It must be the 1984 opening ceremony.
It’s a moment before post-modernism comes in and just liquidizes all culture; it becomes a smoothie of everything happening at the same time. I like that moment.
Do you see punk as a destructive force, culturally?
No, it’s kind of a full stop at that point. They realized it was fucked, and that optimism might have been a fake optimism, that society was pushing towards something it could actually achieve, but…
Think about what our future is now. What’s in 20 years’ time? Maybe slightly better VR and lots of people dying from the flu, that’s about it, right? Penicillin failing, nothing as exciting as thinking we’re going to be on Mars. Are we?
Probably not. The future, from here, just seems like “more.”
Yeah, more of the same. Which is disingenuous, isn’t it? Might be something to do with our age. There’s a point where you lose track of decades. You kind of go, “ok, the ’70s and the ’80s have their own particular set of trousers,” you can draw what the fashions were. Can you for the ’90s? Erm… not really. And the 2000s? Forget it. I’m not even sure I could draw the ’90s; you might [go] for a Kurt Cobain-like grunge look. It wasn’t that many people had that, though, was it? Then you get to the ’00s or 2010, it’s all… but it could be that you also give such a small amount of fashion by that time, when you’re 40.
I like the depiction of Anthony Royal as a god figure, and in a big-picture sense I wonder how that fits into your conception of God in general.
He’s not dissimilar to the filmmaker is he, in a way? He gets to choose what the building looks like, he throws everybody into the building, and he’s got an idea of what it’ll turn out like. And then it might not turn out like that at all! My idea of God, I dunno. God is cause and effect. It’s the primary action, and whatever happens from that point onwards — it’s not spectacularly thought out, my theories on this, and might not even tally properly with literal mathematical thinking, but it’s the pre-Newtonian idea of a clockwork universe. Which has been thoroughly disproved, so I won’t even go on with it. Something in the mists of that — there’s no hope, basically.
I see characters in your films looking for difficult or damaging truths that are just out of reach, and that leads into curiosity about God — who is holding or defining those truths?
Yeah. They’re always within systems in the films, but everything’s messy. It’s structural, but it’s messy. And also, the idea I think about when I look back at them, not necessarily as I make them, is the idea of how far we’ve come and how little distance we’ve traveled. Modernity is wafer-thin all the time. We think we’re hot shit when we’re really not much different from a hundred thousand years ago. That can be on a more black magicky or pagan sense, in the broadest way. We’re living in a magical age; I don’t know how television works, I’ve got no fucking clue. It is literally magic; it’s pretty bizarre. What could you hope to make if you were dropped on an island? Literally fuck all.
I recall you mentioning setting your upcoming crime film “Free Fire” in the 1970s to get around cell phones. Was that borne out of the setting for “High-Rise,” or do they have that in common?
That was pretty important in “High-Rise;” the book gets pretty mangled quick if you have social media. Though the book talks about social media, which is really amazing, the idea of them filming themselves and projecting it on the walls, it’s effectively their own intranet in the building. Photographing everything and broadcasting it would be the natural modern way of approaching that. People would just turn up straight away, and it would become more like “Dog Day Afternoon,” wouldn’t it? Big crowd outside shouting.
It becomes a reality show, a spectator sport.
Exactly, it’s a totally different thing. It made the modern version really complicated. As soon as you deal with that, a lot of real estate gets used up explaining that away; then you’re getting further and further away from the book, and you want to get as much of the book in as possible.
Jeremy Thomas produced this, who also did David Cronenberg’s version of Ballard’s novel “Crash.” Did the two of you talk about how Ballard translated to the screen in that case?
No, very little conversation about that. And I was really gutted I didn’t get to meet Cronenberg when I was in Toronto. That would have been interesting — though maybe one of those quite fruitless meetings with people. “I really love your work!” and him saying, “Who are you?”
There’s an interesting relationship between Cronenberg and Ballard, going way back.
Sure, because of “Shivers” [Cronenberg’s first film, which features a plot similar to “High-Rise”]. I never got to the bottom of that, either, and I don’t know how much you should probe it. They both came out in ’75, they’re so similar — would be brilliant if they both came up with it at the same time. The only difference is, we have to have a montage in the middle of the building going into rack and ruin; they’ve got a sex slug that makes them all go crazy. And it’s such a neat way of introducing the building via a sales video; it’s like “agh, it’s been done!” It would be really obvious to repeat that.
I’m curious about your take on “Wages of Fear.” Are you casting female leads across the board?
A female lead. That’s a thing that was misreported. I did an interview, I think around the time there were press releases out for “Ghostbusters,” and somehow one female character got turned into a whole cast of women. I’m writing the script at the moment; it’s slightly terrifying, obviously since it’s been made twice, really well, but that’s kind of what attracted me to it. It’s such a high-wire act, almost like a no-win situation. But I think, audience-wise, it’s a story that could easily be seen again without any trouble, and general audiences haven’t seen it. As much as we all love the movies, people haven’t seen them. And it fits with the kind of movies I’ve been making: It’s all about tension, it’s procedural and physical. That’s what attracted me to it.
And you can avoid technology again.
Well, I think they have phones and stuff. The hardest part is getting nitroglycerin back in, because a story about people transporting plastic explosives is not that interesting!
Will we see “Free Fire” soon?
September, I think. That’s what I’ve been told.
“High-Rise” opens in theaters this weekend. The movie is currently available on VOD.