Kill List Director Ben Wheatley
We chat to the UK director about his superb horror. Be warned - HUGE SPOILER ALERT below
We absolutely loved Kill List, with the UK horror getting a coveted top marks review from us. When the chance came to grab a few words with the director, Ben Wheatley, we headed there straight away. Be warned that this interview contans HUGE SPOILERS, so do not under any circumstances read this unless you have already seen the film.
Is it true that Kill List was inspired by your childhood nightmares?
Yes, I trawled my memories for very scary scenes, that whole thing of following cultists through the woods stems from dreams I had as a kid. I just thought if it was scary as a kid then it could apply to lots of people, and afterwards when we'd had a few screenings people were saying that they had had similar dreams, so it kind of made sense. The other side of it was looking at - what was the worst thing that could happen, what was my worst fear. I think as a father, the accidental murder of your family through your own rage is something that...doesn't occupy my mind a lot (laughs) but that would be the worst thing that could be happen, so that's where that comes from.
Were you inspired by any other movies in particular?
Well yes, I mean it would be pretty disingenuous of me to say I wasn't influenced by The Wicker Man, but for me, The Wicker Man side of it is more the ending - and it was more of a memory of watching The Wicker Man rather than rewatching it recently and saying "I want to do this film again", i was more thinking about watching it as a kid, when it scared the shit out of me, so the main thing there is the mechanics of the ending, the whole film is like a trap to draw you into that point. Also, The Parallax View for me has a very similar structure. Race With the Devil as well, that's another one that I hadn't seen for years, and I watched it again after we'd done Kill List, and it seemed like quite a silly film, but the ending is very scary. I do remember seeing it as a kid, when the caravan pulls up and they see the fire all around them. That scene is Kill List when they go back to the cottage is a slight nod to that. Generally, the other stuff is the non horror side of it like Alan Clark, mid 80's BBC drama type stuff.
Can you talk a little about the social commentary you make in Kill List, in that this is as much about the effects of war on the people who fight it, and also about the small business situation at the moment.
I think that the documentary (the American Nightmare) which looks at the old Romero and Hooper movies of the 70s shows that they were a kind of a direct conversation with what was going on in the news at the time, and the approach here was that this has to be about the environment that we're in, we have to make some sort of comment about it. It seems that there isn't any kind of movie coming out that deals with how we psychologically deal with the war, and also the idea of how the recession is pressuring everybody's lives. My first film, Down Terrace, I like to think of as a kind of reaction to what Blair got up to - it's about this family who declare war on people, and justify it afterwards by saying that they did what they thought was right. So this is kind of about soldiers coming back from the war, and they don't really understand why they were in it, which kind of upsets them psychologically. It's like Jay says, he wishes he could have fought the Nazis, that's what he signed up for, that's what his ideal was, that's what they've all been sold, the idea of a clean war, with that demarkation of who's good and who's bad. Its just a mess, which kind of mutates their morality. It's the idea of the social contract, like what's happening now with the riots, where the people at the top, the politicians and the multimillionaires making up their own rules all the time, not paying taxes etc. go to war and don't worry about the legality of it. But at the bottom of the pile, where we sit, if you fuck up your taxes they take you to prison - you could go to prison over two hundred quid. That message from the top trickles down which is that actually, you should make up your own rules. I think that's what's been going on. In the film ,its similar, the war over there's morally dubious, so when we come home we can fight our own little wars, executing people for money is the same as fighting for money over there.
Is it true that the restaurant scene with the Christians is based on a true experience?
Well, up to the point when he complains! (laughs) It is, back when I was working on a show called Modern Toss, for channel 4, I was staying in this hotel with a guy called John Link, who was one of the writers. They did literally have this big meeting and they all started singing! It was like "this is un-fucking-believeable!" I do think though it's important with that scene that it is balanced, it's not taking the piss out of them. They've got a right to do that, but it's that point when you realise that Jay is just going... you know he's open to the plans of the cultists.
What was the approach to the pivotal moments of graphic violence?
Well the thing with the librarian was in the script from the start, it was actually more graphic than it turned out. It's bang in the middle of the film, and the film is almost sort of weirdly symmetrical, you've got the hunchback killing, which is echoed at the beginning when he fights his wife with the kid on her back, and you've got that thing with killing the rabbit and eating it, and you've got the hammer scene. The idea that the hammer scene is so brutal that it almost ripples out, kind of unbalances the whole movie. You can see it the film, time and space and everything in it is moved around and ripples around that moment. For example, the scenes when they go to meet the client and the cutting is all slightly...broken. The main ideas from all that was from seeing The Orphanage, when they run over the old lady in the beginning, and they do the cut away from it, and you go "oh that's OK, we're not going to see it", and then they cut back and a little bit and and then again when her jaw falls off and you just go "oh fucking hell! why did you do that!" but it's clever, because it basically says, we've shown you this, now we can show you anything.we've got the skills to do it, we can make an old lady's face fall off and we don't care, we've got no taste! From that point you don't trust the filmmakers, later on you think, they won't show us the dead kids, they can't show us that...oh please don't show us the dead kids. In Kill List I wanted the same thing, a break of trust with the audience, where it's "right. here we go, now we can show you anything" and it's all shown in one single take and this could happen to any of the characters, you just don't know. It doesn't really happen for the rest of the film but the feeling carries on, and that feeling of dread continues throughout.
Probably the toughest thing about that scene is the way it doesn't cut away.
