Above His Pay Grade: Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise
Paste talks to the High-Rise director about making the leap from cult status to big cast.
Photo: Monica Schipper / Stringer / Getty
J.G. Ballard’s seminal British sci-fi novel High-Rise was first published in 1975, but some four decades later the book is finally getting its due on the big screen—and its dystopian vision of modern urban living feels even more prescient in 2016, according to director Ben Wheatley.
The story almost made it to film twice before, first with Nicolas Roeg in the late ’70s and more recently with Vincenzo Natali. Those false starts, coupled with the book’s unnerving depiction of a luxury high-rise apartment building devolving into utter chaos, saddled High-Rise with the “unfilmable” tag. And that was that, until Wheatley and screenwriter (also wife) Amy Jump chased after the rights.
Starring Tom Hiddleston as the tower’s newest resident Dr. Robert Laing, Jeremy Irons as the architect behind the brutalist apartment complex, Sienna Miller, Elisabeth Moss and Luke Evans, High-Rise features Wheatley’s biggest cast, and biggest budget, to date. But the British filmmaker behind cult hits Sightseers and Kill List (and most recently, A Field in England) proves to be a perfect fit for the material, deftly mixing dark comedy and unsettling imagery as a few power outages and clogged garbage chutes plunge the building into rioting, literal class warfare. Household pets will be eaten.
With High-Rise coming to theaters May 13th (and available on demand as of April 28th), Paste spoke to Wheatley about making a ’70s sci-fi dystopia film with a comic book movie cast, the challenges of adapting a supposedly unfilmable novel and his even more impressive feat: getting Portishead to record a song for the film’s soundtrack, the band’s first new music in years.
Paste Magazine: It’s been over 40 years since this book was published, but its themes really do seem more relevant than ever. That’s good for you, but it seems like it’s not too great for the rest of society…
Ben Wheatley: Yeah, well, it doesn’t look good when you look at [Ballard’s] other books as well. I mean, if they’re going to come true too, it’s bad news all around.
Paste: Why do you think the time was right to tell this story now?
Wheatley: I’d read the book when I was a kid, and liked it. It tied in really well with my love of Mad Max and reading 2000 AD and all those kinds of things. It felt like a kind of potential future. But when I re-read it when I was older, it felt like it was being taken from the pages of a newspaper. It wasn’t a warning about a future that might happen, it was just reporting on now. And that made me think that maybe it was time. But also, it’s a big British sci-fi novel and I just couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been made. So I started poking about to see who had the rights to it.
Paste: I know a lot of people have called the novel unfilmable. But a lot of people have called a lot of novels unfilmable, and that certainly hasn’t stopped anyone in the past. Was that unfilmable tag almost like a challenge for you?
Wheatley: Well, it depends why they call it unfilmable. Do they call it unfilmable because people have been trying to film it and they haven’t? Or is it that, formally, the book is structured in a way that’s not simpatico to the traditional three-act structure of cinema? When you look at something like Naked Lunch, which is a very difficult book to adapt, it’s all over the place. It’s lots of vignettes, it doesn’t make necessarily any kind of narrative sense. But you look at the High-Rise novel and it’s pretty linear in its storytelling. It’s from the perspective of three characters, which isn’t unusual for cinema. And it’s very vividly written. So I think the unfilmable tag comes from more of a production point of view. I think that probably the main issue with it that’s made it difficult to film is that [Ballard’s] general attitude is maybe something that isn’t mainstream enough. If you were to make it into a big Hollywood movie. Because the characters, their outlook doesn’t always necessarily fit within the traditional narrative structure. Laing, for instance, being an observer, as the kind of audience avatar or hero, he doesn’t do anything particularly heroic. Or savory. And the whole story puts the audience in the crosshairs of responsibility, which is an uncomfortable place to be. So I think that’s probably more the reason it’s not been attempted up until now.
Paste: And yet you ended up working with your biggest, most Hollywood cast yet.
Wheatley: Yeah, that was a great treat.
Paste: Did that make the experience of filming this feel different at all? Or is it still just making a movie in the end?
Wheatley: Weirdly, on this film, it literally comes down to something as simple as this: often, the schedule is organized around lunch. So you can have “a hot in the hand,” or a continuous lunch, which means that you don’t stop. Everyone eats as they film; they don’t have a sit-down for an hour and all stop. And on High-Rise, it was done like that so we could keep the energy up. But what it meant was that I never left set. I was always there by the camera or by the monitors, so I never saw anyone. So this whole massive production was going on, and the only people I interacted with were [cinematographer] Laurie Rose, Bobby Entwistle who was sound, the script continuity [person] and the actors.
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