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
“Obviously, when a filmmaker and a cinema nerd like me sits down to write something with sharks, you just go straight back to the USS Indianapolis speech from Jaws. I could never do the American version of that because you need 85 million and Nicolas Cage, apparently. But my version of that was just to get online and Google to see if there was any kind of Australian reference to something like that. I came across the true story of the HMAS Armidale that sank in 1942, halfway between Darwin and Timor. And it was a very similar story. It’s just a smaller budget. So I was sort of inspired by that true story, but very, very much taken from the Quint speech in Jaws, which is one of the great monologues in cinema history.”
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.
The post ‘Beast of War’ Shark Practical Effects Made Cast and Crew Scared to Get in the Water [Interview] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
