Earlier in the week, I reviewed Kiah Roache-Turner’s excellent 2024 creature feature Sting (which you can read here) and wanting to pick his brain about the film, the film industry’s usage of AI and to gush about fun creature features, I hopped on Zoom and chatted to Kiah for a good forty minutes. Grab a brew, sit down and enjoy!
First off, I wanted to say thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to do this interview. I’m a huge fan of Sting, I caught it at the cinema a few months ago and as soon as the opportunity arose to cover the film for Blueprint: Review, I was like “Yes! I want to write about this film, it’s so much fun!”
Thank you so much for saying that, man, it really means a lot. You spend so many years on these things and you get to the end and you’re like “I hope people like it!” You never know, so to hear that somebody actually liked it is fantastic.
It’s an absolute blast! When I was revisiting the film, I watched it with a friend who hadn’t seen it, he had a blast and then recommended it to another friend, so it’s like a cycle of people enjoying the movie and passing the message on. How’s your day been?
It’s okay, I just finished shooting the last shot on my giant shark film yesterday and I’m still doing press for my giant spider movie, and I’ve never done back-to-back movies before and it’s weird. I’m slowly working my way through all of the creatures that scared the crap out of me when I was a kid, y’know? Zombies, spiders, sharks, in that order.
Are there any other creatures that really get under your skin that you’d love to tackle in a film one day?
I don’t know, it’s going to be horror but I’m not sure. It’s going to be ghosts, some weird swamp creature or a serial killer alien, those are the three that are circling right now.
I wanted to ask about the effects work on Sting, because the film blends CG and practical effects. How was the process of finding that balance in the final product?
I always like to lead with practical, so if it can be done practically, we’ll do it practically. If it literally can’t be done, that’s when CGI takes over. My thing was, we can build a puppet creature that has a face and arms that are reaching for people, so that wasn’t a problem. Amazingly, we got Richard Taylor and his team at Wētā Workshop to do that, and that’s like getting God to get you to build a thing. I mean, it’s Richard Taylor, it’s like meeting Elvis. Not only did he build me an amazing puppet, but he was a lovely guy to work with.
I believe horror is a tactile medium, I think you’re scared of what you see and even with the best CGI, it’s best to use it quickly and sparingly because CGI tends to not have the physical weight. They’ve created such amazing technology right now but I still feel that if you have a puppet or a person in a suit, it feels better. It’s interacting with the actors, it’s interacting with the shadows and the light, blood splatter, the moisture in the air and the human brain knows what’s real. It’s scared of what’s real and that’s why all of the stuff in the 70s and 80s like The Exorcist, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Ridley Scott’s Alien or Jaws, these are still the best because somebody put a scary thing in a real place and had it interact with actors.
I think that’s the way to go with horror and you’ve got to fill in the gaps with digital. I still think there’s a place for digital and without the CGI in Sting, we wouldn’t really have a movie. All of the stuff when the spider’s small, that’s all digital or anytime we’re cutting to a wide shot, such as when the spider’s crawling around on the roof, that had to be CGI. We worked with a company in Australia called Cumulus that did that, and it looks fantastic, but I think the less you see of the CGI creature, the scarier it becomes.
I think you do a great job of that in the film, particularly with the shots of Sting inside of the glass jar, it makes sense to use digital there over a practical puppet. There’s some great POV shots from Sting’s perspective too, I’m a sucker for POV shots so thank you for including them.
Me too, and of course! The whole point of the jar was to hide the CGI behind a thick distortive glass, and I love the fact that from the POV, it feels like it’s in an airlock, with this weird little world in there.
I’m a huge advocate for practical effects, but I understand the need for CGI when a shot’s impossible to get any other way. Speaking of digital tools, what are your thoughts on AI being used in film? Recently, it’s been cropping up more and more in films which utilise it, and given that Sting is such a tactile film and there’s an emphasis on great effects work, I was curious about your thoughts on the subject.
I’m really glad you asked that question because I was thinking about this the other day. AI’s just came in and for me, a filmmaker, a creative, it’s really intimidating because somebody can push a button and put in some prompts and do work that is phenomenal. It looks amazing, but I believe that people want to see real people doing real things in real situations. No matter how beautifully and wonderfully photographically the AI can make these images, I still think that when it’s a real person doing a real thing in a real situation, it means something. It means something when you’re watching it and it means something when you know that it’s real. I think the human mind knows and appreciates the difference.
