Benni Diez

Diez has been named variously as a producer or co-director for the third installment of the Skyline series, Skylines, currently in production with release anticipated in 2020.

The project took about three and a half years to complete. Stung is a 2015 German-American independent romantic comic horror film starring Matt O'Leary, Jessica Cook, Lance Henriksen, Clifton Collins Jr., Cecilia Pillado and Eve Slatner.

In 2011, Diez decided that working on commercials took too much time away from being a filmmaker, and left the company to go back to freelancing and pursuing his own projects.

After graduating with a diploma in visual effects and animation, Diez served as CEO for the Cologne-based production company founded for and named after Kingz from 2008 to 2011. Kingz Entertainment provides visual effects for commercials (for Toshiba and Shell, among others). Diez reused footage from an advertisement made for the International Film School Cologne, Keine billigen Tricks (2009), to create a new short of his own, Space Chase.

During his first year at the film academy, Diez collaborated with fellow student Marinko Spahić on a short mixed live action animation film titled Druckbolzen (Pressure Bolt, 2003), starring Benjamin Biehn [de] and made for €250. The short played at several European international film festivals, winning an award at Aubagne [fr] for sound in 2003, and the Shine Award at Bradford, for technical innovation in 2004. Ain't It Cool News called Pressure Bolt "stunning" and "quite possibly the best film ever made for under five hundred bucks". Diez teamed with Biehn again, as screenwriter, to make a short comic horror movie titled Martha (2004) starring Monika Manz [de] and Hermann Schevtschenko. Diez and Spahić collaborated again in 2004 on a short science fiction film, 90 Grad Different, starring Steffen Wink. That summer, they began their third and longest project together, a thesis film, an alien invasion thriller with hip hop and gangster rap motifs; the title, Kingz (2007) is derived from hip hop slang. The twenty-minute film stars Mathis Landwehr and pop music stars Bela B, Olli Banjo [de] , and Claire Oelkers [de] , and features martial arts, swordplay, and gunfighting. It was shown at international film festivals, winning Best Short Film at Trieste S+F in 2008 and a Méliès d'Argent in 2009. Todd Brown praised the cinematography and called Diez "an effects god"; the film "fuses a bit of gang culture with bits of horror, scifi, and martial arts action and does it all remarkably well... Landwehr gets time to show his moves and the whole thing just fits together beautifully and cries out to be made into a feature." Five years later, Brown recalled: "that short was far and away one of the best I saw in that year, an amazing blend of scifi, action and horror elements that made me a fan for life."

Diez worked for agencies and production companies in Bavaria, and made his own videos before enrolling at Baden-Württemberg Film Academy, in Ludwigsburg, in 2002, specialising in visual effects and animation. He said the video Bullet – Highway Patrol (2002), made in three days "from idea to finished clip", was what got him into the academy.

Born in 1979 in Starnberg, Germany, Diez developed a love for horror and science-fiction filmmaking in the early 1990s. In a 2015 interview, Diez said: "I always felt like I'm a filmmaker at heart. I always made my own movies when I was young." He began teaching himself computer animation when he was fourteen, using "the very first computer animation program."