BEAST OF WAR Interview: Director Kiah Roache-Turner, Sharks, Soldiers, And The Soul of a Nation

ScreenAnarchy: Kiah! How are you?

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: Okay. People really like this one. People obviously like sharks, but also, there is some genuine excitement, critically and journalistically, about this one. I hope that turns into people coming to the cinema, like, that's a whole other thing. It's been the best critical response to any movie I've done, so I'm just like, oh, wow, we must have… we must have got something right.

 

ScreenAnarchy: That's really good. You don't want to say that sharks are an easy sell, but you know, it's-

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: They are an easy sell, like zombies. It's so oversaturated that you have to get it right. You're going to turn into just another schlocky B-movie that enters the void and disappears in two minutes. Or, you can try really, really, really, really hard to do something vaguely original, while also making sure that it's familiar, so audiences get what they want, but also get something they hadn't expected. So, it's easier to finance, but harder to sell to the critical community, who are all just going, “Alright. Like, so, is it just gonna be another crap imitation of Jaws? Or are you actually gonna make a movie here?”.

 

ScreenAnarchy: So that critical response is coming out of the world premiere back home, right?

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: We had the world premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and it was kind of important for us to have the premiere in Australia, because this is a very Australian film, and it's got a phenomenal Indigenous lead, in a real, you know, heroic war movie context. We worked with Wayne Blair, who's a wonderful writer-director, and (lead actor) Mark Cole-Smith on the cultural Indigenous aspects. But also, it's very loosely inspired by a real, true, actual historical Australian event, where the HMAS Armidale was sunk by Japanese Zeros back in 1942.

 

And so we wanted this to premiere in Australia, and the audience… I was really close to it, I finished it, and I was like, I don't even know what we've got here. I know I like it, and I know I'm really proud of it, but I just don't know… and then to watch it with three, four hundred people in this giant cinema on a huge screen in Melbourne, and just have the audience react in the way that you just want an audience to respond with a genre film. They laughed and cried and screamed and moaned and groaned in all the right places, but there's just that silence that settles in about 5 minutes in, and as a filmmaker, you're just like, “Oh, we've got them. They're kind of hooked”.

 

They responded really well all the way through, and then, the next day, we got the reviews, and I'm just like, “Oh, thank God”, some of the harshest critics in Australia were like.'Well done”. And then, to have that sort of mirrored now that we've done our US premiere in Fantastic Fest, which was a really nice full-circle thing for me, because my first film, Wyrmwood, had premiered at Fantastic Fest, and that was one of the greatest weeks of my life. 

 

I love Austin. I love that festival, and the response to the film was really generous. And I'm just like, “Oh, yeah, we did well”. Then some of the U.S. reviews have come in, and they were pretty much mirroring what the Aussies said, so clearly the accents aren't a problem. We seem to have made a film that can connect across the water. So, yeah, I'm proud.

 

ScreenAnarchy: Good, good. I'm very glad to hear it. Westerners, people growing up in the Americas, when we hear about shark movies, torpedoes, ships, and so on, we automatically think of Jaws and Quint's-

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: The USS Indianapolis monologue.

 

ScreenAnarchy: But of course. Yours refers back, as you said, to the Armidale, right?

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: Yeah. A couple of years ago, my producer, Blake Northfield, called me, and he asked, “Have you got anything set on water?” And I'm like, “Man, like, why?” And he says, “Well, I've got access to a giant tank, can you write something set on water?” And I'm like, “Oh, that sounds like a shark film”. And he says, “Shark film? Fuck yeah! I'll call you in a month!”

 

And so sometimes that's how films get started, you know? So I was sitting around thinking, well, if I'm gonna do a shark film, what's it gonna be? Obviously, it's gonna be some kind of riff on Quint's monologue from Jaws. Of course, we've all been waiting for somebody to do a real dark horror version of that monologue, where he's talking about how a shark rolls over, and its eyes turn black like a doll's eyes, and my mate was bitten in half, and he's floating up and down like a top in the water. And I'm like, yeah, man, I wanna make that film!

 

But I can't make that film, because that's an $85 million action film with Nicolas Cage in it, and I don't have $85 million or Nicolas Cage, so I was gonna have to do a smaller version.

