Exclusive: Director Benni Diez Talks Stung’s Cast, Influences, Road to Directing, and More
Heather Buckley
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Benni Dietz, the director of Stung, an experiment in practical effects madness that is available now on VOD, found his inspiration in American monster movies. Whether they be furry little critters or encased in shiny black exoskeletons, he found creatures plus a bit of humor created an instant inspiration.
After moving away from the post-effects world, Stung is his feature directorial debut—and what better way to start your career than with a movie starting Lance Henriksen and giant killer wasps on the loose?
Dread Central: Why did you want to make Stung (review)?
Benni Dies: I got the screenplay a few years ago from my manager, and it called to me on a few very profound levels, mainly to my inner child that watched Alien way too young and got messed up in the brain by it a little bit… it was a kind of genre where I thought there are way too few movies of that kind that are—you know, that are old-school creature movies that leave you with a fun feeling when you get out of the theater. So I told my management to get me to the writer, and when he met me, we hit it off right away; we have the same taste in movies. I was really excited to work on it, to develop it a bit further, and luckily enough a friend of mine worked at a production company… so I sent it to them there. A few years later, we’re here, having a finished movie and making interviews!
Dread Central: What were your influences while making the movie?
Benni Diez: In this case, it was a lot of those [creature movies]—of course, you have to include movies like Jaws and Alien—but also the more funny ones like Tremors or Gremlins or Slither because they have this sometimes satirical or funny edge to them… we didn’t want to play it too seriously because when you ask the audience to buy into human-sized wasps attacking people, you have to wink once in a while and make a little bit of fun of it. Otherwise they’re gonna think it’s ridiculous—which it is, and you have to acknowledge that.
Dread Central: I noticed, much like the movies you mentioned, Stung is practical effects-heavy as well.
Benni Diez: Oh yes. I wanted to right away not only pay homage to those [types of] effects, but also to use them for their benefits… I mean, pretty much everything is CG nowadays and I’ve studied that stuff. I’ve been working in the CG industry for a while, so I know how this works, but I also know how it is shooting those things: I know for actors oftentimes they are frustrated about playing against tennis balls. For me, as a director, as well, it’s way more interesting and fun to have puppets on the set; it means you can actually direct physically—like an actor, basically. There’s much more humanity and life behind it. Even a wobbly rubber puppet sometimes is more effective in terms of conveying emotion than the best CG creature because the difference is when you do a CG creature, afterwards you start planning every movement in detail, you work on every little thing, and it gets so clinical. It ends up being too smooth; you miss the tiny accidents that happen on-set. You know, when you just say, ‘Jump a little bit harder, make it a little bit more aggressive.’ And then the person behind the [puppet] has to act it. It’s much more natural when you have things on set. And, as I said, it’s way more fun because you have those puppets; they’re covered in slime and artificial blood. It’s like kids in a toy store. We were always laughing really hard when we shot those scenes.
Dread Central: What was your direction to the special effects team in creating your wasp monsters?
Benni Diez: Well, we wanted to start with natural reference, so it is based on existing wasp species—I think the name reference was the “Tarantula Killer Wasp” because it was very lean and had very strong legs and wings, black mostly—it already looks like an alien, kind of. That’s where we started out from; we wanted to, of course, expand on the whole thing a little bit. These wasps, they do lay their eggs in other animals, in tarantulas; they serve as hosts, and creatures hatch from them. Pretty much like it was in Alien, which probably took a lot of inspiration from nature as well.
And then we wanted to expand that because we thought, ‘Okay, we can make an interesting movie out of that, but it can’t be all, we have to go further, we have to surprise the audience because they’re going to get the concept, and then what can you do? Can you do just more wasps, bigger wasps—or can you do some crazy stuff?’ And then we thought, ‘Okay, one guy has a lump on his shoulder, and into that lump eggs will grow to full effect, and it would be kind of weird, and maybe he would still be alive when it hatches. We started thinking in those directions to go a bit more crazy and a bit more… we tried having sick ideas. I mean, it gets even sicker towards the end.
Dread Central: Can you speak about the cast?
Benni Diez: It was great. Casting took a long time because for a low-budget movie like this, it’s not easy to get actors with a name… they are very careful about which corner they want to put themselves in later on, and they don’t know if a movie turns out well. If you got to someone and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to make a movie with seven-foot wasps.’ at first it sounds kind of, I don’t know, it sounds like trash, ‘Why should I do that?’ Sometimes it took a lot of time convincing people. Once they were on board, they gave their everything, especially Lance [Henriksen (interview here)], such a great and generous actor. He’s so experienced and also still, in spite of being a genre icon, a very versatile character actor. The first things he said to me when I had him on the phone were really smart ideas about his character and how to make him more realistic and a little more funny. A lot of the humor that’s in the scenes with him comes from his ideas because he’s actually a very very funny guy and a great comedic actor. I think this aspect of him has been underused a lot in most of his movies.
