan Corr the film's version of Roache-Turner. As happens in the picture — which features Noni Hazelhurst (One Night), Penelope Mitchell (What You Wish For), Jermaine Fowler (A Murder at the End of the World), Silvia Colloca (Wellmania), Danny Kim (C*A*U*G*H*T) and Robyn Nevin (Relic) as well — Sting's creative force had just welcomed a new baby. Similarities continue, albeit with a critter that Roache-Turner is most frightened of looming large, literally, aided by creature design by Wētā Workshop.
How does taking inspiration from so much of your own life guide you when you're writing a horror screenplay? How did Sting get rolling from the idea that everyone hates spiders, not just Roache-Turner? What kind of balancing act was required to make this an unsettling spider flick, also a movie about a kid with an unusual pet Pete's Dragon and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial-style, and a picture about a family in crisis? With Sting opening in Australian cinemas on Thursday, July 18, 2024, Roache-Turner filled us in, and also chatted about his inspirations, casting Browne and Corr, and what type of primal fear that he's grappling with next.
On Starting with the Idea That Everyone Hates Spiders, Then Getting the Ball Rolling
"The good thing about Sting is it's a primal fear like sharks. Everybody's scared of a thing in the bedroom. Everybody's scared of the idea of a ghost. These are primal fears. And as I'm arachnophobic, I've had the image or the idea — anytime I look at a spider, I'm scared, I want to cry. But a little part of my brain goes 'imagine that was big. Imagine that was big!'.
I've been thinking about that for most of my life, and then finally I set myself a task. It was actually after I had a meeting with James Wan's producer, and he was explaining how he and James make films. And he goes 'we do a template system, so we go: single location, one monster, one family — go'. And he goes 'we just make the same movie over and over again'. And I was thinking 'I wonder if I could do that?'.
So I thought 'okay, I'm going take a single location: let's say an apartment building. I'm going to take a family: let's say my family'. So I just had a baby. I'm married. I've got a stepdaughter. I'm going to just template that so I can make it personal. 'What's the monster?' And that whole thing in my head just started echoing 'imagine a spider was big'. That's the thing that I would be most scared of to see. So I just wrote the movie that would be the scariest movie that I could possibly make.
The idea of a giant spider descending on a crib was one of the first images that I got, because I just was a new father and I had a baby, and I just couldn't imagine anything worse. And so I was like 'yeah, that'll make a good poster'.
That's how these things get started. And I wrote the script, and I took it around. And I don't think anybody, I couldn't really find a producer who wanted to do it because they were all scared. They're just like 'no, no, no, no, no, it's probably going to be more than about five mil'.
Everybody wants to make the five-mil Blumhouse template thing. And I'm like 'yeah, I could write that, but I didn't write that in this case. I don't think we can make a giant spider movie set in a New York apartment building for five. I don't know how to do that'. So Jamie Hilton and Michael Pontin and Chris Brown [Sting's producers] just were brave enough to just go 'okay, we believe in this, we're going push it'.
Once we got the ball rolling, it just seemed like a good idea, because it had been a while since we had a really decent giant spider movie. I can't even really think of one. I mean Arachnophobia, but they're little. I'm talking about one the size of a pit bull terrier. Other than Shelob, there's not really that many out there. So we had something vaguely original and we just ran with it."
On How Taking Inspiration From Your Personal Life Guides You When You're Writing a Screenplay
"It guides the emotion, so all of this stuff with the father and the daughter and the wife and the baby and the tension, that all came out of COVID. I was going through that. The big difference is I get on with my family really well — I'll start to make up a bunch of really horrible drama to make it interesting, but the feelings and the emotion is there.
In terms of writing the thing, there's no secret to it. It's unexplainable. The structure just jumps into your head. You go 'if there's an alien spider in the building, how does it get into the apartment? How do we keep it in the family? How does it then grow big? How does it then escape so it can start eating dogs and cats? Who's the first human it's gonna eat? What happens when it attacks the family?'.
One thing leads to another, and it just becomes a question of thinking your way out of situations. And then you find yourself at the end, and then you write 'fade out'.
Sometimes they're good. Sometimes they're bad. Writing is the most-unexplainable thing in the world, and it's the hardest part of the whole process. But there are little tricks to making it easier, and certainly templating your own family and your own experiences is an easy way to get into an emotional truth."
On Balancing the Film as a Spider Horror Flick, But Also a Movie About a Kid with an Unusual Pet and a Picture About a Family in Crisis
"It's the hardest part, balancing that stuff. And because I am the person who made Wyrmwood, my tendency is to just make films that feel like they just never stop. So I really was trying to make something that has more long sections of just straight drama. I wanted to slow it down a little bit.
A huge part of the writing process and the rewriting was about making the family warmer at the start so that when cracks start to appear, we care about them more — and how much drama should there be between the father and the daughter? All that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's a real balancing act in a film like this.