I’ve just made a giant shark movie in WW2 that’s set in the middle of the ocean, where a warship gets sunk and a bunch of guys are on a raft in the middle of debris as a giant shark is trying to attack them. They’re jumping from wreckage to wreckage as they’re stuck in the middle of a fog bank, so they can’t see more than six or seven metres ahead of them. It’s like this perfect video game scenario, and the thing I like about this is that I’ve got seven dudes on a raft in the middle of the biggest water tank that’s been built in Australia, they’re surrounded by fog with two litres of water underneath them, nearly a million litres surrounding them and the great white shark is a one-ton puppet that’s chasing them.
That’s a real scenario, so anything that they’re doing, these poor young actors are having to do what I’m asking them to do. Even when the puppet drags them off the raft, it’s not stunt people, it’s the actors being dragged into the water. So you’re watching people in a scenario, doing things in real time. It’s the opposite of AI, but looks just as good. So, I don’t know, at the same time, I’m both a little bit intimidated by AI and also a little arrogant because I live in the world. I’m doing live things with live people and showing it to people who exist and that’s why we make art. So making this film really proved to me why what we do is still important.
I’m in the same boat as you, I feel like the artist’s intent is way more interesting than a machine or an algorithm squirting something out. It can be very impressive sometimes, but it’s never going to match what somebody’s conjured up with their own mind. Whether it’s the practical effects team, the director or the cast and crew reacting to something real.
I think it’s okay to be absolutely fascinated and impressed by the fact that artificial intelligence has gotten to the point where it can create great art. That’s great and wonderful. But at the same time, one thing AI can’t do is paint a picture on a canvas and move things around with a hand that’s attached to an organic body. They’re two very separate and different miracles, so I think there’s room in the world for both.
I did a little bit of research and found out that you’re arachnophobic and working on Sting was your answer to facing your fear. Did working on the film help quell that fear at all?
No, it didn’t quell my fear at all, if anything, it made it worse! I had to look at hours and hours of footage of horrible tarantulas, funnel web spiders and huntsman spiders with mandibles biting skin and stuff. I was hoping that it would have some kind of positive psychological impact but no, it’s horrible! But that’s okay, I was happy to make the sacrifice. My job is to think up the worst thing that I can possibly imagine and then show it to you guys in a 90 minute format and I think that I did that.
Speaking of how effective the film is, my first exposure to the film was the fantastic poster of Charlotte on her phone while Sting is on the wall. It’s such an effective piece of marketing and I remember seeing people’s replies to the poster online, saying “Oh no, I can’t watch that” because of their arachnophobia and I was curious, what are some of your favourite examples of effective horror marketing?
Thank you for saying that, that means a lot actually because that’s a photo that my wife took. She does most of the photography for my films and she took the photo and comped the spider onto the ceiling and when the distributor saw it, they said “That’s sick! Let’s use that as the poster” so my wife kind of did the poster for the film. It’s based on our daughter who’s on her phone all the time. I’m like “You would be on the phone with your headphones on and we’d all be being killed and you wouldn’t do anything because you’re on fuckin’ TikTok!” So that came from a real place, that image.
In terms of viral marketing, I’m pretty old school so I’m immediately thinking of the poster for Jaws, you know, that horrible mouth rising up to the bather, what’s more terrifying than that? All you have to do is look at the poster and you never want to go in the water again. Also, Rosemary’s Baby, with the tagline ‘Pray for Rosemary’s Baby’ alongside Mia Farrow and the baby carriage on top of the mountain. The Exorcist, that amazing image of the priest waiting in front of the window, that’s pretty good. The Blair Witch Project was the first one where people would approach you and go “Oh, have you seen the documentary about the Blair Witch? It’s a real thing that happened to real people.” Some people would watch it and jump out of their skin, and some people would go “Bullshit! This isn’t real but still, it’s very scary”. That was a very good marketing campaign. Paranormal Activity, I remember people really believing that was a documentary, that was so good. It felt real and I know they made that for nothing, but poured tons into design and marketing and that’s a really good example of what you can do with very little.
