In 2009, I discovered a really great filmmaker. I was on the Fantastic Fest jury that selected Ben Wheatley’s first feature, DOWN TERRACE, as the best debut film of the films in competition (basically the festival’s top prize), and there wasn’t even much debate. The film was clearly a confident, beautifully written (by Wheatley and Robin Hill), and twisted bit of drama, and soon after he went on to make such works as KILL LIST, SIGHTSEERS, A FIELD IN ENGLAND, and HIGH-RISE, as well as a the memorable “U Is for Unearthed” segment in THE ABCs OF DEATH horror anthology, and a couple choice episodes of “Doctor Who.”
His latest work, FREE FIRE, is a high-energy, all-out-nasty piece of gun porn set in late-’70s Boston and featuring the likes of Armie Hammer, Brie Larson, Sharlto Copley, Cillian Murphy, Noah Taylor, Sam Riley, Jack Reynor, Wheatley favorite Michael Smiley, and so many more. It’s about two gangs meeting in seemingly abandoned warehouse to do a deal, and it all falls apart quickly and violently. And should be all you need to know to excited about this self-contained, wonderfully bloody mess.
Wheatley also works incredibly fast, putting out about a film per year. He’s already lining up his next work, his first monster movie FREAKSHIFT, starring a returning Armie Hammer as well as Alicia Vikander (if the internet is to be believed); Wheatley is a bit cagey about confirming everyone’s involvement. If you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that Quint talked to Wheatley, along with Hammer and Copley, after a vigorous paintball match in Austin during SXSW. And I'm happy to report, there's almost no overlap in our lines of questioning. Go team!
Anyway, FREE FIRE is loads of fun, and I had the chance to sit down with Ben Wheatley in Chicago just before the film’s release last week. Please enjoy…
Capone: Hello, sir. How are you? Good to see you. It’s been a very long time. I was on the jury at Fantastic Fest when DOWN TERRACE won.
Ben Wheatley: Oh, Christ, that was a long time ago. Yeah, yeah.
Capone: September 2009. When your film is set primarily in a single location, as you’re writing it, do you have to figure out the design of the room while you’re writing, to make sure where things are and that they stay there?
BW: I think what happens, what I did, is you write the set-piece bits in, but it’s a kind of movable thing. You’ve got to write “I want this to happen and this to happen,” but in your head, you can hazily see there are some pillars and maybe some low walls but they float around a bit. Prose writing is particularly slippery. There’s no real technical way of saying where everything is, so in your mind’s eye you can start to see everything a little bit, but then even that’s a bit…you cheat.
You just go “someone rolls to the door, but can her roll to the door here? Maybe that’s two roles,” and that’s a big difference in a film. So then it’s trying to take away as much of that distance between your idea for it and the reality of it. That’s when the storyboards come in. Again, storyboards can lie, so then you have to start to build it out as models and measure it out and make spaces that you can rehearse in. So it slowly move towards a kind of finished version of it.
Capone: Is this the film, or is it HIGH-RISE, that you designed the room using Minecraft?
BW: Yeah, Minecraft was this one. So that was really useful, because you can start to see what the eye lines are for where people are, and how long it takes to walk across the set, and how long it takes to walk across the set, how long it takes to run across the set. It’s always a problem that you’ve got a walking and talking thing. When people are walking doing “Yack yack yack.” How long is the set? Then you can time it out and go “Well fuck, how far can you walk in a minute? You can walk a long way in a minute,” and suddenly you’ve got this enormously expensive set. It’s other stuff like trucks coming in. “Fuck, that’s going to take that long while they’re over here.”
Anyway, it’s a load of dull stuff, which you don’t really notice on screen as an audience member until it’s wrong. But if you’ve made a mistake like that when on your when your making the film that’s set in one space in real time and shot in chronological order, if you don't get it right, you can become really unstuck.
Capone: So you did shoot in chronological order? That would have made it much easier.
BW: Yeah I had to, because of all the holes in the walls all the time. That kind of stuff. I think Cillian [Murphy] had to go off and do ANTHROPOID, so he went a week early. So that got us fucked a little bit, and we got where we had to shoot some of his stuff out of order, but the rest of it was done that way.
