BEN WHEATLEY 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.