One of my favourite examples is the original Alien marketing, the original teaser with the egg, the poster with the tagline “In space, no one can hear you scream” and I could tell that Alien was a big influence on Sting and I wondered if you’re a fan of the Alien franchise as a whole or is mainly that original film in particular that sticks with you?
I love Alien, it’s probably my favourite but I’m well aware that Aliens is probably a more fun film. To me, it’s like Terminator and Terminator 2, I mean, of course, Terminator 2 is obviously bigger, amazing and culturally shifting but without the first film, there’s no Terminator. The Terminator was so insanely original and such a wonderful debut and Alien to me is the same because of Ridley Scott’s brilliance. He gave James Cameon an aesthetic template and the best possible launching pad for Cameron’s intense commerciality. Like The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, the second’s great and there’s probably more to it, but the first is the original! I love the Alien franchise, I think the first is insanely good and is part of what I consider the Rosetta Stone of horror masterpieces. You’ve got The Exorcist, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Alien and Jaws. Those are the big ones for me. But with Aliens, there’s no better horror-action film. It’s probably the best horror-action film out there.
You kind of answered my next question there, what are some of your favourite creature features?
Alien might be the one, but you can’t talk about this stuff without talking about The Evil Dead, especially in terms of low-budget brilliance. The Alien one’s funny, I think it kind of lost its way a little bit. Alien³ is good, David Fincher’s brilliant, of course, but I felt it lost its way a bit there, and then Alien: Resurrection, I love Jean-Pierre Jeunet but it didn’t have the commercial brilliance of Aliens or the cinematic brilliance of Alien. Prometheus was a little bit talky for me, a few too many concepts. I thought Covenant was going to be a return to form, like “Let’s go back to the original” but it ended up having too much Blade Runner-y stuff, it turned out to be this philosophical treatise about what humanity is and artificial intelligence, that’s a Blade Runner thing! What are we talking about that stuff for? It’s supposed to be a creature feature! I haven’t seen it yet, but it seems like Alien Romulus is returning to form so I’m looking forward to seeing that.
I have a few friends who really, really enjoyed Romulus but I haven’t caught it yet. Speaking of friends, my friend Brady really wants to check out Sting and he had a question. How would you sell the film to a new viewer?
A little girl in New York, in an apartment building in the dead of winter finds a tiny little spider, she decides to sneak it into her apartment and raise it as a pet. After they develop a bond, the spider escapes and then cats start to go missing, dogs start to go missing and then people start to go missing. Then her family’s in trouble, as they’re trapped in this apartment building with what’s turned into a giant killer alien spider, and the girl is the only one with the key to defeating the creature, because of their bond. If that doesn’t make you want to go and see the film, then I think you need to go and see a musical.
That’s a great way to sell the film! With Charlotte almost feeling like a superhero in the final act and Ethan’s role as a comic book artist, are you a big comic book/superhero guy yourself?
Before I became a filmmaker, I wanted to be a comic book artist. Weirdly, this film is very much autobiographical. This is me living vicariously through the main character who has become a vaguely successful comic book artist. I grew up reading X-Men and The Punisher, all that stuff. Of course, then you make your way through Watchmen and Frank Miller’s Sin City. I’m a big fan of graphic novels, so I think my films have a big tendency to ape that aesthetic. I love superheroes, so when Marvel started doing their thing, I was so happy but I have a little bit of superhero fatigue at this point. My superhero love always finds its way into my horror worlds, I can’t shake that love for that genre, so there’s always a little bit of that stuff in my films, I can’t help it. I read so much goddamn X-Men, I can’t get it out of my head.
Another influence I noticed in the film, especially with Ethan’s character, was early Spielberg. Was that intentional and did Spielberg’s work influence Sting at all?
100%. I grew up watching Poltergeist, Jaws, E.T. and Close Encounters and anybody who grew up in the 80s is very, very influenced by Spielberg. Even Jurassic Park, with its use of puppetry and CG, he’s the man, he’s the grandfather of all of this stuff. In the same way that he stole from Hitchcock to make Jaws, we steal from Spielberg to make our stuff. I did want my family to have a very Spielbergian feel because nobody does a family in crisis, harried by some kind of creature better than Spielberg. The influence is there, and there’s no way I couldn’t do that.
