Ben Wheat­ley: ​‘I didn’t get any­where with film until I stopped caring’

It’s set in Boston, Mass­a­chu­setts and boasts a multi­na­tion­al cast, but Free Fire marks a home­com­ing of sorts for British writer/​director Ben Wheat­ley. Specif­i­cal­ly, it’s the first occa­sion since 2009 that he has shot a fea­ture in his adopt­ed home­town of Brighton, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly filmed in Belfast for High-Rise, Sheffield for Kill List, across Der­byshire, North York­shire and the Lake Dis­trict for Sight­seers, and in a field in Eng­land for A Field in Eng­land. He moved down from Lon­don a lit­tle over 20 years ago to attend uni­ver­si­ty, and it’s been his base, along with his screen­writ­ing part­ner and wife, Amy Jump, ever since.

Free Fire isn’t a Brighton film, but as with Wheatley’s micro-bud­get debut, Down Ter­race, some­thing of the unique char­ac­ter of this vibrant city by the sea seems to infuse every frame. Per­haps it’s some­thing to do with the fact that the sin­gle loca­tion set­ting, an enor­mous old ware­house on the out­skirts of the city, adjoins the for­mer HQ of the region’s only dai­ly news­pa­per. Or maybe it’s because, after a long day shoot­ing in (and shoot­ing up) said ware­house, the cast and crew would hang out in one of Brighton’s many tra­di­tion­al tav­erns, sink­ing a few suds and soak­ing up the local culture.

When LWLies spent an after­noon with Wheat­ley in Brighton – vis­it­ing the Free Fire set, sift­ing through crates of sec­ond-hand vinyl and grab­bing a quick drink at the pub where Brie Lar­son, Armie Ham­mer, Jack Reynor and co bond­ed – it struck us that this place is as much an exten­sion of Wheat­ley as he is of it. Both city and direc­tor share a cre­ative, free-think­ing, live-and-let-live out­look, each has its own colour­ful his­to­ry, and both offer some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent – some­thing edgi­er and more unpre­dictable – from the norm. But if we’re view­ing Ben Wheat­ley films as prod­ucts of their envi­ron­ment, it’s worth not­ing that his sto­ry begins not on the south coast or in the UK cap­i­tal but in a small com­muter town in Essex…

LWLies: You were born in Bil­ler­icay in Essex, which most peo­ple will know from the Ian Dury song. What was it like grow­ing up there?

It’s quite an inter­est­ing place in a way. The only cul­tur­al ref­er­ence points for it are ​‘Bil­ler­icay Dick­ie’ and also Gavin & Stacey, because Gavin comes from Bil­ler­icay. It’s also where the Pil­grim found­ing fathers gath­ered on their way to the Mayflower – some Bil­ler­icay blokes actu­al­ly went off to Amer­i­ca. For such a lit­tle place to have such as impor­tant bit of his­to­ry snake through it, it’s kind of a weird thing when you think about it. Billericay’s got a twin town in Amer­i­ca that’s famous for hav­ing the first per­son killed in the Amer­i­can Civ­il War.

Are you into your history?

Not real­ly my fam­i­ly his­to­ry so much, but I’m inter­est­ed in where I grew up. Peo­ple tend to be quite snide towards Essex, but I’m proud of where I’m from. When you meet oth­er peo­ple from Essex there’s a shared sense of humour and a shared out­look which you can recog­nise. I was lucky to grow up in a sub­ur­ban envi­ron­ment, but mov­ing to Lon­don made me quite dis­lo­cat­ed from that. We moved to Bel­size Park and I went to Haver­stock School which is just oppo­site Chalk Farm sta­tion. Quite an inter­est­ing school it turns out. It’s since been rebuilt as an acad­e­my but at the time it was like an old Vic­to­ri­an com­pre­hen­sive. There were some weird peo­ple there. The Milibands went there; Ed was in the year above me at school. The papers used to call it ​‘Red Eton’ but it was about as far from fuck­ing Eton as you could get.

Did you have a sense back then of what you want­ed to do when you left school?

