The Brit crime comedy “Down Terrace” was a hit with critics back in 2009. Made on a shoestring budget and shot over a little more than a week, it was lapped up for giving a uniquely dark and hilarious twist to the standard gangster flick while adding splashes of U.K. kitchen-sink social realism into the mix. The film also set up its director Ben Wheatley — making his feature debut after years working on TV, commercials and shorts — for cinematic greatness.
Fifteen years on and Wheatley has more than staked out his territory as one of the U.K.’s most exciting —and unexpected —filmmakers. After landing “cult director” status thanks to his “Down Terrace” follow-ups — the gritty psychological horror “Kill List,” murderous black comedy “Sightseers” and trippy period feature “A Field in England” — he then upped the stakes (and A-list stars) with J.G. Ballard adaptation “High Rise” (starring Tom Hiddleston) and ’70s action thriller “Free Fire” (staring Cillian Murphy and Brie Larson).
More recently, Wheatley was lured into the studio world, first with Netflix’s ravishing adaptation of Daphne de Maurier’s “Rebecca,” and last year with Warner Bros.’ mega-budget summer tentpole “Meg 2: The Trench. Whether well-received or not, these filmstook a sledgehammer (wielded, perhaps, by Jason Statham) to whatever sort of pigeon-holed assumptions onlookers might have had about Wheatley’s choices. However, between those two projects he did take a minor —and very Wheatley-esque —detour with the much lower-budget pandemic horror “In the Earth” (which he began developing after the “Tomb Raider” sequel he had been attached to became a lockdown casualty).
Now, Wheatley is heading to the Glasgow Film Festival for a special screening of “Down Terrace,” followed by a Q&A. Speaking to PvNew ahead of the Scottish festival, he discusses whether he enjoyed making the leap from “handmade, cottage industry stuff” to choppy studio waters and his next feature, the recently-announced crime thriller with Bob Odenkirk.
How does it feel to be re-showing “Down Terrace” in Glasgow?
It’s always good when you know that there’s an audience for films that have been out for a few years. It’s exciting to see it again.
Have you watched it much since 2009?
only recently to check the DCPs to make sure that they still work. So I’ve seen it in the last couple of weeks and really enjoyed it, to be honest.
In the grand scheme of things, 15 years isn’t that long and you’ve made a lot of films since then. Have you had a chance to look back and reflect?
I don’t really look back as much as I can. But 15 years is a long time. Well, it feels like a long time. And the industry changes dramatically every year, so the film feels like it’s from another time now.
While you may not look back much, are there any career highlights that stand out?
“Down Terrace” itself is always kind of close to my heart because it was the first. And the ideas behind it are from making short films in Brighton over the previous 15 years. So when I look back at it now, especially given how things have moved in the last 15 years, it definitely feels like a time capsule that some of the others don’t feel so much. You kind of look back to a time that doesn’t exist anymore, which is really interesting.
You recently made your first leap into the mega budget studio tentpole world with “Meg 2.” How was that experience?
I think the idea that the bigger the budget is makes something more important or more enjoyable is not true. I think there’s like a music analogy. It’s like doing an acoustic set and then doing an electronic set —they’re all different. But “Meg 2” was really exciting and interesting. It was on a massive scale and I got to play with the full train set and that was fantastic. And then to get that exposure, to see it go to a world audience, was exciting in the same way that “Rebecca” was. That was massive at the time. And I think “Meg 2” was the No. 1 film in the world for a week. So that side of it was amazing, but I still like doing the smaller stuff — the more handmade, cottage industry stuff is great.
One general theme from those who ventured into big budget films is that they don’t have the same level of control.
You have a different set of responsibilities. You’ve got a responsibility to the audience and to the budget. If you’re making a wide-appeal, popcorn movie, you’d better do it. If you’re going to spend $100 million on it, you can’t be making a kind of a personal tone poem. They wouldn’t give you the money to do it and they wouldn’t thank you if you did it.
Before you started making the film, you said just how excited you were to be working with Jason Statham and have him smashing up big sharks. Did your hopes and dreams come true?
I feel utterly sated.
Your next film has just been announced, a crime thriller with Bob Odenkirk called “Normal.” He was great in “Nobody,” is he going to be kicking similar ass in this?
It’s the same people behind the camera in terms of writers, so it’s moving in that direction. It’s not obviously an actual sequel to “Nobody” because I think they’re doing one of those anyway. But it’s that Odenkirk genre cinema space and has a crunchy ’70s heavyweight action style to it, which “Nobody” had, so I’m really excited about it.
Does it have any similarities to your previous films? Given the ’70s action vibes, it sounds a little like “Free Fire.”
They came to me because of “Free Fire.” They saw the link in terms of treatment of action and ambition of action. So it’ll have that kind of feel — that strong, grounded genre action.
You’ve been jumping between genres recently. Is there one you haven’t tried you’d like to have a go at? Could we see a Ben Wheatley musical, for example?
I’m just finishing off a TV show —a six part thing for Channel 4 called “Generation Z” that’s horror, so I’m going back into that field. I’ve always wanted to do a cowboy film, but I think the Odenkirk project will go some ways toward doing that, which is one of the things I was excited about. And I’ve actually gone on the record saying I don’t like musicals at all, so maybe I should do one.
There’s a lot of talk at the moment about the difficulties to make independent films in the U.K. Do you think a film like “Down Terrace” could be made these days?
It was impossible to make at the time. The budget was £6,000 (approximately $7,600). It was before edit suites were on phones, before the DSLR came in. So it would be cheaper to do it now. So there’s no real excuse. But between the group of people that made it, we had a lot of skills, so we could all operate in post-production so none of that was a cost to us. But if you’re trying to raise £1 million ($1.26 million), then yeah, that’s hard. But it was hard then. If you look at the budgets of “Kill List” and “Sightseers,” “Kill List” was about £500,000 ($634,000), “Sightseers” was £1.2 million ($1.5 million). So it took a long time. “High-Rise” was the first significant budget I had I think, which was about film five by that point.
