It takes a mix of lunacy and integrity to make films as uncompromising as Down Terrace (2008), Kill List (2011), Sightseers (2012) and A Field in England (2013). While there might be a prevailing tone of dark humour and horror to Ben Wheatley’s films, really his defining trait is independence. He starts projects with his own money, so that control cannot be taken away from him further down the line. The Essex-born director was a comic fan and graphic artist in his youth. Coming through sketch shows and comedy series in the Noughties, Wheatley’s cinematic visions are clearly drawn, his subversion of genre and tired conventions utterly original. Roaring successes in his own inimitable style now mean big suitors like HBO seek his magic touch. More greatness is expected, but only after his latest project, an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High Rise, brings more dark intelligence to our screens.
Interview Joshua Bullock Artwork Anna Galkina
46 47 Joshua Bullock : Ben, you started out in subversive TV comedy: The Wrong BW: Rob and I had made a short film ten years earlier called ‘Rob Loves Door, Ideal and Time Trumpet. Why do you think you’ve ended up giving Kerry’. That was a really important film for us because it was based around so many comic actors dramatic roles in your films? something that had happened to Rob, so we’d made it with the people who were involved in the story: Rob kind of played himself, Kerry kind Ben Wheatley: I think there’s something brilliant about comedians who of played herself and his dad kind of played himself. We had a barebones act straight because they already know how to do the hard thing, which script which was then improvised on and I shot it in quite a loosey-goosey, is making people laugh. It’s always the flip side of the clown, as the cliché documentary style. Amy Jump [now Wheatley’s wife] came in to edit it, goes. A lot of comedy is based around sadness, so they usually have quite and she introduced a really flinty, hard editing style to it that we hadn’t a big reservoir of it for more dramatic roles. done before. I had done a bit of hard-cut, jump-cut stuff I’d got from New Wave film. She had a different approach. She didn’t give a fuck about film JB: Yo u r fi r s t fi l m , Down Terrace, had elements of comedy on the surface history – she’s a very experienced and very talented artist and just saw of a deeper dramatic tension. The dialogue seems natural and colloquial it with a completely different and fresh eye. That editing style was what but it doesn’t digress from the story as some improvisational scripts can. made that film and Down Terrace possible. The cut style in the film is not as hard as the short because I’d come off of doing a lot of TV – that had BW: Rob and I made a lot improv-y stuff over the ten years before Down calmed it down. I’m an editor and I love editing, I love seeing it, I don’t Te r ra c e, so that went into the film. Also, we were working quickly and the necessarily believe in invisible editing as the best editing. I want to see only way we could do it was treat it like documentary and harvest enough the chops in it and with this I wanted to see the emotion changing from material that would be usable. One of the big problems with low budget moment to moment. is you’re forcing people to do the script, which might not be brilliant, and you’ve got nowhere to hide from it. It usually ends up looking like JB: You’ve joked in the past that two major influences when you were the actors are bad and they’re usually not. It’s more likely the script is a making films were The Sopranos box set and Hollywood Blocking, an bit ropey and the actors literally can’t say it. We knew the meaning and instructional DVD about camera positioning and setups. tone of it was right but sometimes the order of the words wasn’t. It’s very difficult to script that close, stuttery delivery so we thought we’d just BW: I’d watched Hollywood Blocking before and thought I knew it all. When let them do it and put it in their own words: not making stuff up, just you’re shooting TV and there’s such a turnover of shots to get through remembering in a more relaxed way. everyday it grinds you down – you run out of ideas for coverage. So I used it for the comedy series Ideal (2011) I shot with Johnny Vegas. It basically JB: How did you meet Rob Hill who plays the film’s main character, and ended up as a playbook like you’d get for American football. whose real dad plays his fictional father in the film? JB: One of the issues some people claim to have with conceptual art is BW: When I met Rob, I was in my first year at university and he was that there doesn’t seem to be a rebellion from craft – no one has spent doing his A-levels. He’d started making a film called Project Assassin with years learning drawing or printmaking to then subvert it. Has all the more Andy and Mike Hurst. It took them four or five years to do it. I helped formulaic TV and advertising work you’ve done as a director given you out, did the storyboards and wrote bits of script for it but not very much. rules to break? That was an eye opener: they went to Cannes on their own, found a guy in a bar and got a German distributor for it. That showed me all you needed BW: Maybe, but it’s almost that the filmmaking tools and the language of was confidence, gumption and hard work and you could actually do it. it are all there to find. Film is a weird art because it got invented in the first You don’t need to go to film school. You don’t need anyone’s permission. twenty years of its life and they uninvented it half way through because sound completely fucked everything up. Early cinema is as wild as anything JB: You can’t hide behind the fact that it is expensive to make a debut anyone is doing now. We’re not at the cutting edge of cinematic craft – we’re film any longer. trying to catch up with what’s already been invented. To do anything that looks like it’s got any intention behind it should be applauded, so when I BW: Not at all. I’m doing lots of tests at the moment on iPhones. The see films that have any kind of authorship I think it’s great. That analogy iPhone is a beautiful thing. The new iPhone 6 shoots really good pictures. of art and its current stage of abstraction doesn’t really hold. Film isn’t I just bought the Zumi 2. It’s a weird little Japanese camera and it comes like that because it’s a craft. You’re not going to get an abstract cupboard in bubble-gum pink and shoots like an Instagram video camera. because if one of the drawers didn’t open you’d be fucked. Film has