Interviews
[Interview] Ben Wheatley Talks ‘A Field in England’
One of the most interesting contemporary filmmakers, writer/director Ben Wheatley continuously circumvents expectations. I was first introduced to his work with Kill List, about a hitman on a mission that he’s not entirely aware of. I had seen his short “U is for Unearthed” in The ABCs of Death, showcasing his visual style an inventiveness with horror. Sightseers took me by complete surprise with it’s darkly comedic tone as a couple travel across the country on holiday. And then we had A Field in England, which feels nothing like any of his movies and more like a cinematic experiment that was supervised by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Always surprising the audience and always pushing himself in new directions, I got to sit down with Ben Wheatley back in September in Austin to talk about the immersive and impressive cinematic endeavor.
WolfMan: For fans of yours, like myself, coming off of things like Sightseers or Kill List, I didn’t know what to anticipate. I didn’t know what to expect. Do you feel like you should voice to your audience how different this film could be from the other films you’ve made?
Ben Wheatley: I would say that, with all of my films, you could make that argument. If you look at the reviews and the reception of the movies, it’s pretty much a 90 degree turn each time. So, yeah, I think you should do that with every film you go to, really. You should take it on uncertain terms. What I expect from directors is, when I follow their work, not for their films to always be the same. The quality of the thinking to be similar. You wouldn’t want to warn people, that sounds weird, like that would put them off. I think it’s hard going from something that’s a comedy to something more serious. That’s the trick here.
WM: The idea of this group of characters all walking around and exploring nature, looking for a pub, isn’t necessarily tied to the time period in which your film took place. From the inception of the film, was it always this group of characters in this specific time and place or was there any thought of having it take place in modern day?
BW: It wouldn’t really make any sense in modern day. I’ve had that question before and I’m trying to figure out where it comes from, that idea. It might be that because it’s not a part of American history that it feels like it doesn’t matter. That you could use any old bit of history to tell this story, but it’s a very specific thing. If the film had been set during the American Civil War, you wouldn’t really be asking that question, would you? I think the events that are happening at that point are very specific to the story.
WM: It probably is an American thing. We see people in period garb and expect to see historic battles recreated in some sort of big way. That seems more familiar to movies made in America and American audiences.
BW: The history ends up as backdrops for more generic stories, and I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. And in your own culture, you’d never expect that. Within European stories, if it was the French revolution film, I wouldn’t think to ask, “Have you thought about making this a sci-fi film because that would be more fun?” They’d probably say, “…what the fuck are you talking about?” I literally saw a review online that said I could have set this film anywhere in the world.
WM: “I know it’s a story about this civil war, but couldn’t it be a buddy comedy that took place in a mall?”
BW: Yeah man, sure. Good luck with that. (laughs)
WM: In Kill List, there were a lot of characters with connections to the Earth and to nature. Sightseers had characters appreciating nature on their holiday. A Field in England has strong ties to nature, and your short “Unearthed” has “earth” in the title. Is this a conscious theme you have or have these themes just subconsciously been making their way into your movies?
BW: It’s interesting. I’ve always been interested in looking at beings who are ancient and modern at the same time. Modernity is just this wafer-thin thing teetering on top of ancient things. The things that we think are important now weren’t important ten years ago. What was important ten years ago weren’t important ten years before that. The reality of where we come from is always there. I was thinking about that kind of thing, that if you dig through the ground, you don’t have to go that far before you hit the dirt…I recently heard that in 100,000 years, the Earth would be able to completely recover from humans. Anything we built would be gone, rotted away or rusted away into nothing. I think that’s a common link between them, you see it strip away the modern illusion. Whether anyone wants to know about this history or not, it’s the beginning of America and Western civilization pretty much. I come from Billericay which is where the Pilgrim fathers met up on the way to Plymouth Rock. It was at that point, and that came from that radical thinking, and none of this would be here if it wasn’t for that place.
WM: You’ve done quite a few different genres, from the more straight-up horror thriller, to–
BW: You’d be on ROCKY ground saying that Kill List was a straight-up horror thriller. That would have been a hard sell in 2011.