 

So I did a bit of Google research, and I found the story of the HMAS Armidale that got shot down by Japanese Zeros in 1942, and sank halfway between Darwin and Timor, and a lot of soldiers went into the ocean. And a lot of those soldiers got eaten by sharks, and they had to swim out into the debris, and get this smashed-apart motorboat and fix the engine while being bedeviled by sharks. And somehow, you know, jerry-rig this thing, like somebody in a Mad Max movie, to drive themselves back towards Darwin. They got picked up, but the rest of them were just never seen again. 

 

I was inspired by that story. I couldn't tell that exact story, out of respect for the men who actually went through that horror. But I was definitely inspired by it, and so a lot of the research that I went down into on that story found its way into my script, because it was based on a real event.

 

There was an importance to it, and I really felt a little bit more than I usually do with my other films. I had to elevate this beyond just a genre film. So we really worked hard on putting a few more emotional and character-based layers into this than, you know, just the usual munched by a shark movie.

 

 

 

ScreenAnarchy: You spend a decent portion of the film at the beginning establishing your characters. That gives your dynamics during the rest of the film, when a lot of them are cast out on that side of the ship. Of course, the one guy who has an issue with your hero survives. The guy who we said, “Oh boy, I hope he gets eaten by a shark.” No, of course he doesn't.

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: Well, but that contrasting dynamic is important. Like, you've got a guy who has a clear issue with the lead. You've got this wonderful, sort of, heroic, interesting, Indigenous man with clear integrity who has the ability to survive. And then you've got, like, a really messed-up, traumatized racist on board with him. And it's like, you kind of want him to die first, but at the same time, if he dies first. Then the only conflict is with a shark. So I wanted to keep that guy around as long as possible, and my goal was to start with a partial conflict between a person of color and a clear racist, and then end up with those guys going through hell together, and ending up as kind of blood brothers.

 

And I love the idea that they start off fighting tooth and nail, and they almost end up bleeding half-dead in each other's arms by the end. And, the whole point of war is that when you're trapped in a life-or-death situation, you need to rely on your mates to survive. 

 

Skin color doesn't matter, you know? And so that was one of the layers that we wanted to kind of put into the narrative. There's a little bit of racial politics in there, which was important because I'm telling the story, effectively, of an Indigenous man. And Indigenous soldiers, as is mentioned in the film, were paid, like, a third of what the white blokes were paid, so the racism was just…endemic back then. Yet, we had so many soldiers of color who did so many heroic acts in that war, and then they bloody had to come back to an Australia that was just still riddled with racism. Yeah, I wanted to tell that story too, you know?

 

 

 

ScreenAnarchy: Let's go talk about special effects, because a lot of people want us to talk about special effects as well. What was practical? Did you have a Bruce?

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: Yeah, but ours is a female, so her name was Shazza. And we wanted Shazza to look like a monster shark, not like you're standard… I mean, it… every year, there are, like, 10, 15 shark films made, and they all kind of look the same. It's all the great white, and yeah, they all look… sharks look scary on their own anyway, but I was like, “Well, let's do something a little bit different”. And I talked to Steve Boyle, who runs Formation Effects, who built the shark for me, about making it more monstrous. I'm like, “Let's make a shark that looks like it's had a few run-ins with a few propellers, and got into a few, you know, pub car park brawls”, and it's got scars all over its face, and like, one eye's dead. 

 

Yeah, so Shazza looked pretty terrifying, more terrifying than a shark usually looks. And in terms of special effects, it was very important to me, even though we had an indie budget, and we didn't have a lot of money. But we had to spend a big chunk of that budget on a practical shark. We just had to.

 

I mean, every time a shark film comes out, it's another digital creation. It just doesn't look real to me. Sometimes it looks really cool, but it doesn't look real. And, if it doesn't look real, then you don't feel like it's real, so there's less terror, you know? And so, still, I think the best on-screen shark ever is Jaws, and there are a few shots of the puppet shark that don't look great in that movie, but it's a film made in the 70s.

 

So the fact that the shark shots that do work (and) are phenomenal, the reason for that, I think, is because they built an actual thing that's interacting with the actors, and the water, and the water displacement is correct, and you get a real sense of the weight of the thing.

