Interviews
‘Beast of War’ Shark Practical Effects Made Cast and Crew Scared to Get in the Water [Interview]
World War II shark thriller Beast of War draws inspiration from the historical account that Quint tells in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. That it releases in the same year that Spielberg’s seminal shark classic turns 50 feels like uncanny levels of planning ahead.
“It’s just a beautiful, ironic coincidence, isn’t it?” Australian writer/director Kiah Roache-Turner (Sting, Wyrmwood: Apocalypse) grins at the serendipitous alignment in a chat with Bloody Disgusting ahead of the film’s release on October 10 in theaters and VOD.
Instead, the inception behind Beast of War was far simpler. “No, it’s funny, a couple of years ago, my producer, Blake Northfield, rang me and he goes, ‘Have you kind of got anything written about something on water?’ And I’m like, ‘Water? No man.’ He goes, ‘Well, I’ve got access to a giant water tank. Can you write something on water?’ I say, ‘Yeah, that sounds like a shark movie.’ He replies, ‘Shark movie, great, I’ll call you in a month.’ And that’s just how it started.”
That doesn’t mean that Jaws didn’t factor into Beast of War at all, though. Far from it; Quint’s unforgettable monologue did serve as foundational inspiration for Roache-Turner’s first foray into aquatic horror-thrillers.
[L-R] Mark Coles Smith as “Leo” and Joel Nankervis as “Will” in the thriller film BEAST OF WAR
. Photo courtesy of Well Go USA Entertainment
Also, like Jaws is Beast of War‘s commitment to practical effects; the shark work by Formation Effects is incredible.
“Every year there’s like ten shark movies that come out and every time I’m just looking at them going, it doesn’t look real,” Roache-Turner says. “It looks digital. My biggest problem, well, there are two big problems: the sharks move too fast, and the water displacement doesn’t look real; it just looks like a really well-rendered video game.
‘Beast of War’
“To me, that’s not scary. The scary thing is that top shot in Jaws, where you see the shark coming to grab the guy’s leg, then he is trying to get back up on the boat, and it’s ripped off the boat. It’s real. You can see the weight of it in the water. We knew we had to build a shark, and that was a huge deal from a production point of view. We had a company called Formation Effects, led by Steve Boyle, and that’s kind of like the Australian version of Wētā, a smaller company, but no less talented. They built three giant sections of shark, like a huge puppet shark that you put a stunt diver in, and he just operates it. That was very easy to use. I love that one.
“Then we built a giant half-submarine with a fin on the back that swam around in the tank. You need that because usually in movies they’ll just put the fin on a diver, and there are no big waves on either side of the fin to show that there’s a one-ton creature underneath the fin. It’s actually not the fin that’s scary; it’s how much water is displaced when it moves through the water, because you’re like, ‘Oh my god, that fin is big.’ But under that fin is something as big as a bus. That was important. And then we built a thing called an attack head, which is a giant half-ton animatronic shark that runs on rails under the water, and that explodes up out of the surface to munch on the actors. It was like we had pieces of shark everywhere, and it was very difficult to make and hard to shoot. But man, it worked.
“Once we got that thing in the water, it was terrifying. Nobody wanted to get in the tank. There’s something psychological about seeing that stuff in the tank; they’re like, ‘I’m not getting in that water.’ It was good fun.”
As for the shark’s design, Roache-Turner was less interested in realism. He tells us, “Well, I am not really a massive realism guy. I like the heightened hyper-stylized reality, and I grew up reading comic books and stuff, so my conversations with Steve, who made the shark, were just give me a monster shark. I want it to look like a bulldog that’s been in too many fights. You know what I mean? That’s just scarred up and one of its eyes ripped out, and pale because it’s blind in one eye, and it looks like it’s just had a few fights with a few propeller blades. People kept joking, ‘Oh, it’s zombie shark,’ but I wanted that.“
While the filmmaker’s heightened reality sensibilities also reflect in the cinematography, in which Roache-Turner instructed to “do Nosferatu with a fin” with a richly saturated color palette, the fog bank that traps the soldiers in place is less of an aesthetic choice and more of a requirement once Spielberg threw a wrench in production plans, further entangling Jaws with Beast of War.
“We had originally decided to make this quite a gritty, realistic-looking film. We were going to shoot the thing in the giant tank in Malta, where they shot Gladiator. We actually started pre-production in Malta, so we were going to go for that look and that type of film. Then Spielberg came in and just grabbed all the tanks because he was producing Jurassic World. So ironically, my idea I stole from Spielberg, and Spielberg came in and took my tank. I mean, it’s beautifully ironic. We had to then make the decision to go back to Queensland and shoot it in a huge tank indoors, and I was like, the only way to get away with that is to just lean into the fog.”
See the stunning shark effects this Friday when Well Go USA unleashes Beast of War in theaters and on VOD.
Evil Dead Rise final girl Lily Sullivan finds herself coated in blood once more in SOULM8TE, but this time as the killer.