Dread Central: You started out doing VFX and worked on Lars von Trier’s Melancholia; what shots did you work on?
Benni Diez: There’s a handful of shots where Kiefer Sutherland and his son construct this little wire thing, where they look into the sky, onto the approaching planet, and they create a circle out of wire so they can compare the size and can determine how fast it’s approaching. We did a few of those shots because everything behind that wire had to be rotoscoped out and the planet had to be put in, which are fairly small shots, but they were quite difficult to do because pretty much everything had to be painted out and replaced by another background planet. But it was a fun little job, and it was for a great movie. I really love that movie, and as I said, it looks really nice on a resume. Other than that, I’ve done a lot of smaller commercial stuff. I did, as you said, short films. The thing is, before I even started studying effects, I always felt like I’m a filmmaker at heart. I always made my own movies when I was young. I started teaching myself animation when I was fourteen.
Dread Central: How did that lead you on a path to direct?
Benni Diez: Later on, I thought, ‘Wow, it’s awesome that now we can study that stuff and really do it as a profession. So I approached that because I thought, y’know—Making genre films always interested me, and it’s sometimes hard, especially in Germany, when you study directing, to do crazy genre stuff. You try to go the more serious, dramatic way, which is not wrong, but would have been wrong for me. So I deliberately decided to study effects because I knew I could still direct my own stuff. The long-term goal was always to do a feature film. It was just a question of how do I accomplish that, and when does it happen. A lot of stars aligned and a lot of work that paid off later on, and now we ended up with Stung a few years later. So I’m really happy how it turned out. It was always the thing I wanted to do, but it took awhile, and as I said, I’m really glad that it worked, and I hope I can do another one now. It’s definitely the thing I want to do for the rest of my life, if it’s up to me.
Dread Central: Where you influenced by the German genre filmmaker cycle [Andreas Schnaas, Jörg Buttgeriet]?
Benni Diez: No, actually I was really mostly influenced by the international things. More than horror, it was sci-fi. Horror always lends itself to making your first feature film because you can do it on a certain scale and get away with a few things. For example, if you did a serious sci-fi movie, you’d have to know your stuff way better; it can get very complex and expensive. I’m mainly a sci-fi guy, so I’m mostly influenced by that. Films like Aliens were the best of all because they combined the greatest things about genre films—horror creatures and psychological horror, a very serious approach to the emotions of the characters, but also, y’know, hardcore spaceships, sci-fi, it’s always amazing… and all the Spielberg and Cameron movies in general— I like movies that traumatize you in a good way, so you leave the theater and you feel, ‘Wow, that was a roller-coaster ride!’ What I don’t like are horror movies that are too cynical, y’know, just torturing people and horror, just leave you with a sad and depressed feeling. I think reality is depressing enough. Even Stung, as crazy as it gets sometimes and as brutal as it gets sometimes, it’s still supposed to leave the audience, y’know, want to go home, maybe have a beer, maybe make love. That’s the kind of movies I like.
Dread Central: That reminds me of something that Vincent Price said: that he wasn’t making scary films, he was making love stories, because as soon as you jump, you hold on to your loved one tighter.
Benni Diez: Exactly. Even with a horrifying movie, if you forget to put the element of love in it, what do you have? You need something to reference the horrible stuff too. If the movie only shows you horrible things, you kind of get numb. You want to have a core element of warmth or love or genuine emotion to mirror the terrible things. That’s when a movie really works, when it gives a reference.
Benni Diez’s Stung opened in limited theaters and on VOD courtesy of IFC Midnight TODAY! The film stars Clifton Collins, Jr., Jessica Cook, and Lance Henriksen.
Synopsis:
In a remote country villa set amid foggy rural farmlands, the elderly widow of a pharmaceutical magnate holds an annual garden party for the local elite in honor of her late husband. But the festivities take a grisly turn when a plague of giant killer wasps is unleashed on the unsuspecting partygoers, leaving the caterers, Julia and Paul, pitted against the seven-foot mutant predators in a deadly fight for survival.
A delightfully gory horror comedy from first-time director/mad scientist Benni Diez, Stung revels in its outlandish premise, never shying away from the opportunity to showcase the film’s gruesome creations. With its seamless blend of CGI and oozing practical effects, this modern update of the ’80s creature feature is a thrilling and inventive roller coaster ride.
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