that issue because there’s a lot of ways you can push the form around, have all JB: How much would that set you back? sorts of stories. That’s where I live. My films aren’t necessarily the easiest to understand for mainstream audiences but they do still adhere to pretty BW: 120 quid. Everyone seems to think now they’ve got DSLRs like strict storytelling processes. the Canon 5D, everything’s sorted. But DSLRs just mean that everything looks the fucking same. The iPhone is probably as powerful as, or is almost JB: All your films reconcile themselves in some form of conclusion. as good as, some of the cameras I was using in the Nineties. We were lucky to get a Red to shoot Down Terrace – it had just come out and was BW: They’re not Stan Brakhage. When I hear criticism of my films a bit of an unknown. Filmmakers can fall into an image arms race. Their that they’re hard to understand, I think, ‘These people haven’t seen any demands get bigger and bigger, but what that eventually means is they Tarkovsky!’ If A Field in England is the hardest thing to unpack for them don’t make a film. They never do it because they’re too worried about then they really have lived quite a sheltered cinematic life. People have a what it’s going to look like. very low tolerance of stuff even slightly outside of what they want and a very high opinion of their own needs. It’s fine – a lot of this criticism would JB: How did Down Terrace come about? once have been in the pub but now it’s right up in your face. To p : A Field In England © Drafthouse Films; bottom: Kill List © IFC Films
48 49 JB: When you were growing up in Essex in the Seventies and Eighties, far away from the metropolis, Down Terrace, it never would have happened and we’ve always had a slightly kamikaze approach to what were your cultural references and creative beginnings? stuff. We’d go out and we’d pay for it ourselves and then Channel 4 got involved when they got wind of it and we were like, ‘Oh, well just cover our costs.’ Once you’ve got a little bit of money BW: Not film to begin with. Stuff like Action Man and Toy Soldiers and dressing up are probably stashed away you can do that. Down Terrace only cost 6,000 pounds to make. If you’re in a situation more useful to me now than cinema was. I used to play a lot and make up the voices for things where you’ve made your own film and you are the master of it, you’ve edited it yourself and and have a very active creative life. I drew a lot, all the time, obsessively. Up until I was seventeen or controlled every aspect, and it does well, then it’s very hard for people to tell you what to do after eighteen I had a massive bump on my hand where I held the pen. Looking at it now, it’s gone down that. If you haven’t done that and you’re going to them with your hand out, you’re basically asking but it used to be a huge bunion thing on the side because I drew so much. Thinking about story for a collaboration and that’s not my flavour. Obviously there are lots of things people can say that and image together is the basis, the pleasure I get from making films, but it’s also my background will help you but you really need to be the master of your own destiny as much as you can be. The and training. It makes you sound like an old man going on about the time before the Internet – technology is there to do it so there’s no real excuse. It just means your first film can’t be fucking but the latest films literally were just not available, you could not get them. Movies would come set in space or a period drama with thousands of extras. and go but it was a massive effort to go and see anything. My parents weren’t very interested so we just never went. It was weird with Star Wars – I’ve got a very vivid memory of looking at the JB: So how has the transition been made to developing the HBO series Silk Road and a big budget Sunday Times supplement magazine and seeing pictures of Star Destroyers and then not seeing the thriller like Freak Shift? film for another year. BW: On my first trip out to the States I was pretty green and naive. Again I didn’t have much except JB: What have been the most formative creative partnerships of your career to date? for The Wrong Door [BBC comedy sketch series] and that’s not a lot to trade on. I went around and talked to all the major networks and spent a week out there pitching an American version – it was JB: My mate Dom Sutton from school was the first person I knocked around with – he formed a interesting but nothing came of it. Over the years I’ve gone back, I’ve got an American agent and I’ve lot of my taste, introduced me to music. We collected comics together, he wrote and I drew comic met loads of people at film festivals. It’s a project – it takes a long time to get stuff together and you’ve books with him. That’s basically the beginning of the pattern of how I’ve always worked with got to be in the right place at the right time. You’ve got to commit to it as well which I don’t tend to other people, to what ends I’m not sure. Maybe it’s slightly to do with showing off, it’s the cancer do because I’ve been very lucky in making a lot of films back to back. Scripts come in and I look at in your ego when you’re a kid who can draw. I fed off the idea of showing my drawings to adults them and go, ‘Well, I can’t do it because I’m doing something else.’ We’re developing our own films and that was the biggest thrill when it came to drawing. When Amy and I edit, it’s very fierce – a that we are in complete control over – a much better situation with far more control than signing lot of arguing goes on – I don’t have a problem with that. It’s a bit tiring but that’s fine because on as a hired hand. Amy and I wrote the Freak Shift script and started to get it financed by Film4 but these ideas have to be thoughtful. it was taking a long time and we thought fuck it, we don’t want to lose a year to this so we made A Field in England while it was going on. We went back to Freak Shift and then High Rise came up JB: Aesthetically A Field in England is an open canvas and visually stunning, quite a departure from so we thought, OK we’ll do that. We’re just basically jumping backwards and forwards during these the claustrophobia of Down Terrace and Kill List, or even Sightseers which has the landscape and projects waiting for them to come off. Silk Road is ongoing – I’m going out there to talk to HBO exteriors of the Yorkshire Dales but is still more restrained. How has that evolution come about? about that so I’ve just been drafting and redrafting and re-honing the treatment for the first episode.
