Interview: Ben Wheatley talks High-Rise

Wheatley (second from left) on the set of High-Rise

Did making a film from a novel that is considered a cult classic add an extra sense of pressure?
It would be a kind of a pointless worry, because there’s nothing you can do. You just make the film you make. We went out of our way to try and represent the book as well as we could. Worrying about the legacy of the book was always at the front of our minds. Whether or not you do the book justice is not something I can judge, that’s up to the audience. There’s enough pressure going on without piling that on top. I did start to think about it more when the film was finished, you think that people will start to chime in about whether you got it right or wrong. By that point it’s too late anyway, so there’s not much point worrying about it then either.

Did working with a larger budget offer you more creative freedom or less? 
The pressure is always getting the most out of the budget whatever it is: spending it wisely, not fucking about, and ensuring that I’m not wasting money. It’s the transition of the money from the budget on to the screen. Making films is obviously an expensive thing, and potentially you can get into dead-ends where money can be wasted. It’s trying to minimise those things, that’s the main responsibility. Larger budgets are something I don’t tend to think about too much because it gets too terrifying. It’s just so abstract. I think about it in terms of how much money I’d be comfortable losing in a game of poker, which is about £10. When you start dealing with budgets that are as big as your house, which is a debt you spend twenty years paying off, it just becomes insane. When it gets to be ten or twenty times the cost of your house, you can’t even figure it. 

How much did having an actor the caliber of Tom Hiddleston help?
You can’t make the film without a certain amount of marquee names. There are sales equations that explain that ‘this person plus this person plus this person will equate to this much budget.’ It’s all very cold, but without that you can forget about doing anything over £1m. Whereas before I could pretty much cast whoever I wanted and it didn’t really matter, once you step up into that higher bracket it’s all worked out for you. It’s not like you just have a script, and they work out how much it’s going to cost, but rather you have a script and they tell you how much you can get. It’s a totally different thing. Tom is someone we always wanted anyway. Although it might sound like casting is the tail wagging the dog, if you get it right, you can be in a situation where it all comes together sweetly like it did for us with High-Rise. 

How difficult is that to navigate as an emerging filmmaker?
It just depends on what you’re trying to make. If you’ve got your heart set on your dream film about the history of Derbyshire pottery, it’s going to take you a long time to put it together. But if you work in genre, it is easier to make happen. 

Considering some of the content, was there a conscious effort to keep High-Rise from being an 18 certificate?
I did the BBFC course on certification to find out what makes a film an 18 certificate, and it’s not what you’d expect at all. I realised that there was no reason to make High-Rise an 18. When it went for certification I already knew what it was going to be, and it would have been a balls-up had it been given an 18. The whole landscape of certification has changed over the last ten years, so what you’re seeing are films being re-certificated down. I bought Terminator the other day, and it’s a 15 now. It was always an 18, as it was always one of the most violent films going, with a completely amoral message and a main protagonist killing unarmed women. You also see 12 certificates now that feel like they would have been rated 18 in the eighties. It’s all shifted a lot. 

Is the potential certification something that plays on your mind during the process of making a film?
You really have to go a long way to get an 18 now. Kill List was only given that because of the hammer stuff, he hits him again and again, and it’s sickening. The rest of that film is fine. When I did the BBFC course they actually showed Kill List as an example of how to get an 18 certificate. What I learned from making that was that true horror, which is outside the genre itself, something that’s just horrible, hurts the audience. They find it hard to recover from. If you want to upset and disturb viewers, which we did in Kill List, that’s fine. But if we’d done that in High-Rise, which is a film that’s quite complicated and has a lot of information that, as a viewer, you really need to be on your toes to digest, you can’t have the audience feeling repulsed for fifteen minutes when loads of important dialogue is happening, because they just won’t listen to it. 

Your previous films have shown that you don’t pander to audiences with unnecessary exposition. Is that something that attracted you to the novel initially?
That is a common theme between the films I’ve made and Ballard’s novel, he doesn’t really explain things at all. The thing that really attracted me to the book was how much he managed to get right. He was sitting at his manual typewriter in 1975 writing about 2016 quite accurately in many ways: the division of rich and poor, the isolation in modern society, the way we’re really reliant on technology. I just think that’s incredible. 

Elizabeth Moss and Tom Hiddleston in High-Rise

How much did the juxtaposition between the characters being both very normal and relatable, but also very alien and abnormal, interest you?
That’s one of the big things about Ballard; he looks at the normal world and sees it as science fiction. He totally dissembles things in his description, and makes you wonder what it must have been like seeing the world through his eyes. But that’s part of the deal between you and the audience. Things have to feel relatable and human on one level, for you to then pull some of the more extreme stuff out of the bag. If it’s all just odd, there’s no relation between you and the film and you’ll just drift away and not care. That’s a fine balance, seeing that adult relationships can be weak and strong, or good and bad at the same time, very contradictory and cowardly and all these things we are as people on a day-to-day basis. You don’t really get that in cinema, there’s no place for the cowardly lead. It’s like John McClane hiding in the toilet in Die Hard for half the film and not coming out because he’s scared of getting hurt. 

Was the lack of a likeable, heroic character problematic in pitching the film?
It wasn’t at the beginning, because you’ve always got the book. But once people saw the film, there were some grumbles about it because there’s a reason films are structured the way they are. People like that stuff; it makes sense of a chaotic world having a hero that will always win. It becomes uncomfortable when things are more morally grey. People are hard-wired into this retrospective reordering of events in both history and their own lives, to make sense of how they’ve got from one point to the other with them as the hero. It’s a hard thing for audiences when they’re presented with chaos. But that’s just a reality that I wanted to present. It’s not saying all cinema should be like that, I enjoy watching Marvel movies as much as I enjoy watching Tarkovsky; it’s not a problem, it’s just different. 

How did you manage to get the big musical names involved?
I managed to get hold of Clint (Mansell) through Twitter, and I’d become aware of him liking the films I’d made through some interviews he’d given. I had a chat with him and it just went from there, and it was the same with Geoff Barrow from Portishead. It was surprisingly easy, and also something that wouldn’t have even been possible ten years ago. I wouldn’t have even bothered before Twitter, as they just seemed too big, and too far out of my orbit. 

What have you got coming up after High-Rise?
We’ve just finished another film (Free Fire, which is set in Boston in the seventies). Then I’m writing and trying to prep the next movie, which we’ll hopefully be shooting at the end of 2016 or early 2017.

High-Rise will be in Nottingham Cinemas from Friday 18 March 2016.

High-Rise Trailer