For Australian director-screenwriter Kiah Roache-Turner “Sting” is more than a horrific fright fest starring a ravenous alien spider that dines on its victims while they’re still alive.
“It is a bit based on me when I was little,” Roache-Turner revealed in a Zoom interview. “I was like Charlotte in the movie, a grumpy, silly kid who lived in my head and drew a lot of stuff.
“The family in ‘Sting’ is based on my family. Charlotte I very much based on my daughter who can be surly but also is quite funny. Dad is me, an artist, and we had a baby at the time of writing. So the baby’s based on my baby.
“The wife is a less interesting version of my wife — as my wife keeps reminding me. All the sub characters are fairy tale archetypes. The science student played by Danny Kim is very much like a failed magician. Jermain Fowler’s Frank would be like the knight who comes and you think he’s going to do battle with the creature.
“We’ve got the good fairy godmother (Noni Hazlehurst) who saves the day and the evil stepmother (Robyn Nevin). All those characters need to be colorful because a film like this is pretty bleak when you’ve got a giant spider running around eating people. You need a little bit of humor.
“Helga has Alzheimer’s — that’s based on somebody very close to me. But it also happens to be just a great idea for a character who sees a giant spider and then forgets it five minutes later! That is just inherently funny. I just liked that premise.”
As “Sting” begins, Charlotte (named of course for E.B. White’s classic “Charlotte’s Web”) seems a bit troubled but happily feeds the little spider she’s caught and keeps secret in a glass jar.
“She’s mainly just an isolated teenager and is just being grumpy to her parents because she doesn’t really have anyone around her own age at that moment in time,” said Alyla Browne, 14, who plays Charlotte.
“If you have teenage girls, you understand that it’s actually quite normal for them to be a bit grumpy. Charlotte, being a teenage girl with no other friends, is not going to try and make friends with her parents. Because that would be weird! And they’re annoying.”
Browne, acting since she was six, will be seen in May as the Young Furioso in George Miller’s “Furioso: A Mad Max Saga.”
Acting, she says, “never really feels like work at all. You get to dress up in a character’s clothes and act like them. It’s kind of therapeutic. But also really fun.”
“Sting” opens April 12