WM: Well something more familiar to genre audiences. Any time anyone asks me, who enjoys a movie like The Wicker Man, I recommend Kill List.
BW: I think it’s an oddball film within the genre. That wouldn’t be an entry-level film for the genre.
WM: If I showed Kill List to someone and they didn’t like it, I wouldn’t want to talk to them about movies anyway. But you’ve done a few different genres, do you think of the movies regardless of genre, however it might be labeled, or do you intentionally set up to experiment?
BW: I’m not very consistent in my answer to this. (laughs) I like a lot of different genres and I’d like to make a lot of different movies in those genres. The question can be a bit leading in terms of whether I’m looking at genre in the modern way where there are 15 genres lined up next to each other, I don’t think of it like that. I follow where the story goes and then when it becomes its own thing, once you stop writing it and the characters start talking to each other and you don’t know what’s going to happen with it, then you form it and form it until it makes sense with its running time and structurally and the characters are true to themselves in that minute, then you completely change it again because the actors get into it. The way I tend to film is kind of reacting to feeling like a witness in this space, rather than a Hitchcock-ian planner. I don’t plan as much. I don’t know what it’s going to be until I’m there and I feel the emotions and vibe of the actors. And within those things, it’s a very long way from sitting down and watching a few DVDs and saying, “I want to make these kinds of films,” to where you end up. It’s hard to understand how critical thinking works. All you ever hear is this list of movies that are a bit like your movie. I’m guilty of it myself, you talk about different films in comparison to yours in interviews, and I’m not sure I ever believe it. They are movies you might have thought about in a general sense, but they aren’t necessarily influences. The weird thing is that I’ve done this process four times in the past five years, and the influences on all the films are probably all the same so it just gets boring to repeat.
WM: You mentioned that you wait until you’re on set to feel things out to see how things are going to go and you mentioned during the Q & A that there was only one line of improvisation in the film, so how much of the movie we are seeing is different from how you pictured it? Not necessarily the performances, but visually speaking, how close did A Field in England end up like what you saw in your mind?
BW: Again, that’s a different type of filmmaking. If you talked to Hitchcock or you talked to the Coens, if they’re to be believed because they’re such slippery customers, then you have the thing where you plan it all out and storyboard it and it’s not quite what you pictured and you’ll have an issue with that. If you go into it and witness it, then what you shoot is what you shoot. Unless you’ve got a problem with performance, and at the end of the day, it just didn’t work, you’ve made assumptions dramatically that didn’t come off, that’s the high-wire act. You put your whole understanding and drama on the line and you think it will work, then you shoot it and hopefully it fucking works. (laughs) Or it doesn’t. Sightseers was more scary because there was a lot more improv and it was a lot more amorphous and the cut was harder and took longer, but it was all there. We knew it was all there. Kill List was the same, where we knew we shot it but I was worried that it needed a lot more exposition and we looked to those things we didn’t like and took them out and got back to the core of it. Down Terrace was more like a fever dream when we shot it anyway so it was what it was.
WM: There’s a disclaimer in the beginning about the strobe effects, was there a lot of experimentation to work out how to convey that stuff or were those heavier visuals effects in your head from the beginning?
BW: It was in the back of my mind, definitely. I’ve been experimenting with that kind of cutting for a long time and that was in the air, that 60’s and 70’s experimental cinema. In the 70’s, you’d break out into these crazy still-based montages all the time. If that happened in a movie now, their heads would explode, in the middle of a Tom Cruise film or something. It was just trying to shrug of this kind of conservativism. We wanted to see something crazy in the cinema, on the big screen, with a lot of people in a dark room, and let’s see what happens.
A Field in England is available on VOD on February 7th.
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Eli Roth is a formative name in the “Splat Pack” of ultraviolent filmmakers who first came to fame during the 2000s.
Roth’s Cabin Fever was a great statement piece, but he’s managed to continually top himself with gory gems like Hostel, The Green Inferno, and Thanksgiving. Roth has always been a filmmaker who strives to push boundaries and embrace a passion for genre cinema.
