In just seven years, filmmaker Ben Wheatley has not only directed a prodigious six feature films, but has immediately established himself as a strong and idiosyncratic voice — one that’s arguably one of the most exciting working in British cinema today. His films, often written and edited in various capacities by his wife Amy Jump, take on genre topics with a morbidly ironic tone and, frequently, an anarchic approach to story. He’s tackled crime (“Down Terrace”), political thriller (“Kill List”), black comedy (“Sightseers”) and historic horror (“A Field in England”), as well as “Doctor Who” and other television projects. Wheatley’s films are earnest but bizarre, and consistently surprising.
Wheatley’s latest film is “High-Rise,” adapted from the novel by “Crash” and “Empire Of The Sun” author J.G. Ballard. The book, published in 1975, is set in a fictional apartment block in which the social order, which is hedonistic from the outset, breaks down with violent rapidity. The film focuses on doctor Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a new tenant, stuck right in the middle of the building as the infrastructure fails, leading upper and lower classes (on respective floors) to set upon one another like animals. The film is Wheatley’s strangest and most savagely funny, with solid work from Hiddleston and what should be a career-defining turn from Luke Evans as an ambitious and brutish television producer (Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller and Elisabeth Moss co-star).
Attempts to adapt the book go back to the late ’70s; Nicolas Roeg was once developing a film; Bruce Robinson (“Withnail & I”) scripted another version. Most recently, Richard Stanley (“Hardware”) co-wrote a stalled adaptation with Vincenzo Natali (“Splice”). Now Wheatley and Jump make a case for their work as the ideal adaptation as they amplify the novel’s core observations even as they streamline its excesses.
The Playlist recently spoke to Ben Wheatley about the work, touching on the film’s depiction of class breakdown, the concept of the future as fiction and reality, and Wheatley’s upcoming version of “The Wages of Fear.”
This is a film in which everyone gets the stick, across all classes, but you seem to reserve the most scorn and suspicion for the middle class.
I am middle class; I kind of understand it most, or more clearly. And self-hatred is a strong theme within the work (laughs) so that’s probably why they come out of it the worst. I think everyone gets a fair smack.
That comment comes to mind because Tom Hiddleston’s character threads the needle of the situation without really committing to anything. That seems like a bad place to be.
Talking broadly for everybody, he’s the closest to what we’re all experiencing. The noncommittal nature of it is important; it’s nobody’s fault, but it’s all happening all the time. It’s like we all run around in cars, but no one questions where the oil comes from, particularly. All the blame is dislocated; it could never possibly be anything to do with us, it’s always someone else’s fault. Every side, left and right, demonizes everyone else as the ones to blame. We should all be in it together, really; it is all our fault.
That comes to play as everyone takes care of themselves.
Absolutely, yeah. And [Laing is] an anti-hero in the worst sense. He doesn’t do anything. He’s a kind of weird cockroach, he can survive any destruction, and he kind of weasels through it by being very good in the sack as well, which I quite like.
But you skip the bit about him and his sister.
Yeah, that was… the official line on it is, “there are so many characters in the book; if you did them all you’d be there forever,” but the real reason is we couldn’t face it. It was enough, there’s enough going on in that film without having to deal with incest as well. Yes, it could have been done, but it’s difficult to not have it be such a strong thing that the film becomes all about that. It isn’t all about that; it’s just one of the many taboos that Ballard kind of marches through in the book. But on film, it would be just about that.
Why did you and Amy Jump choose the time period we see in the film?
There’s no date stamp on the film; there are no specific particulars. We kind of figured it was in a period between 1976, just after the book was published, and 1985. From the position of now, where we’re so far ahead in the future, Ballard, in the novel, is looking toward a future that we’ve already seen. And we know it hasn’t come true, but it’s coming true now. That period where the book is set is almost like an alternative or pocket universe. Yes, it’s the ’70s, but it’s a ’70s that never really happened. Those huge buildings were never built in the U.K. like that. And we didn’t want to make a heritage film, just people spotting things they remember from their childhood or that generation. There are things designed to be the ’70s, but there are also things we’ve made up; we’re juggling lots of different elements like that. Which is a roundabout way of saying it’s a period movie and a science-fiction movie at the same time.
That general time period seems like, if not the birth, certainly the development of a type of voyeuristic culture which is referenced in the novel and the film.
Yeah, to a degree. To me, it’s more the late ’70s, before punk, is the last moment when there’s a future, when there’s an idea we’re going to have rocket ships and jet packs. Which of the Olympic Games is it: the American one, where the guy comes in on the jet pack?