BW: Sometimes you go into these things with a set of goals and one of the goals in Field was an JB: Would you ever consider writing something that you yourself didn’t produce or direct? extension or the deepening of focus. We wanted to shoot stuff that was focused to infinity; we did a load of camera tests to do it. The average focal depth of the films has got deeper each time. Down BW: I guess so, but the thing about my own writing is that the element that comes with it, that Te r ra c e was shot on 50mm, the focus is about two inches – by the time it got to Field, we were fixes the script, is me directing it. If I wrote for someone else I’d be worried that the script might using a massively deep focus. That was something that had come out of Laurie [Rose, director of end up looking a bit shit. photography] and I working in TV. We’d fought for years within TV to show a deeper field because the cameras wouldn’t do it. JB: Some writers create worlds or have a style of writing that invites its own adjective – Ballardian in the case of J.G. Ballard, whose book High Rise you have adapted into your latest film. What do JB: All your films are quite kinetic but at some point there will be a slowing down, sometimes literally you understand that word to mean? into slow motion where you fetishise a shot. Like in A Field in England when Reece Shearsmith comes out the tent with a rope around his neck. Do you plan these set pieces in advance? BW: Ballard is odd – science fiction that’s set in the future but is happening in the moment, in the now. His vision is seeing everything as alien. I think that freshness to examine something under the BW: It depends what the film is, but on Field, a lot of the story is a linear movement. We wanted microscope and twist it and make you look at it afresh – that seems to me the Ballardian tone. High to make that shot very graphic. That was just part of the camera setup that day. The plan was that Rise was one of those very formative books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Naked Lunch that Reece was going to come down and walk across the camera. The power of the shot came from I’d read as a teenager and that really seeped into my mind. I just wondered why it hadn’t been made two things: one was leaving it alone and letting it play out without cutting it; the other was that into a film. I then found people had been trying to make it happen since it was written but not we didn’t know what Reece was going to do. He’s really fascinating to work with. He has a really quite managed it. I think the feeling I had about it when we considered our approach was: High Rise deep knowledge of British horror, he felt that script very deeply and he knew stuff I wasn’t even isn’t set in the future, it’s set in the past and the book itself is a book written in the past looking to aware of. He was channelling all sorts of things when he came out of the tent. We used the first the future, but we now live in a future beyond its future. To treat it like that was the way to crack it. take and he looked unbelievable. We just stood there and filmed the fucking thing and just went, ‘My God, brilliant’. For me I find the tree in the scene is as scary as Reece. So that’s how it all came JB: You do have a love of the supernatural and spooky even if it’s a way of exploring the mundane. together, it wasn’t like we thought ‘this is the money shot’ because the film was shot in twelve days. Even Down Terrace has this innocuous looking family with normal dramatic tensions. There are far Everything was shot really fast. While we were there, they were shooting Thor 2 around the corner. darker forces at play but, at the same time, not really. What’s darker than a mother who doesn’t love That field was the car park for Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood – the last big production that was in there. her son or a father who is a nihilist and communicates that view of the world to his son?
JB: A Field in England had an interesting multi-platform distribution: it was released simultaneously BW: Exactly – the drama doesn’t need much. The drama is in everything, in everyone – every in theatres, on DVD and online. Are you reassured by the state of the British film industry and the relationship is the same drama playing out again and again and again. That’s the crux of it, everyone funding and distribution opportunities for upcoming filmmakers? is unique but everyone is exactly the fucking same. Down Terrace is a drama about structure – families and betrayal and power within families. That’s why people like gangster films, they get that, plus BW: It’s tough – we never went for funding to start with. If we had tried to get the finance for people shoot each other.