Capone: And people notice geography, especially, like you said, if you get it wrong. People will go “That wasn't there a minute ago.”
BW: I can show you the shots. [Pulls out his phone to show me images of the Minecraft layouts for FREE FIRE, which look remarkably like the finished product.]
Capone: Can you do it to scale?
BW: Yeah, yeah. You know those boxes? Each of those boxes is about a meter squared.
Capone: So did you build that space, or did you find a location.
BW: A bit of both. [Finally finds it on his phone] Yeah so you can see.
Capone: That’s what you designed?
BW: Yeah, I did that in Minecraft.
Capone: So you even can figure out the lighting.
BW: Yeah, yeah. And this is quite funny, because Minecraft itself comes with these texture packs, and this is the BLADE RUNNER texture pack. So if you stop to look at these pillars, they’ve got some of the graffiti from BLADE RUNNER.
Capone: That’s funny. It’s nice to know that Americans aren’t the only ones obsessed with guns. Does the film play differently in countries where there isn’t as much of a gun culture? I would say this feel like your most American film, in that respect.
BW: Right. Well American culture is the most successful export of America isn't it. So this stuff plays everywhere. So the more American it is, the more it will play. And certainly stuff that is more action based and less dialogue based plays further into China and into Japan. Whether or not this film does, that’s something else, but in general things do. I think there are films that are specific American culture films that don't necessarily play, and sometimes sports films don't translate out. Or something about a political moment here doesn't translate out but most stuff does.
Capone: One of the things you do that a lot of American action films that involve shooting don't do is…to me watching the film, it was worse watching someone get hurt than actually watching someone get killed. You ramp up the pain factor. A lot like people get hit in places where I thought, “That looks like an especially painful place to be shot,” or when somebody gets their hand smashed by a crowbar I was cringing. Were you really cognizant of that?
BW: I found this from KILL List, by the way. Anything that we can draw a comparison back to reality is much more painful than things that are too fantasy. Like people being shot in the head—no one has experienced that and come back to talk about it, or only a few. But certainly you have dinged your hand on stuff or stabbed yourself with pin. So I think that’s the heartbeat of the movie. It;s an environment that’s going to hurt you and you’re tense and you’re trying to get out of it, but then it’s alleviated.
Capone: Where did this particular story come from?
BW: I was a few different places. One was reading a transcript in the ’90s of a shoot out in Miami in the ’80s, which is an FBI shootout with armed bank robbers, and the transcript is incredible; it’s very long, like 40 minutes. It’s blow by blow, so each bullet fired, because they have to account for every bullet they fire, and it’s very close quarters and it’s really messy and chaotic, and I was like, “Hang on, this isn't what Hollywood shootouts are like,” even something like HEAT is very tactical and clean with people are getting shot.
So I thought there’s something in that There’s something that shows what it’s like to drop into the middle of all that, that feeling of intensity. And also, I was reading that people are great on the range, and they can blast away and get bullseyes all day long, and then they see STAR WARS and they go “Why don't the Stormtroopers shoot straight?” But the reality is that if they were on the range and the targets where shooting at them, they would be pretty ginger about how they fired back and they wouldn't hit much stuff.
Capone: The whole movie this an action sequence, but you dissect and say “What would it be like in reality—in a reality—when someones shooting at you?” But you walk that wonderful line of hardcore, violent, bloody, and really funny. Again, was that something in the writing where you had to say, “Okay, maybe we need to tone down the blood or the laughs?”
BW: I think it’s a difficult one where it’s a) having a sense of humor, and b) it’s taste and intuition. It’s not a careful construction of stuff. You go like “What if he did this? This would be pretty good. And what about this? This would be funny.” And then just egging each other, on or just going on the day, having loads of actors who are really up for doing stuff. Like Armie Hammer slinging the crowbar at Jack Raynor, and it hitting him on the fingers is stuff we would negotiate on the day, and thought “That would be funny.” “He’s getting near the case! Well I wouldn’t let him get near the case.” “So what you going to do about it?” So things build up like that during the making of it.