 

And so, yeah, we built a practical shark, and I'd say 90%, maybe 85% of the shark is just a sheer practical element, either a puppet. Or a submarine with a fin on it, or a huge attack head attached to a railing under the water that explodes out of the water and munches at the actors. And it's only really when we cut underwater, and you see a wide shot of the thing swimming around in the dark, that we went with digital.

 

 

 

ScreenAnarchy: It became almost a chamber piece. Here's a single location, out in the middle of the ocean, but because the fog hasn't lifted, it's a very contained piece.

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: Yeah, well, when we realized that we kind of had to do it for various reasons in a tank in a studio, I felt like really the only way to do that without it looking cheap, or just killing the budget, because, you know, usually you have to do constant green screen, and that just would have made every single shot a digital effect, and we just couldn't afford that. So, we went back to the old practical styles of how they made films in the 1920s, like Nosferatu, or Murnau's Sunrise (A Song for Two Humans), or even Hitchcock's Lifeboat, (which) is effectively a giant tank with fog all around it. And, I figured if Hitchcock could do that back in the 40s, I can probably do it now.

 

One of the great things about fog and a studio-controlled environment is I can really pull out all of the stops in terms of making it look hyper-stylized, and so we really took inspiration from Francis Coppola's version of Bram Stoker's Dracula. That was very studio-controlled and very hyper-saturated in terms of approach to color.

 

And so that's what we did. When you're using fog backlighting colored lights in fog is one of the most photographically beautiful things you can do. So, we knew we were going to end up with a pretty beautiful palette. Because I knew we were stuck in one location that didn't really change for 70 minutes, it's just seven guys stuck on a piece of wood, which can get boring very quickly, we decided to change up the palette. Literally every scene feels like a different world. So, you start off with this darkness lit by fire, and then you move into these dusky blues, and then gorgeous pink sunrises, and Kurosawa yellow sunsets, and then it goes into blood red, sort of dusk.

 

And at night, we put bioluminescence in the water so that it's lit from below in this kind of neon green steampunk science fiction feeling. And so visually, the film is kind of a feast for the eyes, and hopefully, then the audience forgets that they're just stuck in one location. Like you mentioned, it's kind of a theatrical setup. It's a plank of wood with men on it.

 

And the backgrounds don't change that much, and so it's like a theater piece. And you can't do that with a film, so I had to pull out all the stops, with the camera work, and the design, and the lighting, and even the editing, and just (a) really intense sound design, to turn this into (a) neo gothic story, you know?

 

 

 

ScreenAnarchy: Talk to us about your Indigenous lead.

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: Mark Coles Smith. Yeah, he's a legend, and I think he's one of the best actors in the country. I've been wanting to work with him for years. So I wrote this part for him, and then just prayed to the cinema gods that he'd say yes.

 

He's got something that nobody else really has, in that he can do that kind of simmering, smoldering, effortlessly cool Robert Mitchum lead character thing, you know? He's a real star, but he also can do, like, this joyful, humorous, luminous thing that makes you kind of love him. 

 

And he does his own stunts. I mean, he's literally stunt certified, so he could be a stuntman if he wanted to. He's a free diver, so he can dive 10 meters down and hold his breath for three and a half minutes. So anything I asked him to do in the water, he was just like, “Pfft, easy”. To have a lead actor of that caliber who can also swim like a fish in a film like this is a minor miracle.

 

And, obviously, the Indigenous element was important to me, and to have also an actor who can write… He's a good writer. He came on and really helped me with the cultural elements, as did a wonderful writer-director named Wayne Blair, who has done some great films. He also helped out; he was one of the consultants.

 

But yeah, Mark came on, and he wrote some of my favorite lines. So he came in, there was a line in the movie where he goes, “It's okay to be afraid. Fear can keep you alive, but it can also get you killed”. 

 

That was his line. He wrote that, and I'm like, “Oh, thanks, man”, because we were discussing Unforgiven. There's that line that Clint does, where he's like, "It's a hell of a thing killing a man; you take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have." And I'm like, “I want a line like that”, and so we riffed, and he came up with that. And I think that even made its way into the trailer. So, yeah, he was fun to work with.

 

 

 

ScreenAnarchy: Was the approach the same for anybody else in the cast? Did you seek anybody else out? Or anybody else that was a surprise to you as an addition from your casting agent?

