00:00 (CRYING)
00:04 Stay!
00:21 The best stories are the personal ones, and if you're a horror filmmaker,
00:27 you know, the best way to tell a scary story is to find the thing that scares you the most
00:31 and put it in the story.
00:34 The thing that scares me the most is the idea of a spider the size of a pit bull terrier.
00:39 Yeah, I'm intensely arachnophobic, so anything with eight legs freaks me out.
00:43 Like, I have a visceral reaction to spiders,
00:46 so I just basically took my worst nightmare and just magnified it by a huge amount.
00:50 Both Keir and I were very much on the same page
00:53 in terms of, you know, getting the best person to do the effects in that space,
01:00 and it just so happens because of my relationship with Richard and Weta,
01:04 I was able to ring Richard up and say, "I've got two words to say to you,
01:08 and they are 'giant spider'."
01:10 I think these days a lot of people are doing things digitally,
01:13 and Keir wanted to do everything practically,
01:15 and Richard just loved the opportunity.
01:18 Well, with any project that you do, it's all about the people
01:21 that you're going to be working with.
01:23 Obviously, the subject matter of this film is super exciting to us,
01:27 but the fact that Keir is such an extraordinary filmmaker,
01:31 such a dynamic and unique individual,
01:34 it was very obvious from the outset that his sharp wit
01:39 and his clever mind was going to produce a fabulous script
01:44 that would be massively attractive to work on.
01:47 Like Richard Taylor, you know, he's like a pretty full-on hero of mine.
01:53 This is the guy that pretty much hand-built Middle Earth,
01:57 you know, Lord of the Rings, Avatar, you know, like he's kind of done it all.
02:01 It's delightful for us because this director wanted to do Sting practically.
02:06 He asked us to initially design Sting, you know,
02:11 and that went through an interesting evolution
02:13 because is it just a spider or has it got more alien attributes
02:19 or is it more monstrous?
02:21 But Keir had a very strong vision of that.
02:24 So one of the things I wanted to do was to take the design of Sting
02:27 from a redback spider, which is like shiny black,
02:32 you know, with that cool red stripe down the back.
02:35 You know, it looks like a racing car or something.
02:37 But also I was taking a lot of inspiration from the H.R. Giger designs
02:41 for Alien, where it's this shiny, sort of almost metallic black look to it.
02:47 So it looks like, you know, the ultimate killing machine.
02:49 In its simplest form, Sting is ultimately just a puppet.
02:53 It is puppeteered by three or four people that are operating the legs
02:59 and its general movement off poles that will ultimately be painted out digitally.
03:06 That is tricky enough.
03:08 You think about the challenge of just rubbing your tummy and patting your head
03:11 and then do that with three to four people over eight legs,
03:15 you start to get the realities of the level of training and practice
03:20 and rehearsals required by a team of people to be able to move a spider believably.
03:26 Just because I'm a big fan of puppetry, I grew up worshipping Jim Henson
03:30 and I just think that there's something so beautiful about the practical,
03:34 the practical element of it.
03:36 She's an amazing puppet.
03:38 She has this hydraulic system that creates that kind of elastic recoil nature
03:42 of the spider jumping, which is super uncanny and weird.
03:45 But I'm finding it, for the most part, really fascinating.
03:48 I'm finding it really fascinating watching the puppetry
03:50 and how much work goes into this and how much movement.
03:53 For months and months before, they've been working out how to articulate
03:56 the knuckle on its left leg, let alone all eight of them.
03:59 It's interesting when you consider the actors that are actually going to play
04:05 opposite something in a film.
04:07 It's evident quite often to an audience when a director is chosen
04:14 to go down an entirely digital pipeline that the actors don't perform
04:21 against something that has presence, that isn't present in the environment.
04:26 For a movie like this, where the relationship between the victim
04:31 and the predator is primary to give the essence that the director
04:37 is trying to capture, that sense of presence becomes paramount.
04:41 And actors are reactive, so if you're coming at them with a tennis ball
04:45 on a stick, they're going to have a lot of work to do and there's probably
04:48 going to be a lot of help you're going to have to give them.
04:50 But if you're coming at them with a 15-pound puppet that's shrieking
04:55 at them and spitting everywhere, they just react to that.
04:59 And he really over-delivered. Richard and his team, Joel, Weta,
05:03 they were fantastic.
05:05 They were very generous in supporting a production like ours
05:10 and a filmmaker like Keir because they're all so excited by fresh voices
05:14 doing the things that they did 20 years ago, making movies out of
05:18 sticky tape and string and scaring audiences.
05:21 And their input into the character of Sting was priceless.
05:26 They designed Sting from the ground up, designed Sting to do everything
05:29 that Keir wanted Sting to do.
05:31 We just firmly believed that this movie would be scarier and better
05:35 and cooler if it had actual puppets and actual practical effects
05:39 most of the way through.
05:41 People have a kind of - it's in their DNA, it's a natural primal fear
05:45 of spiders. That's how strong arachnophobia is.
05:49 So if you want to make a film to scare the living daylights out of somebody,
05:54 spiders seem to be a very good place to go.
05:57 (gentle music)
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