Capone: HIGH-RISE is definitely a more of an intellectual pursuit. Was is freeing to a degree to dispose of the cerebral and go right for the gut? Did you feel the difference?
BW: I think it’s meeting the audience in the middle. There’s stuff in it if you want to get into it. But you don't need to unpack this film to enjoy; that’s the difference. Some films are challenging the audience to understand them and decode them. I like cinema like that.
Capone: And you've done that before.
BW: Yeah, but some cinema isn’t. Some can be equally smart, but it hides it under a bushel slightly. So there’s some pleasures on the top that you can take and have that can be your take away. It’s interesting, you see the reviews and it’s like “It’s got no plot,” and I’m like “Hasn't it? Did you not have a look?” One of our test audiences were hysterical, and they’re going “It doesn’t make any sense. What was the plot? They go there, they buy the guns…” And they just recap the whole plot beat for beat. “But what happens?” “You just told us. You know exactly what happens.”
Capone: I’ve heard the IRA used to buy guns from America in the 1970s. Is that the main reason the story is set in the ’70s?
BW: Yeah, that’s the reason it’s set there.
Capone: Plus the facial hair and flared collars?
BW: To be honest, that’s not why I chose periods [laughs]. Yeah, that’s a side thing. Phones are a big problem. They ruin most movies, modern films. You could have just been a gun deal now with the Hells Angels and da-da-da-da, but it’s all so generic. You know those characters inside and out. You’ve seen them a lot. You’ve seen big TV shows about people, and who was the underground crime boss? Do they even exist anymore? What is that? “The Sopranos” buried it, and so did CASINO and GOODFELLAS. It’s just done. There’s no new take on that, I don't think.
So who are these characters now? I was thinking I wanted people who had lives and experience that wasn’t readily unpacked so quickly, but also the idea you get these characters who have great, quite complicated political lives and personal lives, and they’re reduced down to nothing really quick. I think in those situations, you go from thinking about what you’re going to do on holiday and how next year’s going to be and maybe you’re going to have a kid to “Oh fuck, I better crawl over here or die.
Capone: There are a lot of characters in this movie, but you find a way to give them each a life somehow—just enough information to make us care about whether they live or die.
BW: Yeah, there’s loads of story in it.
Capone: It’s not maybe a story we get from beginning to end, but it’s enough.
BW: There’s not a load of exposition and a load of talking and a load of stuff about something and something and something. But that’s all gibberish. It’s great stuff in other movies, but really what movies are about are the interactions between characters and whether they read true or not. Comedy and then action. That’s the stuff. Everything else is comfortable and it’s padding, but it’s not necessarily…I know people disagree with me on this. It’s fine.
[Both laugh]
Capone: And you’ve certainly made films that are very heavy on plot, so it’s not like you don’t know how to do it, but this is not that movie.
BW: No, this is just fun.
Capone: You mentioned CASINO and GOODFELLAS. Scorsese is a producer on this. How did he get involved, when did he get involved, and what if anything did he add to the mix?
BW: He got involved when he was doing HUGO in the UK, and he had been interviewed in the Telegraph, and they go “What have you been up to apart from doing HUGO?” And he said “I’ve been watching British films in the evenings.” And they go “What have you seen?” He said, ARCHIPELAGO, the Joanna Hogg movie, and RED ROAD, Andrea Arnold one, and he’d seen KILL LIST. I was like “Christ!” And he said he liked it. So I talked to my agent and said “I’d like to meet him, is that possible?” And they sorted it out. It went from there.
He helped in terms of financing and the casting, that was a big deal. He had read the script and they’d gone through that, but there wasn’t anything that came back from that. Being a filmmaker exec is a different thing from being a studio exec. That way, he really respects the process. If they thought there was a problem, I’m sure they would have said something, but they didn’t. And then in the end of the thing, we took an edit to them before the music was put in, and went to the production company, and they all watched it there with him, and I went and talked to him for a couple of hours afterwards about, was it alright? And he said it was fine and he really enjoyed it. There were specific notes about cleaning up some of the sound and making sure it was clearer. That was cool. We talked about the music, and that was it really.