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: All of the cast was amazing. Most of the cast Blake and I had previously worked with. Actors like Tristan McKinnon and Sam Parsonson. Just legends like that. Lee (Tiger Halley) had just been in Boy Swallows Universe, so he was super hot. I'm like, “I need him in this film”. We looked at him for Will, but he wasn't right for Will, because he's kind of… he's got a bit of a blokey attitude, and he couldn't… Will needed to be a nerd, and Lee just isn't. But Lee was great. I mean, he just has a wonderful look, he's got a wonderful spirit, and he just feels like one of those beautiful, young, 17-year-old guys who just shouldn't die in the war. 

 

And a couple of other surprises were the nurses. It's a small, thankless role, because they kind of pop up and then pop out, but I really wanted to make sure that they weren't just cliche characters. I wanted them to have an inner strength and humor, and I wanted it to feel like if we went off with these nurses, there could be a whole interesting movie based on them. But obviously, there are no women on the raft, there are no women on the warship, so this had to be a very male-dominated film. Still, it was very important to me to have a couple of cool female characters who popped up and just kind of went, there are women in this war too, by the way, just so you guys know. They were both great. Laura Brogan Browne, I think, was her name. God, she was great. And, Lauren Grimson, I've worked with her a couple of times, I love her, and they just, yeah, they killed it.

 

Joel (Nankervis) was hard to find; he played Will. We looked at hundreds of guys, hundreds of tapes. And he was the only one that could do everything that we needed. We wanted sort of a guy with a sort of deep Australian voice, who also could look 17, who also could act well, who could do an arc where we need him to start out as a scared boy, and then turn into effectively a brave man by the end of the film. And he needed to have a little bit of a nerdy vibe and a period vibe, and he could do all of it, so we're very lucky to get him. 

 

But yeah, with a film like this, if you get the cast right, like, you're halfway there, because it helps to have the characters have a layered and real feel before you bring in the monsters to start munching them, because if people are being eaten who you don't care about, you're just making a schlock B-movie. To elevate the B-movie material, you need to have a fertile story and characters who are well-drawn; half the battle is casting people who can act. And I'm lucky in the cast here, because they were all great, you know?

 

 

 

ScreenAnarchy: Yeah, a bunch of young, fresh faces, as you said. There's a classic look to some of them. You had Sam (especially) ... 

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: Sam Delich came in with a sick audition tape, and I had originally written that as a huge man, like a mountain of a man, a scary guy who could really take on (the central character) Leo, but Sam just came in with a sick audition tape, and I was like, “Oh, okay, let's make him Begbie”, you know what I mean? Like, from Trainspotting. Let's make him a kind of smaller, scarier guy who whips out a knife and will kill you. And he was great, he's just a great actor. Max (Johnson) was also fantastic. Yeah, we just really lucked out with our cast.

 

ScreenAnarchy: So let’s recap the influences again, because you've been throwing a lot of stuff at us, but there was Coppola and Hitchcock and- 

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: Basically, I wanted to take three things. I wanted to take Jaws and mix it with, you know, the poetic, beautiful war pathos of a film like Gallipoli. Then make it like The Descent, where it's a small group stuck in a small space. And it's very claustrophobic, but it's so dynamically filmed that you just don't feel like it is just a boring bunch of people in one location. The Descent is also a perfect low-budget aesthetic where you don't have a lot, but you make a lot from very little. And also the hyper-stylized, hyper-saturated look.

 

I also wanted to bring one of the things I love about Jaws. It brings an old-school aesthetic to this modern blockbuster. It's why the blockbuster… I mean, it invented the Summer Blockbuster. I believe one of the reasons it did is because it took older elements that were in old Hollywood, the equivalent of the summer blockbuster, which is, you know, Hitchcock's style and his ability to craft a scary thriller, with David Lean's sense of epic majesty and adventure. 

 

And I wanted to bring those elements to bear, too. You know, that's why it was very important for me, in the opening 10-15 minute sequence, where you see them in the training camp, I wanted it to feel like Bridge Over the River Kwai. And even the music sounds like an old-school 1950s war movie. It's almost like Kelly's Heroes, and I wanted it to have that sort of naive, old-school adventure feel. Yeah, but basically apply a Kurosawa palette, and have the thing look like Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior) or Ran, with all these hypercolors and a lot of smoke and fire. 