I didn’t real­ly know what I was gonna do the whole way through my A‑levels. That’s when I ran into Amy Jump and she told me to go to art school, which I hadn’t real­ly con­sid­ered as an option. She did a foun­da­tion course so I applied for the same one. I could draw rea­son­ably well but I was prob­a­bly being lined up to be a painter-dec­o­ra­tor or some­thing. I was writ­ing at the time but I was a bit bohemi­an, long hair and all that. I’d always drawn com­ic strips but I didn’t real­ly under­stand any­thing about film. I want­ed to make some­thing and I got hold of a Video8 cam­corder and filmed some bits and pieces, but the tech­nol­o­gy still seemed too advanced and com­pli­cat­ed. But when I went to Brighton [Uni­ver­si­ty] I did a mod­ule on video pro­duc­tion and the AV depart­ment had an edit suite where you could hire cam­eras and book out the space. I spent my time doing that and basi­cal­ly taught myself how to make films.

What sort of stuff were you edit­ing at that time?

I start­ed film­ing just… stuff. I did a film called Things in My House where I just filmed all my books and shit like that and then edit­ed it. Real­ly, real­ly rudi­men­ta­ry stuff. Then I start­ed film­ing bits of dra­ma and even­tu­al­ly I began edit­ing stuff for oth­er peo­ple, tak­ing films apart and recut­ting them. I even­tu­al­ly start­ed doing more com­pli­cat­ed short films and worked with Robin Hill – who’s in Down Ter­race – and his broth­er, Dan, and their friends, Mike and Andy Hurst. They were at sixth form and had a more tra­di­tion­al, Spiel­berg-style, mak­ing-movies-since-they-were-10 back­ground. They did all these real­ly com­plex remakes of Stal­lone and Van Damme movies – they would do stuff like set them­selves on re and blow stuff up. The four of them were pret­ty industrious.

I worked on a fea­ture they made in 1997 called Project: Assas­sin, which was like a Cro­nen­ber­gian, brain­worm, some­one-get­ting-mur­dered-in-a-squat type movie. It was amaz­ing because none of these guys came from a film back­ground. They just made this thing and even­tu­al­ly took it to Cannes and ran into some guy in a bar and got dis­tri­b­u­tion for it. When­ev­er I speak to young direc­tors now I tell them you’ve got to do it off your own back because oth­er­wise you’re not gonna get any­where. Every­one looks at you like you’re insane because they’re trained to apply for mon­ey and they’re con­di­tioned into think­ing that it’s all fair and everyone’s fair and every­one gets a go. That wasn’t our experience.

What hap­pened after that?

Robin and Andy went off to LA and made anoth­er film called You’re Dead with John Hurt and Rhys Ifans. It didn’t go very well. I worked on the script with Robin and we were sup­posed to get paid for it but it didn’t hap­pen. It was hor­ri­ble. I went, ​‘That’s it, I’m done’. I was young and I felt under a lot of pres­sure. So I stopped. I stopped writ­ing and I end­ed up get­ting a job in a mar­ket­ing com­pa­ny. Amy and I were just pot­ter­ing around real­ly. It got to a point where one of us had to go to work and I thought, ​‘Fuck it, I’ll do it’. But we were hap­py doing our own thing real­ly. The fun­ny thing is I didn’t get any­where with film until I stopped car­ing about it and just relaxed a bit.

How did that lead to you start­ing your blog?

The mar­ket­ing com­pa­ny I worked for went bust. I tried to get anoth­er job and I couldn’t because the dot com crash had just hap­pened and there was no work, so I had to retrain. Had about 20 grand in sav­ings. Amy was preg­nant and I decid­ed I would try and get into the video game indus­try. At the same time we start­ed post­ing stuff online, wast­ing time mak­ing flash ani­ma­tions. Back then there were no YouTube algo­rithms decid­ing what peo­ple watched. You could direct­ly plug into an online audi­ence. First it would be a few hun­dred peo­ple, then we post­ed a cou­ple of things that got seen by a few thou­sand peo­ple and I thought, ​‘Wow, this is real­ly amazing!’

