Ben Wheat­ley: ​‘I’ve always been wary of the woods – they can kill you’

One of the top films at this year’s all-vir­tu­al Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val was Ben Wheatley’s ninth fea­ture: the mind-bend­ing folk hor­ror In the Earth, star­ring Joel Fry as an unas­sum­ing sci­en­tist who gets caught up in a strange pagan plot in the mid­dle of the woods. Shot over two weeks last sum­mer in the British coun­try­side with a tiny cast and crew, the result is a vin­tage dose of Wheat­ley weird­ness, with shades of Kill List and A Field in Eng­land.

LWLies: In the Earth isn’t your first film which plays with ideas of British mythol­o­gy and super­sti­tion. Where did your inter­est in this start?

Wheat­ley: For this film, I’d come to it through think­ing about nar­ra­tive, and think­ing about how sto­ries have been used in a kind of aggres­sive way. And not nec­es­sar­i­ly in an hon­est way over the last few years, which start­ed me think­ing about the idea of nar­ra­tive as a tech­nol­o­gy being sep­a­rat­ed away from the inno­cent idea of just lis­ten­ing to sto­ries. That’s what’s in the film – the idea of this folk stuff being made up, not real­ly based on any­thing. It’s humans try­ing to make a sto­ry out of some­thing that’s hap­pened, some expe­ri­ence they’ve had in the woods.

A lot of the folk hor­ror and folk sto­ries that we have, like our idea of what Druids are, is fic­tion; the druids them­selves didn’t have any writ­ten his­to­ry, so the Vic­to­ri­ans cob­bled togeth­er a lot of stuff about what those cer­e­monies are and what those rit­u­als are. The shad­ow of the ​’70s is across every­thing – when I was doing press for Kill List in the States, they believed that The Wick­er Man was actu­al­ly a real thing.

My point of ref­er­ence was that when you live in a coun­try which is kind of ancient, there’s a lot of stuff around – five min­utes from me there’s an Iron Age Fort. You can go out there and com­mune and red­shift about all you like. That’s the real­i­ty of being a Euro­pean. With In the Earth, I want­ed to show these dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, like a sci­en­tif­ic per­spec­tive and a kind of reli­gious per­spec­tive, try­ing to under­stand some­thing that was res­olute­ly not want­i­ng to be under­stood, or was being spo­ken in a dif­fer­ent lan­guage that they could not pos­si­bly unpack.

You’ve said this film would have nev­er hap­pened with­out Covid – was it some­thing you were toy­ing with pre­vi­ous­ly, or a com­plete­ly new idea?

I’m always writ­ing and think­ing about, what I’m going to do next. But with In the Earth, it was with­in a cou­ple of weeks of the first lock­down. I was writ­ing this and just try­ing to process what was hap­pen­ing around me. The eas­i­est way for me to do that was to write.

Did you feel any trep­i­da­tion around the idea of mak­ing a ​‘pan­dem­ic movie’?

That’s some­thing that I didn’t real­ly think about until I was at Sun­dance, and there was this kind of slight­ly snot­ty thing about pan­dem­ic movies. And you’re like, ​‘Well, come on, it’s the first thing we’re think­ing about.’ It’s the first time anyone’s wor­ried about mak­ing some­thing ​“in the moment”. When was that a crime? It’s bizarre to me, this idea that we shouldn’t make films about Covid because it’ll be over soon – and then it wasn’t, anyway.

All the films I’ve made have always been in a reac­tion to the envi­ron­ment, or the time that I was in. Hap­py New Year, Col­in Burstead had a much harsh­er clock on it, which was Brex­it. We were wait­ing for that to come out going, ​‘Oh, my god, they might sort it out before the film’s out,’ which would have been a dis­as­ter. You know, thank­ful­ly, that nev­er hap­pened. [Laughs] But it didn’t wor­ry me [with In the Earth]; I think we are going to be in pan­dem­ic mode for the next 10 – 15 years of life and art. Peo­ple need time to process what’s hap­pened and they’re going to do it through art. You know, what the pub­lic sees at the cin­e­ma is usu­al­ly two or three years old, by the time it gets there. That’s kind of bad, isn’t it? That there’s a cul­tur­al lag on every­thing that turns up in the cinema.

You’re par­tic­u­lar­ly right about that at the moment. Because of the pan­dem­ic delay, a lot of what we’re see­ing in cin­e­mas now was made a con­sid­er­able amount of time ago.