Spielberg’s one of the greats for a reason, he’s made so many classics. I actually got to see Jurassic Park for the first time during the pandemic, when they were playing classic films on the big screen and I was blown away. It’s so impressive and it’s such an entertaining time.
I was a teenager when I saw that. The weird thing about that is how Jurassic Park came out the same year as Schindler’s List. I got my mind blown in two different directions by Steven Spielberg in one year. I was like “How can one filmmaker make two films so disparate?” Schindler’s List is this dark masterpiece and Jurassic Park is the best adventure film you’ve ever seen in your life. The scope for that guy is insane, I mean, talk about stretching.
Speaking of bouncing back and forth between different genres, are there any other genres you’d like to tackle one day outside of horror?
Yeah, heaps, heaps. I’d love to do a western or a musical, a crime film or anything, but at the end of the day, the easiest thing for me to get financed is horror. I’ve tried to get a couple of dramas up and nobody wants to finance that. So now, I do horror exclusively because I love it and my favourite writer of all time, Stephen King, spent his entire life doing horror and he sneaks in really cool dramatic and beautiful concepts into his horror stories. So I’ll think of a horror concept that’s incredibly commercial, and I’ll sneak some art into it.
What genre would you define Sting as? There’s the horror, the comedy and the family drama, so do you consider it a horror-comedy, a horror-drama or something else entirely?
I don’t know, it’s a good question because the question is, what do you do? It’s always hard to answer and I have thought about it a lot. I don’t just do horror. I think that what I do is effectively fantasy horror. There’s a little bit of fairytale in there, there’s a little bit of comedy, a little bit of comic book and a lot of cinema. I think it’s all within the realm of fantasy and that’s the section of the video store that I’d like to see my films stacked in.
Without spoiling too much, the film ends on a cliffhanger. Are you interested in returning to this world or was that just a stinger to leave the audience on?
I’ve already written a treatment for the sequel, if somebody wants to give me the money, I’ll do it! It’s mental, I have to tell you. It’s set a few years after the first, it’s still got the Charlotte character who’s a little bit older, quite traumatised and without giving too much away, it’s weirdly like The Raid set in a science laboratory. Instead of criminals, it’s giant spiders and they’ve got to make their way through all of these levels of a science lab, it’s wicked. If Sting is Gremlins, this is Gremlins 2, it’s so crazy. I always leave it open for a sequel, because there’s nothing you’re going to do where you don’t want to spend more time in that world. I spent so many years in the Sting world and I would totally go back, but it’s up to the marketplace at the end of the day. An idea is a dime a dozen, you’ve just got to convince somebody to give you 10 to 20 million dollars, that’s the hard part. The ideas are easy.
Given that you’re an Australian filmmaker, do you have any essential Australian films for international viewers to check out?
It depends on if you want to talk about horror, we do horror quite well, obviously The Babadook, Talk to Me just made $100 million. Australia makes pretty damn good horror. If you want to talk about films that people haven’t seen as much as they should, there’s an early Peter Weir film called Gallipoli, which I think is a masterpiece. It’s as good as Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, it’s a truly brilliant masterpiece and I think not enough people have seen that. Weir may be one of my favourite directors of all time, he’s a wonderful director.
Paths of Glory is a big blind spot for me, it’s one of the few Kubrick films I still need to see.
It’s not everybody’s cup of tea. It’s weird, it’s in black and white, there’s American accents, it’s set in France in World War I, there’s a lot of stuff to get through for people to watch it, but it’s unquestionably one of the great war films of all time. Check it out! I mean, everything Kubrick does is good, you know? He’s Kubrick!
My favourite Kubrick might be Eyes Wide Shut but then there’s The Shining, 2001, it’s so hard to pick a favourite with him.
Even the ones that I don’t like, I kind of like. I don’t love Eyes Wide Shut, but it’s brilliant. I don’t love Barry Lyndon as much as I should, but it’s brilliant. There’s nothing he’s done that’s not brilliant, it’s like Kurosawa. There’s no bad Kurosawa film, there’s just ones that have more fighting and ones that have less fighting, and the fighting ones are more fun.
Another blind spot of mine is Seven Samurai, the only Kurosawa film I’ve seen is Rashomon and I loved it.
Start with Seven Samurai! I mean, talk about real people doing real things in real locations, I mean, good lord! That film is the template for action films, there is no better action film than Seven Samurai, except maybe Terminator 2.
