Every interview comes with its own set of challenges. After all, you’re walking into a situation with about 15 minutes to talk to someone about their work. But you enter without knowing how long they’ve been doing interviews. Perhaps they’re jetlagged. Maybe the interviewers before you asked the kind of questions that eschew a discussion of the work and delve deep into tabloid gossip. When interviewing Ben Wheatley, director of High-Rise, any apprehension was quickly skirted when the filmmaker started out by asking me a question about the tattoo on my left arm, which is from the ‘60s British show The Prisoner. Before I could even ask a question, any potential tension evaporated as Wheatley proved to be a friendly and thoughtful interview subject, not to mention one of the finest emerging filmmakers.
High-Rise is an adaptation of the 1975 novel by J.G. Ballard, with the screenwriting duties undertaken by Wheatley’s wife and frequent collaborator Amy Jump. “Her challenges were that the book doesn’t have much dialogue in it, and also little differences between the forms,” Wheatley said of the challenges to bring Ballard’s work to the screen. “You know, thinking about it terms like a film – you’re doing a scene in this space and it’s [explosion sound effect]. You see everything and it’s totally literal. With a book, it’s like a torch. They’re showing you tiny bits of it and you’re making up the rest of it in your head. I think bits of it are different than the author tells you later on, you don’t worry about that. In a film, you’re giving everything away straight away. So sometimes things in a book that seem terrifying and mysterious are not mysterious and terrifying in a film situation. Wrangling that was difficult.”
The look of High-Rise is fairly retro, though the film never presents a specific time in which it takes place. “I’m hesitant to put dates on stuff anyway because it just gives ammunition to people to tug at it. People get cross about seeing something of the corner of the frame and go, ‘But that’s not right!’ We didn’t want to get into all of that,” the director said. “In a way, the period it’s set in is an alternate period. It never happened. This is certainly not a documentary. We started to think that this is a bubble, a time bubble that exists somewhere between ’75 and ’85, but I don’t know. It doesn’t have to conform to the rules about period. It has the design in it from the ’70s and there’s other design that we made up. Then there’s also a mix of all sorts of different periods, and the time period of the music is all over the place as well.“
With films like A Field in England and Sightseers under his belt, is there any pressure for Wheatley to move into the realm of franchise filmmaking? “I basically do what I like, but I’m interested in it,” Wheatley replied. “I’m interested in doing all types of movies. You just have to go with your eyes open. If you do a Marvel film, that’s a very specific genre of filmmaking. I always think of genre films as it’s not always what’s in the film, it’s how the films are made. The superhero genre is one thing, but the action genre of a movie that’s over $160 million is a different world than a movie that is made for $20 [million] or where I’ve been, which is about $10 [million]. High-Rise was about $10 million. There’s a lot of pressure, and rightly because you have to get the money back. There’s no point in making A Field in England for $20 million because they’d probably find me floating in the Thames somewhere with concrete boots on.”
When I respond that I would actually like see Wheatley make a bigger budget version of A Field in England, the director quips, “It would’ve been exactly the same but I would’ve kept all the money.”
Trying different forms of filmmaking is a challenge that Wheatley welcomes. “I’m interested in working within the Hollywood system as much as I’m interested in doing indie stuff, and I don’t think there’s a contradiction in that.”
As evidenced by High-Rise, which is surely to be divisive among viewers, pressure to make crowd-pleasing work doesn’t factor into Wheatley’s process. “I just think about what I want to see and then I make it. Either for 6,000 pounds or 5.5 million, and it’s whoever will go with me to do that,” the director says of his own work. “It’s not as arrogant as it sounds. I think I understand that there’s an audience that likes me and I’m making movies for them. My gamble is that it’s big enough to support the budget of the film. It’s been borne out. High-Rise did pretty good in the UK, and that’s a massive relief for me. There’s an audience that will go to these things that are challenging and interesting. I’ve got nothing against cinema that is straight ahead and obvious, but with all things you should have a balanced diet.”
Even though the film may be divisive, the director has noticed it plays well in certain areas. “It’s interesting how it plays in different places. It played really well in San Sebastian, and the Spanish understood it quite a lot because they had a hard time with the banking crisis. I think it depends on how close the reaper has come,” he said. As for the film closing out the Newport Beach Film Festival, perhaps mimicking some of the film’s harsher themes, the director jokingly said, “Yeah, I’d like to think that they’d all go crazy and murder each other.”
During the press tour for High-Rise, the film’s star Tom Hiddleston has generated a lot of support for taking over the role of James Bond, something that Wheatley finds to be rather interesting. “The Bond thing is interesting because it just grew out of a tiny interview in the Sunday Times Magazine, where the journalist had gone, ‘If they asked you do Bond would you do it?’ And he went, ‘Yeah,’ which is a reasonable question with a reasonable answer. Within three or four days it was international news.” But there is a connection between High-Rise and James Bond that extends beyond the speculation surrounding Hiddleston. In fact, it’s about the clothes the famed actor wears in the film. “You know, it’s the suit from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” Wheatley said of Hiddleston’s suit in the film. “It’s the same cut. So if you look at pictures of George Lazenby and look at pictures of Hiddleston, it’s the same suit.”
Hiddleston wasn’t the only actor in High-Rise to put on a different suit, perhaps one slightly less iconic but one that leaves a memorable mark. In the role of Wilder, Luke Evans gives a performance that is reminiscent of the performances given by the late Oliver Reed in the ’70s. “I don’t think it was a massive leap for him to become ’70s Oliver Reed,” Wheatley said of Evans’ performance. “He knew exactly where he was going with that. The thing is about Oliver Reed is that he was just an exaggerated version of what that ‘70s man was like in Britain. As soon as I was talking to him about it, he knew what I was talking about. He knew people like that, as I did, Amy did, all of us did.”
Fans of Ben Wheatley’s films won’t have to wait too long for a follow-up to High-Rise, as his next film Free Fire is already in the can and set to hit theaters in September. “It’s been bonkers,” he said of making the two films in such close proximity. “We made them essentially back-to-back. I think we delivered the DCP for High-Rise and the next day I was in preproduction on Free Fire. Now it feels good. I’m not sure if it felt good while we were doing it. It was quite harsh. It’s great to have two movies done.”
What does the future hold for Ben Wheatley? “We’re writing a lot at the moments, so we’re just trying to get stuff finished,” he said. ” I’m writing Wages of Fear at the moment, so we’re doing a remake of Wages of Fear. Amy’s writing [indiscernible] Behavior, so one or the other. Hopefully, we’ll be in production on something by the beginning of next year. It’s hard to think about in the bubble of doing High-Rise press at the moment.” With High-Rise hitting VOD platforms this week and a theatrical release on May 13th, Wheatley can take a breather for now.
