INTERVIEW: A big, big shark hunts Australian soldiers in new movie ‘Beast of War’
Photo: Joel Nankerv stars as Will in the thriller film Beast of War. Photo courtesy of Well Go USA Entertainment / Provided by KWPR with permission.
When director Kiah Roache-Turner began writing the script for Beast of War, the new historical thriller now playing in movie theaters, he had another shark movie in mind, and he tried his best keep his film unique.
“I’m a fan of Jaws,” the writer-director said in a recent Zoom interview. “I loved Deep Blue Sea when I was a kid, and I thought The Shallows was fantastic. I hear Dangerous Animals is really good, and The Reef is scary as hell and all that. But Jaws is a masterpiece. There’s one great shark film, and then there’s a bunch of others. I was really trepidatious going into the shark film genre because you’re desperate not to embarrass yourself in the shadow of [Steven] Spielberg. Yeah, so we worked very hard to try and make it original.”
Beast of War, starring Mark Coles Smith and Joel Nankervis, is definitely original when considering the boatload of shark films that are out there. For starters, the tale being told is actually a wartime story that has some threads of truth. A young troop of Australian soldiers finds themselves in the Timor Sea after their boat sinks; World War II is raging, and they must rely on one another to survive. The problem, besides the attacks from the enemy and the changing weather, is that there’s a great white shark in the water as well, according to press notes.
“Alien is a perfect film, and so when you’re in space dealing with aliens, oh my God, how do you [do that]?” Roache-Turner said. “It’s like making a film about an incredibly rich, complicated newspaper tycoon, and it’s like, how are you going to be better than Citizen Kane? Going into a shark movie, knowing that one of the best filmmakers of all time had already perfected it, all I could really do is hope to do my own personal riff on it.”
The director added: “The one thing about shark films from my perspective is it had been a while since somebody had made a film that semi took it seriously. … So you got really great cinematic thriller aspects but also just a real epic adventure. I mean Jaws starts off as this brilliant treatise on dark American capitalism and then turns into Captain Ahab versus the whale with three men in a boat. It’s like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. There are a lot of elements, a lot of layers that make Jaws brilliant. We really try to layer as much of that kind of stuff into this film as we could. We worked hard to try to make this a cut above the average sharksploitation B-picture.”
In some ways, Beast of War is a reinterpretation of Quint’s speech about the USS Indianapolis, the real-life boat that sunk and left survivors bobbing in the waters with untold dangers lurking beneath.
“That’s based on a real thing, and Beast of War is also inspired by true events,” Roache-Turner said. “In 1942 … an Australian warship got sunk by Japanese Zeros, and many Australian soldiers went into the water. And a lot of them got killed and strafed by Zeros. A lot of them got eaten by sharks. These men had to swim out into the debris, find and bring back to their rafts a broken motorboat. They worked out how to fix a broken motorboat while being eaten by sharks. Some of them were able to use that boat to make it back.”
Roache-Turner thought that real-life story was an amazing tale of survival while simultaneously being a sad story of tragedy; he called what the soldiers endured the definition of ingenuity and bravery. He was inspired by that historical episode when he began writing the script for what would become Beast of War.
“So there is an undercurrent of realism, but it’s ‘inspired by,’ not ‘based on,’ because I didn’t want to disrespect what those men went through by making a big fat adventurous fun movie out of it, which I knew I was going to do,” he said. “I knew I was going to Spielberg it and turn it into a roller coaster, so that’s where we’re very careful to use the words ‘inspired by’. But it did give it an undercurrent of truth and import, and as a filmmaker and a storyteller, I felt that import. And the cast certainly felt it because they knew real Australians went through this, and my grandfather was killed in the Pacific in World War II. And so I used his war letters to be inspired by the lead character of Leo. This film is weirdly one of the most personal ones I’ve ever written in a way, and I think all of that lends itself to hopefully elevating it.”
Roache-Turner, who has also directed Sting and Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, said Australian culture is very much fascinated with sharks. They are an island nation that is essentially surrounded by these apex predators.
“One of the weird things about being an Australian is our country is beautiful,” the director said. “We’ve got rainforests and beaches and sunshine and happiness, but all of the creatures want to kill us. We’ve got some of the most poisonous snakes in the world. We’ve got spiders that if you get bitten by one, if you don’t get to a hospital within an hour, you’re dead. We’ve got all the serial killers apparently, and sharks, we’ve got great white sharks all over the place. And my father was a surfer his whole life, so he surfed for 40 years. So I spent most of my early life on beaches terrified to go into the water because I had seen Jaws. So any time I go into the water, I hear that music.”
He added: “We see sharks in the water sometimes when we go to the beach, so it’s a real thing that Australians are actually scared of if you’re a nervous, anxious little kid like me who used to sleep with the light on. That’s a terror that follows you around psychologically, so, yeah, I put a lot of genuine fear into this that I’ve experienced firsthand.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Beast of War, written and directed by Kiah Roache-Turner, is now playing in movie theaters. Click here for more information.