His latest movie, Ice Cream Man, is a project that’s been 20 years in the making. It’s a twisted take on the Pied Piper parable that’s arguably the most gruesome film from Roth’s career and an exciting turning point.
To celebrate the gory film’s summer release, Eli Roth opens up about the luxury of shooting a horror film with hundreds of enthusiastic kids, bypassing the MPAA to deliver the most outrageous kills of his career, and why he intentionally avoided Weapons before filming.
BLOODY DISGUSTING: You’ve described Ice Cream Man as “The Birds but with children” and cited Who Can Kill a Child? as a reference point. Were there other “killer kid” movies that you’re pulling from for inspiration like Children of the Corn, the French film Them, or even Weapons?
ELI ROTH: Well, Weapons I purposely didn’t watch until after I was done with my cut because I had people on the crew that went to see it because I wanted to make sure that there was no crossover. I didn’t watch it until after I was done with the film, but The Children from 1980 was a big influence. That trailer scared me as a kid, watching the kids on the bus go through the gas and then turn into killer kids. When the girl killed her mom in the original Night of the Living Dead was a big reference point. But definitely The Birds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but also other movies like Bad News Bears and those early Amblin movies. Those coming-of-age films. There’s also a lot of references to Bird with the Crystal Plumage in there, too. It’s kind of a Pied Piper story, so that was really the starting point for it.
There must have been serious hurdles to not just filming a movie that involves so many children, but also in terms of its rating and censorship. Was there anything you shot that had to be cut or toned down?
ER: The whole reason I started The Horror Section was to completely bypass that system and go directly to the theaters. Now that Terrifier 3 kicked the door open for the rest of us and you can have an unrated movie go out in 2000 theaters, you know that fans want to go see those movies in theaters. Before, you could never release an unrated movie like this, but now after what Damien Leone did, you can. So I set up an independent studio, I went right to the theaters, I’m self-releasing it, and I didn’t even deal with the MPAA. I just made the movie the way I wanted to make it. We shot it, cut it, and we’re putting it out in the theaters raw and unfiltered.
Every movie I’ve ever made, at some point someone has said, “You have to take this out, or we’re not releasing the movie.” I just didn’t want to deal with that anymore. I’m just tired of it. I think they’re wrong. I think Terrifier 3 proved that they are all strong. In the past, I’ve been like, “I shouldn’t have taken that out. I shouldn’t have cut that down,” but you’re dealing with a corporation in a studio. That’s what they do. They’re so afraid, and it’s an abstract argument. There’s no proof that they’re right or that you’re right, but that’s where I know great horror lives. It’s got that bit of danger to it. You go, “You’re not supposed to do that,” “Should I be watching this?”
Even Evil Dead II, Faces of Death, or whatever it was when you get a tape. Whenever you’re going, “I shouldn’t watch this,” it becomes the most exciting kind of horror. Even The Ring. It’s got to be great. It’s got to be original. There has to be an incredible story that people have never seen before, but I faced no issues whatsoever other than my own budget. The whole purpose of starting my own studio is that I could take an idea like Ice Cream Man, that I’ve always wanted to do and that everyone told me I couldn’t, and just go for it.
On that note, there are so many amazing kills in this movie. What’s your favorite and which was the most challenging to pull off?
ER: There are a few, yeah. My original idea was the mother waking up and seeing her daughter just standing over her; she picks up a hacksaw and just cuts her head off. The dad wakes up, looks over, and the daughter is just smiling and cutting the head off and like, “Hi, Daddy.” Then the kid bashes his face in. So actually doing all that was extremely satisfying. There were a couple other ones that I don’t want to give away that really turned out great. I was just really lucky. I sat down with Steve Newburn at Applied Arts FX Studio. They’re incredible. I told them, “I want to do more kills. I want to basically beat every kill I’ve ever done and do more kills in this movie than all my other movies combined.” Adrian Moreau was incredibly genius. We did Thanksgiving together, and she did some very specific effects for me on this one. She won the Oscar for The Whale, so we had an incredibly talented team and just went for it. The kids in the movie, their parents are all horror movie fans, so we talked to them about everything.
