Ben Wheat­ley says British cin­e­ma is guilty of being ​“total­ly apolitical”

Ahead of the release of his sev­enth fea­ture, Hap­py New Year, Col­in Burstead, writer/​director Ben Wheat­ley has revealed his thoughts on the state of British cin­e­ma – specif­i­cal­ly its con­spic­u­ous absence of politics.

“Most of British cin­e­ma is total­ly apo­lit­i­cal or very vanil­la in that respect,” says Wheat­ley. ​“It’s either so peri­od that it’s got noth­ing to do with any­thing, or it’s the rest of the cin­e­ma we watch, which is genre, which doesn’t touch upon it.”

Accord­ing to Wheat­ley, his new film wears its pol­i­tics on its sleeve ​“heav­i­ly”. Neil Maskell plays the epony­mous Col­in, a put-upon mid­dle-aged man who throws a par­ty for his extend­ed fam­i­ly on New Year’s Eve. Col­in soon comes under pres­sure from his finan­cial­ly strained par­ents, while the spec­tre of Brex­it looms large and is explic­it­ly referenced.

“I look at my own expe­ri­ence of peo­ple try­ing to digest the cur­rent polit­i­cal sys­tem,” adds Wheat­ley. ​“No one ever explains it. No one ever sits down and says what their own point of view is. The papers nev­er say. You nev­er can get to the bot­tom of what has actu­al­ly hap­pened. Even now with Brex­it so far on, it’s very dif­fi­cult to unrav­el what the fuck actu­al­ly hap­pened or who’s respon­si­ble for it.”

So how much is Wheat­ley inter­est­ed in explor­ing class as a film­mak­er? ​“I’m in the mid­dle of it. We all are and all our per­spec­tives are affect­ed by it. I’m try­ing to make stuff from my own per­spec­tive and I think that’s the most you can do as a cre­ative per­son – to try and keep it as close to your expe­ri­ence as you can. Oth­er­wise you’re lost. I find it hard to project too far out of what I know because you’re assum­ing a lot.”

He con­tin­ues, ​“It’s quite a big thing that con­sumes us all, class. Every­thing ties back to it in the end and it’s to do with how you went to school, how you grew up and where your con­fi­dence is at – which is a par­tic­u­lar class thing, the kind of silent thing which push­es peo­ple up and pulls peo­ple down with­out even know­ing it.”

His films Down Ter­race, High-Rise, Free Fire each focus on dys­func­tion­al fam­i­ly units (whether these by birth, sur­ro­gate or extend­ed), and Wheat­ley has pre­vi­ous­ly com­bined broad­er class issues with famil­ial strife. Hap­py New Year, Col­in Burstead is the first where Wheat­ley, who wrote and direct­ed the film, has com­bined these two concerns.

“I always think about it in terms of the fam­i­ly itself,” he says. ​“A fam­i­ly in terms of class – not to use tor­tur­ous metaphors – I always think of it as [like] land­ing boats in Nor­mandy. Each gen­er­a­tion gets a lit­tle bit fur­ther up the beach. Some of them are way ahead and some of them are just get­ting on the boat.

“I think that’s the dif­fer­ence when you look at some fam­i­lies. In my fam­i­ly, I’m the first per­son to have gone to uni­ver­si­ty and that’s a mas­sive thing, it’s not to be tak­en light­ly. When peo­ple go, ​‘I’m from a fam­i­ly of teach­ers or doc­tors’, it’s a total­ly dif­fer­ent thing. It’s not anybody’s fault but it does make a dif­fer­ence to how you are and how you speak, how you inter­act with peo­ple and how you feel about stuff.”

Wheat­ley is in talks to write a TV series based on some of the same char­ac­ters in Hap­py New Year, Col­in Burstead, ahead of shoot­ing his adap­tion of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebec­ca in 2019.

Fol­low­ing a lim­it­ed the­atri­cal release, Hap­py New Year, Col­in Burstead airs on BBC2 at 10.30pm 30 Decem­ber, and will then be avail­able on iPlay­er for one year.