 

So, I was trying to do a lot of things at the same time, and as we got to the end, I was like, “What have we got here? Some kind of bizarre, multi-layered cocktail”. But, you know, I think because we all really took this narrative really seriously, I mean, it might have worked, yeah.

 

 

 

ScreenAnarchy: Still, as followers of your career, we were looking for your little flourishes, right? Seven guys are sitting on wreckage, we are like, “Oh no, there's no room for button porn”.

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: No, there's not, but at the same time, you've still got those close-ups of people taking guns out of holsters, and putting knives back into sheaths, and people tightening ropes, so I found a way to shoot some button porn, you know what I mean? When he was tying the rope, the camera zoomed in on him tying it up. That's me just trying to do the Edgar Wright thing, which is Edgar Wright stealing from Sam Raimi in Evil Dead. 

 

I was laughing about it with my operator, my DOP, and even Mark. I'm like, guys. I can't tell you how many times I've done this shot. This is the same shot I've used in every film I've ever made. But, you know, that's what style is, isn't it? It's a thing you do over…

 

ScreenAnarchy: Yeah, those little trademarks that we look for, right? And the little bits of dark humor here and there, not so hilarious as some of the earlier works, but…

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: Yeah, I think this is the most Kia Roach-Turner film ever made. Like, simply because I'm still doing all of those tricks that I've copied from other directors, but I think the world that I've set up is very specifically me, and when I was writing it, I'm sure I'm influenced by things, but at the end of the day, this is an Australian war story. My grandfather was killed in World War II, and I was using his war letters to inspire me for the role of Leo. 

 

And I grew up with brothers, and a lot of men, and boys, and I went to an all-boys school, so I know young men in peril better than anything. I've been in so many dodgy situations with my young mates, where we nearly get killed for some stupid drunken reason, and we just laugh, and laugh and laugh, and I just… I know a lot about toxic masculinity, and I know a lot about being in a group of friends where one's a coward, one's a prick, one's a hero, one's the guy you want to be with in war, and I've just thought about this type of stuff, you know, my whole life, and I just don't think anybody else could have written it quite like I did, and I'm not being arrogant or anything, I'm just… I'm really happy that I finally found a narrative that really feels distinctly and specifically me, you know?

 

ScreenAnarchy: Yeah, just… now you got us thinking about our family history, that we had a grandfather who made it through. He was RAF, but we have an uncle, Charlie, who was killed in Italy. He was part of British artillery unit in Italy, and he didn't return. He went over, and it wasn't a very long stint, as we understand it. He's still buried in Italy, and to my knowledge, nobody from my dad's family was ever able, despite living in England, which is so much closer than Canada, was never able to go over and pay their respects, but we do know where he's buried in Italy.

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: Yeah, both my great-grandfather and my grandfather died in the World Wars. My great-grandfather, Leo Walsh, who is the namesake of the character of Leo, he stepped on a mine while carrying a… while stretchering a mate off the battlefield, and parts of him are buried somewhere, near Passchendaele, I guess. And Jim Roach, who this film is dedicated to, was my mother's father, he's my grandfather. He was serving in Papua New Guinea, and he was shot by one of his own men. Just a dude with a freaky trigger finger. He was coming home, coming back to the base, after a reconnaissance at night, and he stepped on a twig, and you're supposed to yell ‘Who goes there’, but instead of yelling, this guy just fired and killed my grandfather. It's brutal.

 

And looking through his war letters, like, he was just a good bloke, and just a really nice guy. I was reading letters that were sent to my grandmother from people who served with him, and he was clearly a guy whom they loved to be with. He was a leader, and he saved lives, and he was somebody who you felt comfortable being led by, because he was a brave guy, you know what I mean? And he was a teacher, so he was a real salt of the earth, just a normal bloke, and yeah, just the tragedy of war is that these nice, lovely, brave guys just get killed. And then my mum had to grow up without a dad, you know? So, there's a lot of tragedy involved. 

 

And that's the thing. I'm making this film; it's not just a shark film - there are some serious layers going on here. 

 

ScreenAnarchy: No, it's good. We’re glad that we're really touching on that, that you're open to sharing what the source of this is. We wanted to know who Jim Roach was by the end of the film, and we’d just presumed that it was somebody in the family who didn't make it back, and… yeah, that really sucks.

