{"id":2791,"date":"2016-05-20T22:20:59","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T22:20:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2016\/05\/20\/ben-wheatleys-attack-of-social-vertigo\/"},"modified":"2016-05-20T22:20:59","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T22:20:59","slug":"ben-wheatleys-attack-of-social-vertigo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2016\/05\/20\/ben-wheatleys-attack-of-social-vertigo\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Wheatley\u2019s attack of social vertigo"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Ex-Press \/ Katherine Monk<\/em><\/p>\n

VANCOUVER \u2013 \u201cIf I had to draw something right now, I would draw a cross face. I can draw them quite well,\u201d says film director Ben Wheatley, revealing a secret talent \u2013 and maybe, just a hint of repressed hostility.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to read his face. Half-covered in facial hair and wearing a look of unmistakable fatigue, the director of Sightseers, Down Terrace, A Field in England, the new feature High-Rise and a forthcoming Martin Scorsese-produced thriller called Free Fire.<\/p>\n

looks like a prisoner who just sat down in the warden\u2019s office: Present, honest, but not altogether enthusiastic.<\/p>\n

This is something he has to do. When you make a movie with a studio, they expect you to hit the road and talk about it, and for several months this past year, that\u2019s exactly what Wheatley did for High-Rise \u2013 which finally opens in North American theatres this weekend.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did 22 screenings in the UK before the release,\u201d says Wheatley. \u201cI went up and down the country. I wanted to see who was coming, to look in their eyes and see who they were. I thought the film is weird enough, and it was getting a pretty big push from Studio Canal at that point. And I thought it would just be churlish to sit back and say, oh, I have done my job. I think it\u2019s important to get it out there as much as possible. I\u2019m glad I did. I would do it again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wheatley says when you make the kind of work he and his wife, writer-editor Amy Jump do, it\u2019s highly affirming to see it connect with other like-minded souls.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people who show up are people who love cinema. And they are up for a challenge and excited about movies that are different.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Different\u2019 has been a word used to describe Wheatley\u2019s oeuvre ever since he made Down Terrace, a low-budget black comedy about father and son assassins who don\u2019t get on all that well. Social realism tinged with a nightmare sensibility, Wheatley\u2019s films often feature grotesque violence, but not presented with the titillation of a slasher film. His movies seem desperate to explore the human condition without wincing at the ugly stuff.<\/p>\n

\u201cI find it difficult to talk about the work as a piece, as a whole,\u201d he says in response to a question about theme. \u201cI remember going to Moscow and they showed Down Terrace and A Field in England and Sightseers\u2026 and the first question was \u2018Why are you afraid of old people?\u201d<\/p>\n

Wheatley laughs. \u201cThe films are all really different. And they are all the same. We go through the scripts and we go through the way we shoot and the way we cut and we try not to repeat or reference ourselves. You watch them back and they are kind of the same film again and again and again.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s pointless trying to get Wheatley to articulate his sensibility. You have to watch the work to really understand where he and his creative collaborator Jump are coming from.<\/p>\n

You have to watch Tom Hiddleston and Jeremy Irons holed up in a 1970s-era concrete high-rise, replaying scenes from the French Revolution as scripted by science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard to grasp the strange Wheatley fruit. Or, you could just watch Alejandro Jodorowsky\u2019s El Topo and David Lynch\u2019s Eraserhead, two of Wheatley\u2019s favorites that speak to the same abstracts of the soul, while sticking a finger into the third eye socket.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve also seen all of Cronenberg\u2019s stuff. It speaks to me,\u201d says Wheatley.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, it\u2019s never been about box office. I have a responsibility to make sure I don\u2019t lose people loads of money but I certainly don\u2019t chose projects for things that are sure fire money spinners. In the back of my head I hope we can, but I think independent cinema itself was born out of maybe one or two movies that people decided to go to,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow independent cinema is being killed. First it was by VHS, and now by DVD and on demand\u2026 a whole new generation has been brought up where their first point of contact with cinema is not in the cinema. It un-trains people from going to the cinema just to find stuff. There are massive advantages to that because it means so much is available, but it also means the strangling of the theatrical release as a way of a movie making money. And that is bad for everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wheatley says he\u2019s interested to see people try old-school release strategies, such as Tarantino\u2019s reprise of the roadshow and the long, single-screen stand. But as High-Rise taught him on several scores, there\u2019s but a hair\u2019s breadth of difference between a science-fiction film and a period one.<\/p>\n