That turned to hun­dreds of thou­sands and then mil­lions. By pure fuck­ing luck and good for­tune, I man­aged to get a job doing some­thing while I was fuck­ing around try­ing to do some­thing else. They were real­ly des­per­ate times though. There was one month where we were lit­er­al­ly a day away from hav­ing to default on our mort­gage, and I got a phone call con­firm­ing a job to do some viral stuff for an extreme sports chan­nel. That was the turn­ing point. After that it got much easier.

Do you ever reflect on that peri­od in your lives?

It cer­tain­ly informs a lot of the work I’ve done. I always get asked things like, ​‘Why do you do so much stuff?’ I love what I do but it’s also because it all feels so lucky that it even hap­pened at all. Those days were fun as well, the inter­net back then was like the Wild West in a way. At the height of it I was mak­ing two or three things a day, and you could almost feel the pulse of the inter­net. But as soon as you stepped away it became like a for­eign coun­try again. Every­thing moved so fast.

To what extent did that ear­ly work inform your film­mak­ing style?

Cer­tain­ly the com­pres­sion of infor­ma­tion and sto­ry­telling side of it. It’s also hav­ing con­fi­dence in your own voice and just going, ​‘Fuck it, I’m gonna do this and I don’t care.’ When I was doing the online viral stuff, you’d pitch the ideas and do the cre­ative side of it but you’d also have to deliv­er the post-pro­duc­tion. The thing about the net back then was the audi­ence was so open-mind­ed. It’s dif­fer­ent now, they’re more bit­ter – or maybe the bit­ter­ness was always there, it’s just come to the sur­face. One of my per­verse plea­sures is to scroll through the com­ments on Amer­i­can polit­i­cal sites just to see what’s going on.

You’re fair­ly active on Twitter…

Most­ly I just share stuff I like. I went through my Twit­ter feed recent­ly, mut­ing any­body talk­ing about pol­i­tics. I’ve just had enough. My atti­tude is to always be encour­ag­ing, be as pos­i­tive and as con­struc­tive as pos­si­ble. Peo­ple are too quick to form an opin­ion and to judge. It’s a scram­ble up the hill to the moral high ground isn’t it? I don’t do Face­book though, haven’t done for years. I remem­ber Face­book hit when I was at the BBC doing The Wrong Door and I only real­ly joined to see who knew who. I lost inter­est pret­ty quick­ly after that. And I don’t real­ly post to my blog anymore.

Why did you stop that?

It was one day when it was real­ly hard to upload a pic­ture for some rea­son, the code had stopped work­ing or some­thing, and I’d just had enough of it. But that’s what hap­pened, it was web­sites and then it moved to blogs and now it’s all on Twit­ter. Peo­ple send tweets like they’re emails or texts, I find that real­ly bizarre.

What sort of offers were you get­ting off the back of the viral stuff?

Most­ly stuff for TV com­pa­nies. I edit­ed the Mod­ern Toss pilot and I did all the extras for the Big Night Out DVD. I start­ed doing ads as well, so that was all going on at the same time. Then Joe [Cor­nish] decid­ed he didn’t want to do Mod­ern Toss any more so they asked me to direct it, which was a major break real­ly. Then Arman­do Ian­nuc­ci replied to an email I’d sent about a year ear­li­er. They were doing Time Trum­pet and invit­ed me to come in and have chat. I thought, ​‘Fuck!’ So I scrib­bled down some ideas on a sheet of A4 – one-lin­ers, that sort of thing. When the series aired lots of those jokes had made it in so I wrote them to ask about get­ting paid and they were like, ​‘Oh yeah, here’s a cheque’. Again, ​‘Fuck!’ Then The Wrong Door came along which was a crazy expe­ri­ence, and then I did Ide­al with John­ny Vegas. But I want­ed to do more dra­ma. My agent sug­gest­ed I do a short film so we did that, then Robin and I got togeth­er and expand­ed it into a fea­ture, which became Down Terrace.

