Posted in: Exclusive, Horror, Interview, Movies | Tagged: Beast of War, Kiah Roache-Turner, Well Go USA Entertainment

Beast of War Director Talks World War II & Shark Survival Horror Film

Director Kiah Roache-Turner (Sting) spoke to us about his latest war and survival horror film in Well Go USA's Beast of War, casting & more.

Kiah Roache-Turner has developed a unique niche for horror, given his work in films like Nekrotronic (2018), Sting (2024), and the Wrymwood franchise. One of his most unique challenges in his latest project is Beast of War, is blending both horror and war, in this case, two different layers of survival horror, with its backdrop set in World War II and a regiment of Australian Allied soldiers trying to not only overcome the Axis Forces in the Pacific, but also the resident opportunistic wildlife of the sharks looking to take advantage of their potential prey. Roache-Turner spoke to Bleeding Cool about how Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) inspired him, drawing from the real-life harrowing journey of the HMAS Armidale, balancing horror and war narratives, and casting.

Beast of War Writer-Director Kiah Roache-Turner on Battling a War on Two Fronts

What was the inspiration behind 'Beast of War?'

Anyone familiar with film probably knows that I drew inspiration from Jaws, specifically the speech given by Quint (Robert Shaw), written by John Milius, about the USS Indianapolis. Wooo! What a monologue! Most of my life, I've been waiting for somebody to do a riff on that. Spielberg, I understand, was going to do that as a sequel, but backed out for whatever reason. Now, 30 years later, I'm like, "Well, I guess I have to do it," and when my producer, Blake Northfield, called me and goes, "Do you have anything set on water?" I'm thinking, "It might be time," because he has access to a giant tank and says, "Write me something to do with water." I tell him, "That'll be the USS Indianapolis speech from Jaws, I reckon," so I did five minutes of Google searching online and came up with a true story of the HMAS Armidale that sank in 1942 halfway between Darwin and Timor. Hundreds of soldiers went into the ocean, and a lot of them got eaten by sharks, and I'm like, that's my inspiration, so here we are.

What are the biggest challenges in balancing the war and the horror aspects of this film?

The thing that I wanted to try and do was like one of my favorite war films, it's an Australian war film called Gallipoli (1981) by Peter Weir, which is up there with The Thin Red Line (1998), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Paths of Glory (1957). It's a beautiful, poetic, wonderful piece of cinema about young people who are around 17 years old, young boys who go to war and get mindlessly killed. I wanted to take that and meld it with Jaws, but also meld it with films like The Descent (2005) that are taking place with a small cast in a sealed location, having to battle monsters.

I wanted to take those three films, mix them up in a pot, add my own vision, and see where we ended up. It was important for me to balance the war with the beast, and the way I did that was through character, and through the character of Leo, an indigenous man dealing with racism and a past where a shark killed his brother. He was an ex-fisherman fishing off the coast of Broome (Australia), which is where a lot of great white sharks are found in my country. He's battling internal demons and racism, not to mention he's in a war, so that's fertile ground for a character.

We also have this young guy, Will, a 17-year-old, who's scared out of his wits. He probably hasn't traveled that far from home, and now he's suddenly thrown into a meat grinder, where he's being tested, turning from a boy into a man. When you've got all that fertile character work to do and you play your cards right as a writer, you've got a lot of nice drama to deal with, as well as a shark, action, and machine guns. When you've got seven very different guys all trapped on a raft together, you need that character work to pull you through the emotion of the story.

What went into the casting process? Was there anyone you had penciled in from the get-go?

The casting process was difficult for Will, the 17-year-old. We went through hundreds of young men; it was difficult to find the right balance of naivete, potential strength, and somebody who can act and who looks 17. That was very hard. Leo was easy. I wrote this part for Mark Coles Smith, and it was one of those situations where if we couldn't get him, I don't know who we would get. He's the heart and soul of the film, and he carries it. Luckily, he knew of me, and I definitely knew about him; we'd been circling each other for a few years. He read the script, and it resonated with him. He had a hole in his schedule in between the hundreds of thousands of things that he was doing. He's making like 10 films and a TV series at the same time, but we got him, and thank God we did, because he really makes the film.

Well Go USA Entertainment's Beast of War, which also stars Joel Nankervis, Sam Delich, Lee Tiger Halley, Sam Parsonson, Maximillian Johnson, Tristan McKinnon, and Aswan Reid, is available in theaters and digital.

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