STACK #151 May 2017

FEATURE CINEMA

WHEATLEY'S WEIRD WORLDS

Down Terrace 2009 Wheatley brings social realism and deadpan humour to the British gangster film in his assured debut feature. Fresh out of prison, a small-time crime family patriarch and his son attempt to entrap a rat in their ranks.

continues. “Looking at that movie and thinking, why is it so exciting when you’ve got a scene with just one woman with a pistol shooting people coming down a corridor, and various characters hiding under a table while the windows get shot in.” Setting Free Fire in the 1970s also freed Wheatley of the storytelling constraints imposed by today’s technology. “The mobile phone has sort of screwed the thriller,” he notes. “Certainly this movie wouldn’t last 10 seconds with a mobile phone in it. It’s a real problem for filmmakers. A contemporary version of Free

are betraying each other – all that has to be plotted carefully, where they all are in the room is very specific. There was a lot of planning that went into it.” Part of that planning involved Wheatley constructing a version of the set using Minecraft. “That was really helpful because you can walk around inside it and see how long people take to move from area to area, how big a space you really need, and time out shots.” Sound design was also an important

Kill List 2011 A contract killer's latest assignment becomes a literal descent into hell in this unholy union of hitman thriller and occult horror. Wheatley's brilliant second film is arguably his best work to date.

aspect of the production. “We wanted to put the audience absolutely inside it. We listened to other films and realised that the sound of a gun has been made quieter and quieter over time until the loudness of a gun is the same as a punch. There are movies with dialogue scenes over the top of people firing guns and it doesn’t make any

Fire would have to have a lot of scenes talking about mobile coverage and all that bullsh–t. When you think about Assault on Precinct 13 , they cut the telephone lines and that’s it – they’re stuck.” As well as featuring his most star-powered cast to date,

It’s more Carpenter through Howard Hawks

Sightseers 2012 Like a bonkers blend of Mike Leigh and The League of Gentlemen , Wheatley adds a liberal dash of the mad and macabre to this pitch black comedy about a holidaying couple with a taste for murder.

Martin Scorsese is credited as an executive producer on Free Fire and Wheatley enthusiastically recounts how the legendary filmmaker became involved. “I read an interview where he said he’d seen Kill List , a film I made in 2011, and he’d enjoyed it. I thought if he liked it, maybe I could get to chat with him. My agent spoke to his agent and they organised a meeting. “For me it was incredible. As a film fan, to meet Martin Scorsese was just unbelievable. He’s an elder statesman filmmaker – the greatest living filmmaker as far as I’m concerned. He was just very generous to meet me. When he first went to Hollywood in the ‘70s, he met all the older generation from the ‘40s, so I guess he knew why I was so starry eyed when I met him. We got on really well.”

sense, because when you fire a gun it’s so loud it hurts your ears,” Wheatley notes. “Martin Pavey, the sound designer, and Bob Entwistle, the sound mixer, spent a lot of time recording the sound of real guns firing bullets, not blanks, so we’d get the actual, proper noise of it.” Free Fire has already been favourably compared to Reservoir Dogs but actually has its roots in the crime films of the seventies, with Wheatley citing John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) as a major influence. “It’s more Carpenter through Howard Hawks, that’s the world,” he says. “ Reservoir Dogs sits in that tradition anyway, doesn’t it – Dogs is Kubrick’s The Killing through City on Fire . “The way of using smaller

A Field in England 2013 A group of Civil War soldiers search for treasure in the titular location. Taking its cues from El Topo and Witchfinder General , Wheatley's trippy, black and white period piece practically defies categorisation.

High-Rise 2015 Wheatley's off-kilter brand of filmmaking proved a perfect fit for the "unfilmable" work of author J.G. Ballard – in this case the breakdown of social order in a 1970s apartment block.

• Free Fire is in cinemas on April 27

environments and scale was taken from Assault on Precinct 13 ,” he

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