Do you still draw?

I did all the ini­tial sto­ry­boards for Free Fire. I tend to draw the whole film out just to get a feel for it. I’ll sketch it out real­ly rough­ly and then I’ll usu­al­ly get some­one else to redraw every­thing. That’s what we did on Free Fire and High-Rise. On Freak­shift, which is a sci-fi thing we’ve been work­ing on, Mick McMa­hon has been draw­ing stuff. Sto­ry­board­ing is the cheap­est way of mak­ing the film and it forces you to real­ly think about it. The thing about movies is, cars blow­ing up and guns going off is big tick­et imagery, you can sit there and imag­ine it in your head. What’s real­ly hard is all the bor­ing stuff like peo­ple com­ing through doors or some­one going up some stairs. I’ll spend a lot of time work­ing all that stuff out. Of course, there’s always a cer­tain degree of dys­mor­phia, where you imag­ine some­thing is bet­ter than it is or you don’t see the prob­lems with it.

Has that process got­ten any easier?

There’s more of a bal­ance there work­ing with Amy, because she’s so bru­tal­ly hon­est. I like the fact that we’re a cou­ple mak­ing films, it makes it inter­est­ing. And I like the fact that I get to spend time with her that I prob­a­bly wouldn’t oth­er­wise. She’s com­plete­ly out­side of the indus­try, she doesn’t do inter­views and doesn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly like going up to Lon­don to events. She just wants to do the work, get in and get out. She’s not a cinephile, but she real­ly cares about image and sto­ry­telling from her own unique per­spec­tive. But we’ve always had an agree­ment that I’ll be kind of like the face of it, I do all the press and that.

It’s quite weird going from nev­er hav­ing been inter­viewed before to being inter­viewed 500 times. Sud­den­ly peo­ple are writ­ing down what you’re say­ing, they’re record­ing it and putting online. We lucked out with Down Ter­race because peo­ple were real­ly kind about it – it was a first film and low bud­get, we felt we’d been giv­en the ben­e­fit of the doubt. With Kill List, I thought crit­i­cal­ly we were gonna get real­ly fucked. But it didn’t hap­pen. It’s a very weird film, you know. And it’s a mean film, it’s much mean­er than most movies are. I watch a lot of mod­ern hor­ror movies and they’re scary, but they’re not mean like that.

What sort of stuff scares you?

I got the Alan Clarke boxset recent­ly and I was watch­ing Beloved Ene­my, which is a film about a busi­ness deal, and it’s just hor­ri­ble, ter­ri­fy­ing to watch. Or Adam Cur­tis. Now that’s scary stuff. The only prob­lem is when he veers into a sub­ject I actu­al­ly know some­thing about and I think, ​‘Hang on, woah woah woah, that’s not right…’

He’s some­one who’s found a new lease of life through online plat­forms like BBC iPlay­er. Do you see things mov­ing more in that direc­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion wise?

The prob­lem is it’s hard to make your mon­ey back that way. You look at A Field in Eng­land, it cost £300,000 but only made $30,000 in the US so it’s seen as a mas­sive fail­ure. But in the UK it opened simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in cin­e­mas and on TV and a mil­lion peo­ple saw it on the first week­end. So it depends what your per­spec­tive is. You always wor­ry about the mon­ey side of things but if you can guar­an­tee an audi­ence that’s the most impor­tant thing. Now A Field in Eng­land screens every cou­ple of weeks up and down the coun­try, and in a way that’s more excit­ing because it means there’s a grass­roots fol­low­ing there. For me it was always sup­posed to be the kind of thing you’d dis­cov­er on late-night Chan­nel 4 and go, ​‘Fuck, I can’t believe this has been made’. But I know it’s not for every­one. I think the Lit­tle White Lies review said it was like being punched in the face by your best friend…

How did that make you feel?