It’s fine if you’re doing his­tor­i­cal dra­ma, or if it’s Bond because he’s always a man out of time, so it doesn’t mat­ter. But one of the rea­sons I made In the Earth was I was watch­ing stuff and – this crit­i­cism is total­ly unfair – but it was things like, ​‘Why are there so many peo­ple in a room?’ or see­ing a crowd and think­ing ​‘That’s ridicu­lous, it doesn’t make any sense’. I think that you have got to take that on board; peo­ple have had a glob­al gen­er­a­tional expe­ri­ence. You can’t deny it, it’s going to be what peo­ple are talk­ing about. I think the peo­ple it’s going to affect most, and where you’ll see the major pan­dem­ic art­work, is kids from 18 to 20 who were sup­posed to go to uni­ver­si­ty but end­ed up locked in a dorm room for a year. There’s no shame in the idea that they will reflect on this period.

A lot of the actors you choose to work come from a comedic back­ground, and you put them through some real­ly unpleas­ant things. Do you feel that com­e­dy and tragedy have a par­tic­u­lar con­nec­tion with­in your films?

I believe that the most real­is­tic char­ac­ters in films are fun­ny and trag­ic, and have pathos. All human beings have a sense of humour to some degree, and when you don’t demon­strate that sense of humour in a char­ac­ter they become unre­al­is­tic. But I didn’t even think about Joel hav­ing a com­e­dy back­ground. We’d worked togeth­er on The Wrong Door; I always thought he was real­ly great. He’s fun­ny, obvi­ous­ly, but he’s also a real­ly great dra­mat­ic actor.

This is the thing about Joel – he feels very vul­ner­a­ble and he makes you ner­vous when you watch him because you think it’s just a reg­u­lar guy who’s got caught up in the film. You feel for him a lot because of that. But Reece [Shear­smith] is a dif­fer­ent thing, because he’s so steeped in the his­to­ry of hor­ror and he knows it inside and out. The con­ver­sa­tions I have with him are very par­tic­u­lar. He knows every­thing I’m doing in the script – and even the things I don’t know I’m doing, he knows them.

Giv­en that Reece is a big hor­ror buff and you’ve worked togeth­er before on A Field in Eng­land, do you swap any recommendations?

Not mass­es. We talk a lot and there’s an appre­ci­a­tion there, but I’m so intim­i­dat­ed by the Inside No. 9 scripts, I wouldn’t even know where to start to write any of that stuff. Reece has a com­mit­ment to an under­stand­ing of the full breadth of hor­ror, and his taste is very wide. The stuff he brought to A Field in Eng­land was incred­i­ble, things I was only real­is­ing in the rush­es: ​‘Oh, that’s Phan­tom of the Opera he’s doing now, I didn’t even think about that at the time’

As one of the first films shot dur­ing the Covid era, and under restric­tions, did this project pro­vide new chal­lenges and new oppor­tu­ni­ties to be more creative?

On a very dull lev­el, the pro­duc­tion side of it was bril­liant because you didn’t have to go to an office any­where. It could all be done by Zoom. That was a great advan­tage because a lot of time was saved. The pro­to­col stuff was a bit of a pain in the arse, but it wasn’t any­thing that slowed down the film­ing. It’s just a lot of test­ing, hand wash­ing and mask wear­ing. It could be shot in a way that was safe because it was out­doors, and shoot­ing out­doors is mas­sive for pro­duc­tion val­ue any­way because the woods all look great. Those kinds of prag­mat­ic deci­sions come into film­mak­ing at that lev­el. If you look at Col­in Burstead, the prag­ma­tism there was hir­ing a great big house on the inter­net for not much mon­ey, and then shoot­ing a film.

It’s fun­ny that after so long indoors you chose to make a film all about how there’s dan­ger in the woods, too. It feels like nowhere is safe in your world.

Yeah, I grew up next to the woods when I was a kid and I’ve always been slight­ly wary of them. You’re play­ing in them and that’s cool, and then occa­sion­al­ly you find a dead ani­mal cov­ered in mag­gots. It’s real­ly quite present, the idea that things will die and the whole cir­cle of life. I don’t come from that posi­tion of the urban ver­sus the coun­try­side so much, it’s more of a fun­da­men­tal thing. The woods can kill you.

In the Earth is in UK cin­e­mas 18 June, with pre­views 17 June.