Originally published in 1975, the same year that David Cronenberg\u2019s similarly themed Shivers made everyone afraid of the bathtub, Ballard\u2019s book looks at class stratification from an almost literal perspective, where the Royals live in the penthouse and the nobodies populate the lower floors \u2013 the gap between the haves and have-nots growing more urgent in every scene.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I reread the book I realized how prescient it was,\u201d says Wheatley. \u201cIt had gone from being a piece of science-fiction to something that you\u2019d see in the newspapers. And I think basically period movies and science-fiction movies are the same thing. They are just the shifting of focus so that stories about now can be told in a slightly different way. And I think that\u2019s what they have always been. I think a film that isn\u2019t relevant to this moment doesn\u2019t make any sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wheatley and Jump did made adjustments to Ballard\u2019s material to make it feel more contemporary regarding character, but the rest is a testament to the \u201870s and its penchant for aggregate concrete, sexual promiscuity and formulaic answers to social ills.<\/p>\n

Tension between the classes features largely, as it does in most of Wheatley and Jump\u2019s work \u2013 one way or another.<\/p>\n

Wheatley will tell you he\u2019s not an Eton boy and that he earned his first pennies drawing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI met my wife at a disco. We were 16,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was like West Side Story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wheatley laughs again. \u201cI like the fact she is a serious creature. She refuses, point blank, to do any press or tour. And I think she made the right decision. She doesn\u2019t even talk to financiers\u2026 On set we can get very screamy with one another. But it\u2019s all okay after we wrap. She just gets to create, to do the work, which is fantastic for her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Wheatley is stuck here with me, talking about High-Rise and a master class he gave in Vancouver. \u201cIt\u2019s really more of a talk about my movies than any master class,\u201d says the man who would have been a fireman or a decorator had he not followed his girlfriend to art school.<\/p>\n

\u201cCareer artist is a different thing because you\u2019re earning money from art, and I\u2019ve always earned money from art. I think what happened is I was about six and stayed at a friend\u2019s house and we did drawings. Then I stole one of my friend\u2019s drawings and said \u2018look what I made!\u2019 And my parenbts were like wow, that\u2019s brilliant. Well done! And after that, I could draw. And then I started drawing a lot and did it professionally\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

You stole a drawing and claimed it as your own?<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah. Is that going to go up top now?\u201d<\/p>\n

No. But it\u2019s interesting.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is, because I have always drawn. But when I was 30, I realized I couldn\u2019t draw that well, and I was much happier about it after that. Now I draw a lot more. And I get a lot more pleasure from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chances are, Wheatley will be doing a lot more directing, too. High-Rise may be his biggest film to date, but Free Fire is going to be even bigger, given the cast includes recent Oscar winner Brie Larson, Armie Hammer and Cillian Murphy.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, it\u2019s not about a bigger budget, but about finding a bigger audience \u2013 and meeting it halfway. What do you have to give up to get that big audience? In a way, it\u2019s far more perverse because you play a narrative game with your audience, pushing them to the breaking point. I\u2019m really interested in that.\u201d<\/p>\n

High-Rise opens in select cities Friday<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ex-Press \/ Katherine Monk VANCOUVER \u2013 \u201cIf I had to draw something right now, I would draw a cross face. I can draw them quite well,\u201d says film director Ben Wheatley, revealing a secret talent \u2013 and maybe, just a hint of repressed hostility. It\u2019s hard to read his face. 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