I thought it was great! We always knew it would be dif­fi­cult – it’s a black-and-white film about the Eng­lish Civ­il War… you’re already fucked. What I’ve learned is that each expe­ri­ence is dif­fer­ent and there’s an audi­ence for every­thing, but peo­ple will only walk a cer­tain dis­tance to go to the cin­e­ma. You either need to have lots of screens or you need lots of adver­tis­ing to tell peo­ple it’s on, and if there’s a foot­ball match on or the weather’s nice then you’re fucked. That’s the cold real­i­ty of it. But the thing with putting movies in cin­e­mas is, you’re not part of some busi­ness scheme for some chan­nel that’s try­ing to change its audi­ence by stick­ing you up there as an exper­i­ment, and not releas­ing the sales fig­ures either.

Do you see your­self make ​‘big­ger’ films mov­ing forward?

I think so. But if I can do small­er scale stuff and if it makes sense to then I will, because the actu­al expe­ri­ence of mak­ing A Field of Eng­land was as fun as mak­ing High-Rise or Free Fire.

Would you ever want to make, say, a Mar­vel movie?

I dun­no. I don’t real­ly know how those things work. ​‘Mar­vel Zom­bies’ hasn’t been done which is what I’m inter­est­ed in. Maybe that’s a bit too niche. Marvel’s inter­est­ing in that it’s kind of a hybrid of cin­e­ma and tele­vi­sion. A very, very expen­sive TV show that you buy a pass for every three months. If I’m doing big­ger stuff I try to mit­i­gate against any con­fu­sion on the part of the peo­ple I’m work­ing with. That’s why I sto­ry­board as much as pos­si­ble, so every­one knows what to expect and there’s no con­fu­sion. That’s when it all falls to pieces. If you’re all in agree­ment from the start then you can prob­a­bly stop that shit from happening.

What have you got lined up next?

We’re doing Freak­shift next, which is some­thing we’ve been devel­op­ing since Kill List. We couldn’t get it financed it then because it’s got a female lead and at that point there weren’t many women-based action movies about. You know, either you’ve got Char­l­ize Theron or you don’t get the mon­ey. And then I’m work­ing on Hard Boiled which is a Frank Miller adap­ta­tion. Then Wages of Fear, which we’ve just fin­ished the script on so that’s ready to go. At any giv­en time we’ll usu­al­ly have six or sev­en scripts on the go, but they’ll be first drafts and they’ll go in the draw­er and then you’ll come back to them. Or maybe you won’t. You can’t be pre­cious about this stuff.

So what’s on the back­burn­er right now?

Oh, tonnes of stuff. Some com­e­dy and about three sci-fi/­fan­ta­sy films – we’ve got a script which is an adap­ta­tion of ​‘Gaunt­let’, the ​’80s video game. And we’ve been try­ing to do a rom-com for a long time now.

What would a Ben Wheat­ley rom-com look like?

I dun­no yet, we haven’t writ­ten it. I think it will end up being more Amy’s film. We both real­ly love What’s Up, Doc? – if we could do a film that was vague­ly close to that world then we’d be hap­py. It’s charm­ing and hap­py but you’ve also got gang­sters in it. I’ve been try­ing a lot of dif­fer­ent writ­ing exer­cis­es recent­ly, like what if you write a sto­ry where no one dies or the con­flict doesn’t end in vio­lence? It keeps you fresh and it stops you from repeat­ing yourself.

Are you wary of burn­ing out?

Well, you wan­na keep mak­ing as many films as you can but last year was tough. To do two movies back to back was real­ly hard, espe­cial­ly when High-Rise was in post and the final bits of finance for Free Fire were being worked out. I kept diaries a bit dur­ing that time and read­ing some of them back now… it was just the stress of it, you know. I worked on those movies for almost three years solid­ly. That’s about as extreme as I’d like to get with it, but we’ve had a bit of a gap now in between shoot­ing Free Fire and the next one, so I’m ready to go again. It’s hard though, you want to keep work­ing but you do need to give your­self breath­ing space some­times. The prob­lem is there’s nev­er enough time. I don’t think I’ll ever get to make all the things I want to make.

Free Fire is in cin­e­mas 24 March. Read more in LWLies 69.