Capone: You gave it to him without the music? That’s interesting.
BW: Yeah, it was quite a hardcore version of the movie. It had the diegetic sound in it, the tracks, but it didn’t have the Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury soundtrack in it. He was going “Don't put any soundtrack on it. It’s fine.” I’m like “Eh, let’s see about that.” He said “It’s so bold!”
Capone: Your choice of actors is so good in this, but Sharlto Coopley is a guy who will do anything, and he’ll do it however you want, but he’ll also have all the ideas about how to do it. He’s supposed to be South African in this, right?
BW: Right. The thing about him is, everything he does and every moment that he gives you is always in service of the film. He set himself on fire. That wa not effects. That’s him on fire. It’s stunt fire, but it’s not CG. We watched it on the monitor going “Motherfucker, he’s on fire.” It’s this A-list fucking actor on fire. So there’s stuff like that. He’s doggedly concentrating on the pursuit of laughs and characterization and all those things. It could be hard work for other actors, because he’ll stop and start and do stuff, and they’d be going “Uh, what are you doing?” When I look at the rushes, I’m happy.
Capone: You’ve now worked American actors now. Sometimes American actors come with baggage. How did Armie and Brie to work with?
BW: Fine, man. Brie had just finished ROOM, so the whole Oscar stuff had not happened. So it looks like the film she made just after she won the Oscar, which is great for us [laughs]. What a brave choice. But no, she didn’t. She was cool. I had a lot of preconceptions about what Armie would be like and I was totally wrong. He’s just a really fucking funny, cool guy, and a joy to be around. I’ll cast him in as many things as I can. All the cast is the same, in that respect. I just thought he was great, and he’s so cool as well. For someone who’s like nine-feet tall and incredibly good looking and has got everything going for him, he’s a very generous and nice guy on top of that.
Capone: I’ve been fortunate enough to meet him a couple of times, and the first time I saw him I’m like “God damn, he’s handsome.” It actually kind of makes me angry.
BW: [laughs] Yeah, he’s like that. He’s unnaturally good looking. We were at the hotel in L.A. at the Four Seasons, and we were doing a load of press and we were waiting by the pool and he just took his top off and was just standing there like this, and we were like, “Oh, god” Put it away. Jesus Christ!”
Capone: And he’s going to be in your next film, which is FREAKSHIFT?
BW: Yeah, irritatingly very similar in terms of letters and length of name to FREE FIRE, which is a terrible mistake.
Capone: He’s in it. And who’s the lead actress?
BW: According to the internet, it’s Alicia Vikander.
Capone: Can you say anything about that?
BW: Yeah, it’s a film we’ve been trying to do since SIGHTSEERS, I think. It was meant to be the movie after SIGHTSEERS. It’s like an action, adventure, sci-fi thing with women in trucks driving around at night killing giant crabs.
Capone: You’re doing your first monster movie?
BW: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it probably won’t end up being giant crabs. We’re still working on the creatures, but it’s monsters that dig up through the ground at night and then have to be killed. So it’s a mixture of “Hill Street Blues,” Doom the video game, and ALIENS and ’50s monster movies.
Capone: I know I had seen Michael Smiley in other things before DOWN TERRACE, but I want to thank you for using him in everything you do, forcing me to learn his name. I see him everywhere now.
BW: He’s doing loads of stuff now.
Capone: Hell, he showed up in ROGUE ONE.
BW: I want him to break in America. He looks like he could do one of those villains who goes against Tom Cruise in a movie, like blowing stuff up and skulking about.
Capone: When you're shooting a movie in a confined space with all that gun fire, how loud does it get? How is it to direct?
BW: It’s all headphones for me. The actors, they’ve got plugs in their ears, because you couldn’t do it. They’d be deaf. It’s not like toughing it out. They’d be deaf after day one, and we would have been sued, and it would have been bad. We had one scene where Sharlto right at the beginning, he’s going “I’m going to method this out.” Pow, pow, pow! “Call the medic. Oh, I feel sick.” And that was the end of that.
Capone: I will see you tonight. Good to see you again.
