Can you separate a person from their art? Or is it imperative to know the mind behind the matter? And if so, where do you start? Here are eight entry points for exploring the work of…
…subversive filmmaker Ben Wheatley.
He cites Alan Clarke as something of an influence.
Wheatley is a self-taught filmmaker whose path to directing began with studying sculpture as Fine Art College. It was during this time that “he watched a lot of stuff and started to put it together” and had something of an ‘a-ha’ moment when he realised a lot of what he watched and liked as a child had come from the same man; the maverick filmmaker Alan Clarke who directed the likes of Scum and Rita, Sue and Bob Too. The Guardian called Clarke’s films “brilliant, disconcerting and radical”, all accusations which could be aptly levelled at Wheatley’s oeuvre.
The internet leveraged his career.
He created a website called ‘MrandMrsWheatley.com’ where he and Amy (Jump, his collaborator and partner) would create short animations because they were a form of expression in which they were beholden to hardly anyone. From there, they graduated to live action shorts and that snowballed into doing commercial work once the site got successful.
He credits the philosophy of making films and then making them visible, without anyone’s permission, which of course the internet allowed, as being the reason for his career. “It’s a simple rule and it took me a long time to learn it, all you to do is make work and put it out there so people can see it and if it’s any good then you’ll get work.”
Working on commercials provided valuable experience with bigger budgets.
For a director like Wheatley who, it would be fair to say, has fairly arthouse inclinations, it might be reasonable to assume that commercials were beneath him. Not so. What’s more, he credits them with exposing him to the types of budget and camera equipment that would allow him to make the likes of High-Rise.
“Firstly, it’s massively helpful, and allows directors to work and live and pursue projects in that early planning phase when there is no actual money around. I’ve directed commercials for many years, which has not only been financially helpful but has also given me a really good grounding for something like High-Rise. People have asked how this bloke who makes small films for little money, a lot of it with handheld cameras, could cope with something of the size of High-Rise, in terms of camerawork and money management. My answer is that I have been doing that sort of thing for years.”
He devoured counter-cultural novels in his youth.
Speaking to Mark Kermode for The Observer, Wheatley recalls how he “read High-Rise when [he] was about 17, along with all the usual counterculture stuff: Naked Lunch, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The thing about Ballard was that you could feel his radiation. He seemed scary, and dangerous, and that was why you had to read his books. I read Crash around the same time, and I remember thinking it had a turn of phrase that didn’t feel like anybody else. A way of looking at the modern world and making it alien. I read Hello America and The Drowned World and so on, all in a lump.
He ‘learns’ his rushes.
Before getting into the editing suite at ‘Wheatley Towers’, a.k.a his home, Wheatley likes to commit each frame to memory, so he knows where everything is.
His stories start with walking.
In an interview for BAFTA Guru, Wheatley describes the process by which his ideas develop. The kernel begins with “walking around and listening to music” and once something piques his interest he might commit it to paper. Once an idea survives that personal vetting process, things start to get serious.
Wheatley takes a piece of paper and lists the numbers 1–30, three times (presumably to mirror a three-act structure) and he transfers his story into that mould and if he manages that, well, “it looks like a film.”
In the same interview, Wheatley describes his rule of thumb in terms of where inspiration comes from as “if there’s a film I want to see and I haven’t seen it anywhere then I’ll try and make it.” No doubt this imperative is part of the reason his films feel as original as they do.
He likes when actors actively pursue filmmakers.
Over the past decade or so it has felt as if more and more actors are getting involved with development and pre-production, and generating material for themselves, as opposed to waiting for a studio to give them the green light. Wheatley is a proponent of what he calls ‘stirring the pot’, as explained to Interview magazine.
“It’s great when actors reach out because it shows that they’re out there stirring the pot, trying to make things happen for themselves. They have an understanding of the landscape of who’s making what, what’s coming up, and who’s doing interesting work. I think that helps. It’s part of developing the whole state of how cinema is; everyone is looking out and engaged rather than [it being] just a financial thing or sitting back, waiting for scripts to turn up.”
He and Amy tag team on their scripts.
Throw out any ideas you have of collaborators sitting across from each other spewing ideas back and forth to create something magical. The process between Wheatley and his writing/editing/life partner Amy Jump is much more mechanical.
“I’ll write something and then she’ll re-write it, and there’s no conversation unless she’s written something that’s impossible to shoot or too expensive. We’ve been together since we were teenagers and that’s just the way we’ve always worked.”
This unsentimental, almost brutally efficient process is something Wheatley reiterated in an interview with NotebookMUBI, in which he appears to have become a master at killing his darlings.
“I think [Amy] probably rewrote every line of dialogue in Free Fire.And then, at that point, I’d look at it and go, ‘Yep, okay, it’s all better than everything I wrote, that’s fine — moving on’.”
“When I look at our films, they’re definitely made by a couple. But I end up being the one who gets the voice. Which is weird, because if she’s the writer and editor of a particular film, her position of power creatively is almost as strong as that of the director.”
Sightseers, Kill List and A Field in England are currently available to stream on Film4 on All4.