50 51 JB: Kill List is a great example of a film sitting inside the cloak of a genre BW: As I finish one project, the route to the next one is already sorted. We and after twenty minutes dropping the domestic setting and turning the are almost into pre-production for the next film Free Fire [a hard-boiled whole film on its head as it accelerates into this dark, horrific thriller. thriller set in Boston] and that project would have been written two How did you plan for that? years ago probably. Sightseers was a very specific choice and a reaction to doing Kill List. I wanted a comedy because I knew I’d end up doing loads BW: I’d been using a technique after reading all these terrible ‘how-to- of horror films if I wasn’t careful. A pretty noble thing to end up doing, write’ script books. You simply write one to ninety on a sheet of A4 and nothing wrong with it, but I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to be able to then you write what happens in each minute, then you start expanding each make lots of different kinds of films if I could. Then A Field in England was of the minutes into paragraphs and eventually you get a script out of it. I definitely a reaction to Sightseers in that it was incredibly weird and a step was reading about the Kubrick idea of non-submersible units of imagery: back from the mainstream. It was back to our roots, the Down Terrace days. sections that didn’t need narrative necessarily to hold them together, where Free Fire is very commercial in comparison to High Rise. On the other the image was enough. The images in Kill List were things I had taken hand it’s a process-led look at what a gunfight really looks like: it’s all about from my own childhood nightmares or nightmares from adulthood, of the mechanics of how guns work, how unreliable they are and how hard fears. But the basic idea was to make something really fucking terrifying. it is statistically to shoot anything in a real situation. In a way it has a very That is what guided it. In a similar way to Sightseers, where everything similar dynamic to A Field in England. In the same way that Kill List and was geared towards trying to make people laugh, Kill List was trying to Sightseers are kind of the same film. make people really upset. JB: Martin Scorsese came full circle for you. He called A Field in England JB: There’s a grim sense of inevitability to Neil Maskell’s hitman character ‘audacious and wildly brilliant – a stunning cinematic experience’. It was as he murders his way to his grim fate. on the poster! You got to meet him and he’s executive producing Free Fire.
BW: He gets what he wants – to be left alone. He isn’t engaging with his BW: As a film enthusiast, I couldn’t quite imagine that he would be a family and he’s not engaging with the world. He has got everything but real person. I can’t believe that I got from here to there. He is probably he doesn’t know it. He enjoys the killing too much. Some people out more influential than anyone in the world on me wanting to make films. there are made for that kind of life and they are just living out of time The model of a director. Then I thought, ‘Shit, he’s met Kurosawa. I am you know? That was how we developed Down Terrace as well – the idea one handshake away from everyone who’s ever done anything in film.’ that those people were a family that went back thousands of years, doing the same things. They’re just there on the land, cutting people’s throats and leaving them in ditches. An early draft of A Field in England had the same characters in it. They were just called the Sussex men. There was a draft where they guide the soldiers into a massive trap and everyone gets killed and then they slink off.
JB: We have spoken a lot about cinematic philosophy but there is also a social context to your films. We see suburban malaise in Down Terrace’s Brighton and the class divide in Sightseers. The films are far-fetched stories set in contexts that a British audience instinctively recognises. Even the killers in Kill List are army veterans and have that baggage.
BW: I loved reading about how that original cycle of America’s Seventies horror like Dawn of the Dead was influenced by the news and reflected its media environment. It’s important a filmmaker reflects that, because if you’re not doing that you’re just talking about other movies. Just go and watch the really good films that you are basing stuff on. It’s like a serpent eating its own tail isn’t it? Kill List as a title is a B-movie, petrol station DVD format, with faces on it and a man holding a shotgun. I like genre films. They made me want to make films as much as watching Alan Clarke or Denis Potter or Jodorowsky. I don’t have a hierarchy as to whether films are good or bad. I don’t believe in kitsch and I don’t believe in watching bad films because they are bad. I think it’s patronising bullshit. Films are individual and if you like them then you have to watch them on their terms. Your job as a filmmaker is to dig emotions out of people. The thing that woke me up in the cinema was watching Ta x i D r i ve r and just going, ‘What the fuck is this?’ It felt so weird and intense and I had never seen anything like it. That’s cinema, everything else is like television. Watching something that you like and know, saying, ‘I love these kind of films.’
JB: For each project, do you consciously make the decision to do something Clockwise from top left: Location scouting with producer Andy Starke for Kill List; poster for High Rise released later this year; French poster for Sightseers different to your last film? designed by Ben Wheatley; Poster for A Field In England; location scouting Kill List, eerie woods; Robin Hill gets angry in Down Terrace, Wheatley’s first feature
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