Sometimes, I'm not sure I succeeded. Sometimes, I'm like 'did I put too much family drama in there?'. And some people are like 'yeah man, you should have had more deaths and kills'. And then somebody else would go 'god, what? No, no. That was the best thing about the film'. So it's hard to know sometimes.
I think you just make a thing and you hope it's right. You do some test screenings. You work on instinct. But on this one, I wanted it to be more than just about a spider eating people, and scares and thrills. I had a personal thing that I wanted to work through with the family dynamic, and we did that, we went a little bit more dramatic with it."
On Casting Rising Australian Star and Furiosa Co-Star Alyla Browne as Charlotte
"We went to Nikki Barrett [the Australian casting director] and just said 'Nikki, we have a really, really difficult task for you. We need you to cast a 12-year-old star in this film that we just wrote'. And she goes 'shhhh, stop talking. Cast Alyla Browne. Just don't talk about it. Don't talk about it. Just cast her'. And she doesn't talk like that. She's usually very considered, but she was just like 'this is the person. This is the girl'.
I might've just looked up a clip on YouTube. I was like 'who is this Alyla Browne?'. It was two clips of an audition she did for a film years earlier when she was like nine. She did an amazing audition where she cried. And I was like 'oh, my god, she's so talented'. Then she did the same thing in a flawless American accent and cried. And I was like 'is she available immediately?'.
We didn't even audition her. I just met with her and her mother and just tried hard not to stuff it up. I was more me convincing her to be in the film. But luckily she loved the script and wanted to do it. Her mum just wanted to meet me to make sure I'm not a crazy person and so I pretended not to be, and she signed up and did the movie.
She's honestly one of the most-talented actors I've ever worked with. You put the camera on her and something happens. It's a star quality — she's a 12-year-old with the star quality of Nicole Kidman or something. The whole crew would go silent and people would be looking at each other going 'just how is this 12-year-old being this amazing?'. And she made my film just 30-percent better just by being on in front of the camera — and that's something that the director prays for."
On Enlisting Ryan Corr to Play Roache-Turner's On-Screen Surrogate
"I'd wanted to work with Ryan for years and years. We tried and we just had a few availability issues or whatever. I've been trying to work with him for a long time. So I was stoked to get him for this one, and I'm glad it was on this one because, yeah, this was very much like he's playing me.
He's not playing a guy running around jumping in slow motion, firing a gun — this is me. I wanted to be a comics artist. I wear glasses. I have a beard. Like, he's playing me. He's just playing like a heaps better-looking version of me.
And every actor knows that, he read the script, he knew the deal. He's like 'yeah, this is you. I get it, but I'm going to do my own version'.
With Ryan, it's like working with Brando or Tom Hardy or something. You just step back, say 'action' and watch him improve your movie. There's not much directing that goes on. The guy's a genius."
On the Film's Commitment to Incorporating Practical Effects
"I love CGI and we've got some sick CGI in this film. Cumulus VFX, the company that did all that stuff, it was a flawless job. But I just believe, particularly with horror, sometimes there's just a bit of an uncanny-valley thing that pops in every now and again. You're just like 'oh, there's still just something wrong with the weight of it' or 'it's not quite interacting with the shadows right', and that's even when you've just got the best CGI you can get.
So it's always important for me to have a big practical element. I prefer to have a layer of practical and CGI augments what's already there. Denis Villeneuve does that on Dune: Part Two — you look at the behind-the-scenes, most of it's practical, it's augmented digitally and that's why Dune is one of the best-looking science-fiction franchises of all time.
I think with this one, it was really important that we had a practical element. And when that practical element is done by Wētā Workshop, who are the best at what they do in the universe, your life is made a lot easier."
On Sting's Broad Array of Inspirations Beyond Roache-Turner and His Family
"Charlotte's Web, 100 percent. That's just me having a dig at a cultural phenomenon — everybody read Charlotte's Web as a kid. And I figured most people have read The Hobbit, so the sting reference I think would be nice, too, and with all the giant spiders in Mirkwood.
Also The Thing, with a single location with a bunch of people stuck with one monster being eaten. And there's a comedy aspect to The Thing that I love. The tone of John Carpenter's films, I love.
Very heavily influenced by Jaws, even though narratively, it's very different — but just the tone of it. Poltergeist, also in that they're stuck in a house and it's a sort of flawed family with cracks in it being terrified by an entity in a house.
I really was going for a Spielberg thing. There's a tendency, I think, in today's horror to be overly arty or overly bleak, and Spielberg has a light and an adventurous touch that I really like — as well as being a really good filmmaker who understands that Hitchcockian tension. So I wanted to play in that sandbox. Spielberg is a huge influence on this."
On Which Classic Horror Setup Is Next for Roache-Turner
"I'm in pre-production on a giant shark movie right now, so I'm literally a couple of weeks away from shooting. I'm doing an Australian World War Two shark movie where a ship gets shot down by Japanese torpedoes halfway between Darwin and East Timor, and these guys are trapped on a raft and they're bedevilled by this giant killer shark that's eating them one by one.
So I'm just making my way through the monsters."
Sting opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday, July 18, 2024.