Ben Wheatley On The Particular Filmmaking Techniques Of Kill List, Freak Shift And I, Macrobane

When the UK’s bricks-and-mortar DVD and Blu-ray stores re-open their doors on Boxing Day morning (assuming, you know, that they’re still in business) I should imagine that one of the most popular ways for film geeks to spend their fresh vouchers will be on a copy of Ben Wheatley’s Kill List.

For reasons that will become clear as you read on, I’m not going to say too much but about the film, but here’s just a couple of clue words: thriller and twist.

I spoke to Wheatley about his films this week, particularly about the way he put Kill List together. We also talked about the odd, ambitious and interesting plans he has for how to shoot his his upcoming movies I, Macrobane, with Nick Frost, and the monster shoot ‘em up, Freak Shift.

Here is some of what he told me:

Marketing a Mystery

My heart really went out to the marketing people. How do you pitch a movie that’s about a lot of mysteries? But I thought the trailer was ace. That was one of the highpoints for me.

So often with these things they’re just shit, but they put it on and we sat there and went “Oh, that was good. Fucking brilliant.”

We cut a trailer ourselves which was very arty and mute, and we showed them that and said “This is kind of what we’re thinking.” They came back and hadn’t copied it but the spirit of it was there, but they’d made it like a trailer. “My god – it’s a real film!”, unlike our thing was was more a tone poem about the film.

The press were pretty good in saying “Don’t read anything about it, just go and see it.” That seemed to be the lead on a lot of reviews, but it’s a tricky one. Whenever I read something like that I feel suspicious, wonder if there’s some sort of massive con job going on.

What I tend to do myself is read all about movies I’m never going to see in depth, and I don’t read anything about films I’m interested in.

What Goes In and What Comes Out

You try and build as much detail into the film experience as possible. I like films like that, which have got clues spread across them, things that you wouldn’t necessarily put together. I think there’s enough information for you to understand it as you’re watching it the first time but i’s certainly a different watch when you know.

I remember watching the Scorsese Cape Fear the first time around, and it’s an incredible experience when you don’t know what was going to happen. The second time I took different things from it, definitely.

Breaking Kill List into chapters gives the feeling of moving through it rather than just splurging into one long sequence. And the chapter headings were shorthand, telling the audience exactly what was going on and what we were talking about each time. It’s more encapsulated this way.

Structurally, the film was the same on the page but perhaps there were more scenes where we kind of gambled with the narrative and had scenes which would explain stuff. But we shot them with an eye to taking them out.

I don’t think it’s a fault of the film that they were taken out, we just stripped it back as much as we could, to see how far you could go with the narrative before it fell to bits. As we watched it back we knew we could take it out – why pander to the stupidest people in the audience?

Another Pair Of Eyes

There’s a circle of trusted people who will watch the films. There’s some things that I can be completely blindsided by but, generally, we have a good sense about whether it’s working or not. Amy[Jump, wife and collaborator] and I didn’t have any major disagreements, just some bits and bobs about how the symbol was working, stuff like that.

But then there were things that Amy brought to the edit, the more extreme bits of cutting like where it cuts from the “Librarian” title into the punch, which was fantastic and just compressed all that stuff. I think there was also cutting back of dialogue towards the end so that the magnetic pull was much more visual, that they didn’t stop and explain so much.

Shooting And Cutting Style

I’m a big fan of jump cuts and I have been from the start, but I think that it’s also part of the process. If you shoot a lot of handheld camera it becomes inevitable that you end up with jump cuts, and also if you establish the grammar of it early on, you can keep the best of the performances and not have to worry about that Hollywood way of cutting them. People are used to it from documentaries.

I’ve played around with this kind of faux documentary filmmaking for years. I did a lot of viral stuff that was all about shooting things that played along that edge. There’s some of that in the film. All of the hammer stuff is the language of YouTube rather than, maybe, the straight up language of cinema.

It’s that thing about tricking the audience into investing in the story they’re watching. If it was shot in a more straight-up way it might not feel as real. You might feel more relaxed and a bit more safe.

Future Developments

There’s a thing called I, Macrobane with Nick Frost. It’s pretty much a two hander and the other person with Nick Frost is really interesting and has done loads of really great British movies and I can’t tell you who it is.

Michael [Smiley, from Kill List] is going to be in at as a character called George Clooney, Neil [Maskell, from Kill List] is going to be in it, and Myana [Buring, from Kill List] as well as a smattering of people from Down Terrace. Mark Kempner will probably be in it somewhere I would have thought.

We’re hopefully doing I, Macrobane in the middle of next year. It’s all written, everyone has agreed to do it and it’s just sorting out the finer details of the financing. We almost went in the last year with it, back to back with Sightseers, but thankfully Amy talked me out of doing that.

And then we’re doing a sci-fi film called Freak Shift which is an American set movie with monsters and shotguns and things like that.

I think that Down Terrace and Kill List are of a piece with the loose, handheld camerawork, then with Sightseers we pushed it even further into improv stuff. We shot ten hours of footage and are bringing that back to 90 minutes. I, Macrobane is going to be more formal in terms of its camerawork then Freak Shift is back to something like Cops, but with lots of CG work.

I’ve done a lot of ads which are a very different style, and I’ve done a lot of tele, and now it’s about trying to bring those styles back into the film work, perhaps some more considered camera stuff. But I don’t want to lose the rawness of the performances because I think that’s the major aspect of any movie.

I’ve tried to come up with some schemes for how we’re going to keep people hanging around on set but still buoyed up. We’re not sure how we’re going to do it yet but we’re thinking of trying to do stuff where we keep the performers in character while we’re getting the camera set-ups ready. Something like shooting two different movies at the same time so that you shoot the “technical” film at the same time as shooting a “handheld” film and then just flip-flop between the two movies. I may only end up trying that for one day though! [Laughs]

How they do American TV might be the key to it. You hear that Sopranos episodes are shot in nine days and you go “Fuck – how do they do that?” but I think that’s done with multiple crews pre-lighting so when they turn up on set they can just go. When everybody is on set doing lighting and actors are sitting in their trailers, that’s when the energy nosedives.

Thanks again to Ben for his time. Kill List is out on DVD and Blu-ray+DVD “Double Play” in the UK next Monday, 26th December. The US release is set for