J.G. Ballard’s chilling and satirical dystopian vision of a society on the brink of collapse, is brilliantly bought to the screen in High-Rise. Jason Wood, our Artistic Director of Film, speaks to director Ben Wheatley about the film…
Jason Wood: High-Rise has long been destined for the screen. How did your involvement unfold?
Ben Wheatley: It had been a book I had read and loved as a teenager. There were rites of passage of reading that and Naked Lunch and other books by Burroughs and Ballard. We got to the stage a year or so ago when we started looking at licensing books to film, and sat on the sofa and looked at my bookshelf and saw High-Rise and thought, well why has nobody done it? I didn’t know the backstory of Roeg and Jeremy Thomas so contacted my agent and asked who had it and was told that Jeremy Thomas did. Within three days I was talking to Jeremy. Luckily, he had recently seen Sightseers so it all came together quite well.
JW: The timing is prescient. Though the book was written in 1975 did you feel it important that the film have real social and political resonance?
BW: I think that the issue that people had with the book in terms of adapting it, was that they thought it was futuristic, and that it was projecting into the future. But the future Ballard was projecting was looking forward of ’75 and we have lived into that future. We were making a futuristic film about a projected past and because we have seen what happened, and Ballard also saw it coming down the pipe, we decided to have the end quote from Thatcher about state capitalism. Amy Jump ( High-Rise screenwriter) and I were born in 1972 so we were the same age as the children in the tower. In many ways the children in the tower were our parents and we have seen how their lives have turned out. The film is a look at the book, from the perspective of the people that survived it. We are in a perpetual 70s/80/90s. Boom followed by bust, then boom followed by bust again.
JW: I was impressed by the balance between computer generated effects and actual locations.
BW: It was really important that the building felt real. It was a little bit bigger than the flats that were built but not massively so. The flats in the film are not actually that big, except of course for Royals. We looked at a lot of brutalist buildings but we were also looking at an alternative 1970s. We didn’t want a greatest hits of the 1970s with circular televisions and kipper ties. We wanted to be a time out of time.
JW: Your work has always had an interest in sects and tribalism and the idea of a society teetering on the brink of a return to primitive behaviour.
BW: It’s essentially a contradiction of our time. We all drive cars but don’t really care where the petrol comes from. Countries that produce oil are bombed but we are removed in our empathy because we want to continue to be able to drive our cars around. That was one of the most heart-breaking things about New Labour. There were more wars under Blair than there were under Thatcher. As people that live in a country with an army that is out in active service we are part of that. That’s the ugliness of our society and we can’t pretend that we are not responsible. This is certainly what Kill List is about. They bring the war home. People’s memories tend to be short. When we look back at the tribes that have lived in England they have done all sorts of terrible things. And will continue to.
JW: It’s an incredibly visceral film.
BW: It’s a statement of intent. It’s a film that is very much about the stripping away of social masks and showing what is literally beneath the surface.
JW: It’s a risky role for Tom Hiddlestone as a young doctor with a faint whiff of conscience. He’s the most sympathetic character in the film but that really isn’t saying very much.
BW: I’ve watched Hiddlestone in the films of Joanna Hogg and the Marvel films pictures he has made and enjoyed him in both. He’s a very smart guy and knows how to play complexity. As an actor he’s also incredibly committed.
JW: The minimalist score is terrific. Can you just say something about working with Clint Mansell and having Portishead cover Abba?
BW: I was watching Portishead on Glastonbury and then I realised that Geoff Barrow was following me on Twitter and that he was a fan of A Field in England. I followed him back and we eventually met. And I just said, ‘Are you interested in doing this?’ I had to write a permission letter to Benni Andersson. Thankfully Benni said ‘Yes’. The process of working with Portishead is one of the treats of filmmaking, as is working with Clint Mansell. I had heard that Clint was keen to work on High-Rise and so I quite simply contacted him. The process was a little different on this film because the process was less montage driven and more propelled by an underscore. This was much more of a suite of sounds. It presented a different challenge.
JW: This is, to be fair, quite a high-risk film given the admiration for Ballard and for this book particularly.
BW: To be honest I haven’t thought about it. It’s about making the best film you can make and hoping that people like it. You really can’t spend time worrying about it. If you worried about it you make if differently and then end up chasing a mystical audience that exists only in your head. I make films that I want to see and hope that I am in tune enough with an audience that other people are going to want to see it as well. I don’t want my choices compromised. We wrestled with the book, which was difficult to adapt, and tried to be as true to the book as we could. The translation of a book to a film can’t please everyone. It just can’t. The ethos of Down Terrace was that a group of people got together to make a film and didn’t worry about asking permission. This comes from a very similar attitude.
High-Rise continues on our screens. Book tickets and find out more here.
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