In Blumhouse’s new horror movie, arriving on Digital on August 1, Sullivan stars as Sara, an Artificially Intelligent android whose sole purpose is to serve as the perfect partner for her owner, David (David Rysdahl). But impossible beauty standards and programming safety measures that have been tampered with set this love bot to destroy mode when her relationship with David becomes threatened.
Director Kate Dolan (You Are Not My Mother), who rewrote an original draft from Rafael Jordan (Salvage Marines), based on a story by James Wan, Ingrid Bisu and Jordan, drew inspiration from ’90s erotic thrillers like Fatal Attraction.
They became a guide of sorts to Sara’s villainous turn, Kate Dolan explained to Bloody Disgusting. “All those old movies, when I was re-watching them to prep, I was writing the script, I was like, ‘Damn, these women are really just being driven into these scenarios by these men, these hapless men who are just treating them so badly. These men should really be getting their just desserts.’ But I think that was something we had as a guide for Sara: what really makes her into that femme fatale or that evil woman is just the impossible task of being a perfect woman and trying to balance being the Madonna and the whore and all these different kinds of aspects of being a woman and not being able to compute that. That’s what drives her crazy.
“That was always what really drew me to the story: of how to reframe that femme fatale or that villainous woman of the erotic thriller and do something new with it and something different.”
Lily Sullivan agrees: “She felt like a contemporary evolution of those characters. It’s like processing it all and then putting it through in an output. But it was so fun to try to find the old Hollywood archetypes of women in the 1990s, where it is built around fantasy, projection, desire. Then you’re just, even as the actor, then going through makeup, going through costume, where it’s all of these things that are kind of messed up about the blonde wig, the covering your whole body in paint so you can’t see any of your imperfections, or getting your teeth whitened and a push-up bra, and you’re just like, ‘Whoa. Why am I so angry? Why do I not feel enough? And why am I actually, literally, the male gaze right now?’ I was like, ‘Booked.'”
It turns out, though, that it was the impossible ideal of perfection that Sara represents that terrified Sullivan. She credits Dolan for helping her take on the intimidating role, one she was extremely hesitant to tackle at first.
Sullivan explains, “To do it, I’m like, someone’s going to meet your freak. We’re both choosing to do this. But at first I met Kate, and I felt like I told her all the reasons why I couldn’t do it or shouldn’t do it or why I was worried instead of being like, ‘Yeah, I’d love the role.’ I just weirdly had this verbal diarrhea of freaking out that I was like, ‘I don’t think I can.’ But then usually when you are that scared, it’s usually an indication to walk towards it. But really for me, it was Kate.“
Once she was on board, though, Sullivan grabbed the role by the throat. “Then also just again, to walk into the inky, gross, shadowy stuff of being a woman where I’m like, ‘How about I go over-hypersexualize the hell out of myself?’ But I’m going to make it uncanny valley. I want you to feel as silicone as much as you can. So I’m going to bring my Jim Carrey version of it, The Mask work, the Jacques Lecoq method of finding it through physicality. So there was so much nourishment in the challenge of it. Even reading the words when I was reading Kate’s writing, I’m going into Palisade mode. I was like, ‘I’ve got to go figure out what that language even means.’ And, ‘It better be as jarring as I possibly can.’ We love David, but we judge him for being able to project a whole life onto this wonky woman who’s forced to be there.”
Dolan reveals she did a lot of research into AI, and our home uses of it like Amazon’s Alexa, which informed Sara’s soothing voice and mannerisms. It also informed Sara’s parent company and new owner, David. “I was reading a lot about why that’s appealing, but also bias within the tech industry and how it’s predominantly male-led,” Dolan says. “So, you’re getting a lot of men of a certain background and life experience all thinking that this is the right thing to do.”
The director uses the ’90s thriller framework as an abstract metaphor for how we’re currently engaging with AI now, and “how people engage with them and what you get from that back.” That didn’t just inspire Sara’s look and design, but her methods of murder.
“The kills were very much like, I won’t spoil anything, but it was always ways that the men would be taken down a peg, then emasculated, or just put in a chokehold; literally, it was the kind of concept behind a lot of them,” Dolan explains. “And then it was just like: what would be most fun? What would be really fun to do? What would be fun to film and fun to watch as an audience? I mean, they were great fun, and all our male cast were very eager and excited to have these death scenes. That was the most exciting day on set when they were getting ready to be completely eviscerated.”
If it’s not already apparent, it feels strange to consider Sara a villain when she has no actual agency, though there’s no question she’s the terror of SOULM8TE. And Sullivan had a blast taking on the baddie role. Especially when it came to eviscerating the pursuit of perfection and anyone who dares to get in Sara’s way.
Sullivan teases a favorite kill of hers as she recalls the joy of playing a horror movie psycho, “Even loving the stiletto in the mouth referenced from The Last Seduction, just sets the heart. Even just having the plastic apron as I’m sawing the man’s body like a cello, little wink at American Psycho. It was so fun making a film about AI that’s super tech-based. Obviously our whole lives are bombarded by it, and it’s quite nauseating. If you’re going to make a film about AI, this serving is fun, it’s twisted, but it’s also freaky. And the freak show circus is already here, unfortunately.”
Lily Sullivan and Kate Dolan behind the scenes
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