Once you put the kids in the gore and in the makeup, they go right into it. They get it. They understand that this is like Halloween and pretend. There’s the bit where they’re pulling apart a body — they call it a “taffy pull” — we did this fake trailer, “The Piano Killer,” with Hailey Kittle. I also worked with her in Trick VR Treat, and she was in Thanksgiving. I said, “I’m going to drop a piano on you,” so we had her fake body and thought, “Let’s kill Hailey, and then we can use the body from “The Piano Killer” and pull it apart in Ice Cream Man. I recycled the same body parts.
It was unreal doing it all with the kids, though. You can’t believe what you’re watching, and the kids were having a great time. It was Christmas morning for them. Justin Harding, who was my Second Unit Director, his son Bowen is a baseball player. So it made sense to give Bowen the axe so that he could really give a good swing to cut Hailey in half. He is so good and so athletic, so he could really go for it. He’s just gleefully swinging the bat, and we’re just on the ground pumping blood at him. The kids were just laughing and having the time of their lives.
The main actors are so good, too. I really didn’t want “kid acting.” I wanted the same acting as when you’re watching Stranger Things or the ’70s Bad News Bears. These kids are real kids, and I didn’t want it to feel like movie dialogue. I wanted the kids to swear and talk the way that real 12-year-olds talk to each other and the way that bullies talked to me in the ’80s. I verified it with all the kids to know that this is exactly what the bullying in schools sounds like. This is how they’d talk and what they say when the adults, parents, and teachers aren’t around. I wanted it to feel naturalistic, and like you’ve just been dropped into this small town that has all this drama. Then you’re just with these kids, trying to survive this “kidpocalypse,” and trying to figure out why this is happening and how to get out of it.
I’m a huge fan of the Clint Howard Ice Cream Man from 1995. There’s also a great Tales from the Crypt episode with Bill Pullman and Brad Dourif that plays in this space. Why do you think there’s this ongoing connection between ice cream men and horror?
ER: It’s interesting; I’ve never seen the Clint Howard film. I’m certainly aware of it. But this all came about from just watching this ice cream man handing out ice cream. It was during the Cabin Fever press tour in 2003. I was just watching this ice cream man and thinking, “We just trust them.” It could be a serial killer, you know? What if they just rolled into town and poisoned the kids? I thought that might be too fucked up, but then I thought of it as if it’s the Pied Piper. There’s something with the music. Kids just want to run out into the street and buy ice cream when they hear that ice cream man music. It’s such deep programming. So what if that was used to turn the kids against their parents?
Having a new daughter myself — having a baby — all you want to do is protect them. And you know that no matter what you do, you can’t. The outside world is going to get to them somehow. You can prepare them, but you can’t fully protect them. Some evil force will get into their head, and so what if that was turned against you? This thing that you loved and put everything into now wants to kill you. It’s the most horrible thought as a parent. After 20 years, it was kind of great to go in and re-approach it from that direction.
But I think ice cream men just have this inherent trust behind them. You see them, and you trust them. They come into the neighborhood, feed the kids, and then they leave, and you have no idea who they really were. Sure, they were an ice cream man, but what were they like? They were wearing a white hat, and they drove an ice cream truck, but anyone can do that. It was such a perverse, sick thought. Like, “What if you turn Thanksgiving into something awful?”, “What if backpacking in Europe became a nightmare?”
That’s where great horror lives. It’s when you take something that’s seemingly innocent and then make it dark. “What if the kids are playing jump rope, but then they get turned, and they’re playing jump rope with guts?” At the beginning of the film, they’re playing “Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” but then it’s “Pin the Knife in the Teacher.” Or you’re playing little league baseball, but now you’re bashing your dad’s head in with the bat. It’s taking all the fun, innocent things from childhood and then twisting them with a horror spin.
Ice Cream Man is in theaters on August 7.
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