What else can you tell us about your next project, Beast of War?
A producer approached me and asked if I had any concepts involving water, and I was like “Obviously, it’s got to be a shark film” and I started thinking “What would my shark film be?” Obviously, it’s going to be Quint’s speech from Jaws, the USS Indianapolis speech but you can’t really do that, it’s US history and I don’t have the right to do that, or the money, so I started looking through Australian history to see if there was anything like that.
In 1942, the HMAS Armidale went down between Darwin and East Teamore, it was shot down by Japanese bombers and a bunch of Aussie soldiers went into the ocean and were eaten by a bunch of sharks. Some of them survived, some of them didn’t. So my concept is, there’s these soldiers on a raft, surrounded by debris, and there are things in the debris, like supplies, if they can get to them and maybe even build a motorboat to get home. But they’re being eaten, one by one by a giant great white shark. It’s the perfect video game premise, and while shooting that, we built the biggest indoor water tank in Australia, as I needed something that was 40 metres of water, so this tank holds nearly a million litres of water. I got a bunch of people in that tank and made the film, there’s not a lot of CGI or stunt-work, I’m just making the actors do most of this stuff and it’s mental!
We’re in the biggest bathtub in the world shooting a film for five straight weeks. Like I said, they’re trapped in this fog bank so they can’t really see much, it’s like the ultimate single location horror. The shark is practical, built by this amazing company called Formation FX and it looked insane. I’m working with a new director of photography, Mark Wareham and he’s a legend. He’s shot so many films, so much TV and he was interested in doing this crazy low-budget thing with me and I wanted to do something that’s visually insane. We used old lenses, distorted lenses and played around with frame-rates and when you unleash a DoP like that, especially someone like Mark who’s done it all and he’s like “Oh, I can do whatever I want? Of course I’ll do this, it sounds like fun!” I said, let’s shoot a shark film and make it look like Natural Born Killers, we don’t care. It’s pretty cool, and it’s like Wyrmwood with a shark. I’m really excited about it.
That sounds amazing! You have me even more excited than I initially was, coming off of Sting, I couldn’t wait to see what you made next but how you’re describing it as Natural Born Killers with a shark, that’s perfect.
Well, you know sharks are nature’s serial killers.
True, true! One final question, as we’re talking about Sting during its home media run, I wanted to ask if you’re a physical media collector yourself? Do you collect films, games, comics, music or anything? 
I’ve got a fairly decent physical media collection, maybe 300/400 DVDs and Blu-rays. I’m well into physical media but at the same time, I do a lot of streaming too. I grew up in the age of physical media, I’m old enough to remember VHS stores. Physical media is a great thing, especially when you’re searching for your favourite film from the early 80s or 90s and it’s not on the Criterion Channel, it’s nowhere to be seen. I was looking for The Commitments the other day and I couldn’t stream it anywhere, I had to buy it from the UK. This generation is growing up with access to films, access to everything but they don’t have access to films that didn’t make enough money to last, do you know what I mean? These little films that were gems are slipping through the cracks and people aren’t watching them, which kills my heart.
I think that’s why I’m such a huge fan of boutique labels such as Arrow Video and as you mentioned, Criterion, who are picking up these films that haven’t had the best life on physical media. Films like Happiness and Gummo are both getting 4K Blu-ray releases from Criterion, and they were relegated to old DVD releases without HD transfers for the longest time. It’s great news because I always want to see these films but they end up being so hard to access, they’re not streaming or anything.
We’re losing a thing, you know? We made a bunch of behind-the-scenes for Sting and I’m not sure if anybody’s going to see a lot of that. They didn’t even ask me to do an audio commentary. On my last film, I did my own commentary and recorded it in my lounge room. We’re losing these wonderful DVD and Blu-ray extras, a lot of that stuff isn’t happening anymore, they’re not leaving a line in the budget for it and I think that’s really sad.
It’s one of the things I was really hoping for on the Blu-ray, I would have loved to hear you talk about the film for 90 minutes which is why I’m so happy that we’ve been able to do this interview, so I could hear your perspective on the film.
Unfortunately, to hear my perspective on my own film, you had to Zoom me! You had to call me and not everybody can do that!
Sting is available now on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital courtesy of StudioCanal.