 

It sucked for a lot of people, and it just keeps on going, unfortunately. It can touch on the current situation and speak to the age that we're living in. You're talking about toxic masculinity, male dynamics, and obviously the indigenous situation. I know that you guys have had some marches going on down there recently, and it's kind of made it up our way here. 

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: Oh, there's a lot of horrible, racist bullshit going on in my country at the moment. You know, we've got neo-Nazis attacking peaceful Indigenous communities who were just sitting around doing very peaceful demonstrations for their culture, and, like, this is their country. This was originally their country, and we invaded it, and they're allowed to have their voices heard, and we got these jackbooted,  black clothes-wearing Nazis going around punching people, and I'm like, “What the hell's going on?” 

 

Like, I don't understand. You know, my grandfather died in World War II to stop this kind of crap, so this neo-Nazi stuff that's going on is horrific, and I grew up in a very racist country, and I had hoped that we were moving away from that, but to see it pop up again in such a violent, horrible way, it's heartbreaking.

 

ScreenAnarchy: Certain people have given those mouth breathers the platform that they need over the last few years.

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: But I guess part of my point is, too, like. those neo-Nazi pricks, if they went to war with an Indigenous bunch, they'd be mates within a couple of weeks, because when it's life or death and you're saving each other's lives, their skin color doesn't matter, and I'm just like, why can't we just skip to that? Why do we have to go through war for you to go, ‘Oh, you know what, Aboriginal blokes are okay. 

 

And this is what I always realised growing up in racist 80s Australia. Like, a lot of my mates were really racist. But they had mates who were Indigenous and Asian, and they're like, ‘Oh, no, not those blokes, like, my mates, they're fine. It's the rest of those bastards I don't like.’. And I'm like, “There's no difference between your mates and, like, the rest of them”, it's just, you know, this small-minded thing, you know? It's like when you've got… when you've had a hard life, and you're filled with anger, and you're uneducated, and your dad beat the crap out of you, you want to punch down, and you're like, well, who can I yell at? Who can I be angry at? And you go, well, immigrants, you know? And it's just a bully mentality, and I don't know, yeah, it's really… It's ugly.

 

ScreenAnarchy: Anything else that we should… we’re just being mindful of your time, because you're almost at 10 o'clock (a.m.), dude (knowing full well that Kiah uses mornings to get writing done).

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: Yeah, I should… I should run off and do some writing. I'm working on a treatment at the moment. But yeah, I gotta go for a run and try and do some writing today, I think. I am working on another film; hopefully, we're going to be announcing it in a couple of weeks (which will be Dogs of War, announced the other week).

 

We're hoping to be shooting in January, February. It's another war film. I had so much fun writing this one that I immediately wrote another war film, and my producer is like, ‘Oh, another one!’ I'm like, “Yeah, man, like, let's do another one!”. And this is a completely different context. But yeah, it's sort of set on the Eastern Front. Totally different cast, but there are Russian snipers and Nazis, and I'm really looking forward to doing it, you know?

 

ScreenAnarchy: Just something a little bit more… yeah, a little bit… sorry, not to say more fun, because watching this one was definitely as fun as it can be. I know we've touched on a lot of serious underlying layers to it that have driven it to the point of creation. But would it be something like… would the new one be a little bit more, you know… and focus on, sorry, you know what I'm trying to say, right?

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: Dumb, and dark, and serious, and adventurous. I always do like a bit of a mash-up. I could never make just an out-and-out bleak horror film, like Hereditary, even though I think that's one of the best films to come out in the last 20 years. I just couldn't do it. I have to have all those elements. I've got to have the adventure and the fun with the dark and the twisted. And the serious. 

 

I like to work on big melodramatic themes. I always grew up reading comic books and watching Shakespeare and stuff, so I like big dramatic, sort of epic, emotions, you know? So again, I don't know if I could do something subtle, like Ken Loach. All of my films are serious and fun at the same time. And so, yes, I think it's pretty much more of the same tonally.

 

ScreenAnarchy: Did we miss anything? Is there anything that you really, like, no one has asked you, or anything that you feel that, like, we've really gotta say about Beast of War?

 

Kiah Roache-Turner: I think we covered it all, I think. I think we're good. I think we did well.