Yeah, I've done a lot of viral ad campaigns, and I've done a lot of fake camcorder stuff, and you learn the language of amateur filmmaking. It's very hard to copy, something that Scorcese talks about is his steadicam shots, where they feel very real. Cuts are artificial, and when you don't have any cuts, showing the gangster language of cinema the audience really thinks that this could be real. So the scene itself isn't by Saw or Hostel standards really gory or anything, but because it's in the frame that it's in, it's triggering something in your brain which says, this must be real. It's like execution footage on Youtube or something, you're like - Fuck! You kind of expect it to cut, you think it'll cut then switch to the gory close up, and when it doesn't, you're then thinking "not again!" I'm pretty happy with that.
Could you tell us a little about the music? That whistling motif is pretty chilling.
Yeah, Jim Williams did the music, he did Down Terrace as well. We listened to a lot of Morton Feldman to start with, but then Rob HIll (the editor) and I, we laid in a lot of Feldman, but slowed it down to about 5% or 10%, and started to make a lot of soundscapes with it, so we could really give something to Jim that he could work on, instead of just describing it. After that he just ran with it and did his own stuff, the song is really scary, it's old Saxon or something, and the lyrics were something about stealing the tears from the moon. We got it on the internet and just read it, and just reading the sound off the page was scary, and we just thought that was it. I always think that's the best thing about The Omen, just hearing something that scares you. We did a lot of work on the sound design as well, we track laid that really precisely. There's all sorts of crazy shit in there, there's shark sonar noises, like whale song but from a shark, which is something you never want to hear! A lot of animal stuff, that weird screaming noise throughout, there are loads of monkey noises in there, and lots of pig stuff too.
So you'll be having more nightmares?
I can't watch the hammer stuff when I watch it! I'm really too squeamish!
Have you been taken by surprise by the critical response? Did you always know you were on to something special?
Well yeah, when we did South by Southwest we didn't know how it would be, it's pretty uncompromising, we weren't reined in at any point by Film4 or anyone, so all that violence and creepiness is (still in there). I'd have been just as surprised as if everyone hated it! With Down Terrace we got a really good critical reception, we thought there's no way that will happen again, it's just such an anomaly. I'm just really blown away by it, I'm still waiting for the backlash! The hype side of it is a scary thing, at South by Southwest, they held it back and back, with no clips, nothing. There was pressure because it had been so built up, if they didn't like it they'd be ten times as angry as if they'd just discovered it. The reviews are coming in pretty good, there's a few five stars being thrown around. Screenings are still going on, but people aren't going in saying "scare me!" and coming out saying they weren't scared. If the shoe was on the other foot, I know I'd be saying, this had better be fucking good, because it's getting rated against the writeups and not against the film.
Did you cut anything out that you wanted to keep in?
No, the original cut was about two hours long, and everything we cut out had to go, and nobody misses any of it. I don't believe in that DVD extras thing, you tend to see them and say "Oh yeah, I can see why that came out." We did one on Down Terrace, which we just thought was really funny but couldn't find anywhere to put it. It's a rare thing to actually have final cut on that film, we have to try and keep hold of that, and bring it back again and again.
What have you got lined up next?
We're in production, about to start filming on a project called Sightseers, which is produced by Edgar Wright. It's about a couple who go on holiday in a caravan, and they kill someone, then sort of go on the rampage. It's more of a comedy, I didn't really want to make another horror film after that! I just felt to miserable!
Could you tell us a bit about the genre mutating?
I generally just write stories, I wasn't conciously thinking "let's mash these two fuckers together and see what we get", I mean I always wanted to make a horror film, I had to start somewhere, it came from a treatment that we'd written called Get Jakarta, which was something we wrote for Neil Maskell to do, sort of like Get Carter but shot and set in the Philippines. It was going to end up like H.P Lovecraft style, but it never happened. The reason the film's structured the way it is, is that in modern horror, you just don't care about the people and therefore it's not as horrible, because terrible things happen and you want them to die, or the people are wafer thin, but the monsters or killers are really interesting, so you like the killers, and it becomes a sadistic punishment of the characters, and I wanted to turn that so that you know the people onside out so when horrible things happen to them, you feel connected to them and feel that they are real humans, and that amplifies things. In a remake that might happen, or maybe in another version of this film if it was shot for DVD, it would start with a scene of him caving someone's head in in Kiev, and then cut back to him going home. That scene would have half the impact that it would in the middle of the movie because you just think, oh well, he's a fucking monster, they're those kind of people. That's why we got this whole chunk of meet the characters for half an hour or so.
Are you also working with Nick Frost as well?
Yes, that's the film after Sightseers, it's called I, Macrobane. It's got Nick Frost in it, and Michael Smiley, and Neil Maskell and Myanna too. The other part apart from Nick Frost, we're in negotiations with someone really good, really interesting. That's one I've written, again it's kind of a comedy, based on comic strips i did online, kind of a time travel, alternative reality thing. Smiley would play a character called George Clooney who's not George Clooney, but gets loads of women for it. One of the characters gets in a sort of time machine, going 24 hours into the future after being smashed in the head with a rock. There (are elements) where it's like the Ulster of the 70's has expanded out into modern Britain, so there's Saracen tanks and things everywhere.
Does the success of Kill List help you become more ambitious with projects like that?
Well a lot of these scripts were written around the same time, Sightseers was something that's been kicking around for a long time, it's taken this long to get financing. Then all of a sudden Macrobane was ready to go, I'd written that after Kill List. We've got another thing for Film4, a big sci fi movie, which is in development so we're doing concept art and things like that, that'll be in 2013.
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