Alan Clarke and Alkaseltzer - A Conversation with DOWN TERRACE's Ben Wheatley
There may be a minor **spoiler** in there or two, perhaps even for Wheatley's proposed horror film project (possibly his next film), so fair warning, but mainly the discussion is a clean as you can be while still talking about a film in depth.
Kurt Halfyard: Lets talk language. How do you gauge the response (at a festival) of a North American Audience to a film that is such slang and dialect heavy?
Ben Wheatley: Well it is tough. In North America it is tough. But it makes us chuckle, because we get all sorts of American Stuff on TV in Britain, nobody would ever think to subtitle "The Wire" on TV, it is just like second nature because of the way that this stuff travels. But I had a screening in Philadelphia where there were a lot of blank looks. There is a lot of slang. But if you see something like Gomorrah, which is heavy with a lot of Italian culture stuff, a totally different culture, but you adjust. Same with Japanese stuff.
KH: But Comedy is often all nuance, seems particularly tricky.
BW: If it is reference based, there is a lot of English comments, and cultural context, you cannot do that touch stone saying and have it travel.
KH: But Down Terrace is about family, and there is lots of gangster type stuff is likely familiar to most audiences, but most of all it is about families simply not getting along.
BW: That was the plan. I am a massive fan of crime films. I really love them and watch as many as I can. I am a fan of English crime films, both the past and the current crop of football violence movies. I'm not snobby about that stuff, when people look back in 10 years times, it might even be considered a movement, in the same way you look back on a period of 70s horror movies, which are considered amazing now, but at the time are more or less considered just trash. I think that it is Britain's commercial cinema at the moment, and because it is populist it can slip through critically. But also I did not want to end up making something that was, you know some of those films are taking their moves from Scorsese and American cinema of the 1970s, that stone in the pond that resulted in stuff in the 1990s like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and between those two things it is really distorted the face of what crime films are, by the time it gets to you it is so fourth or fifth hand that you realize (as brilliant as they are) that culturally it doesn't mean anything anymore.
KH: It is a copy of a copy of a copy. Less grounded in reality, but more in reference.
BW: This is not a criticism of it, it is just the reality of it. If you want to make films about films that is fine, but I just couldn't, I didn't want to, I wanted to make films that were about emotional violence more than crashing cars or shoot outs. I think that edge and really good performances, it is like a great sucker punch, and it really works and that comes through as more from watching stuff like Cassavetes' Faces. And you say, "Why does this stuff work so well? It is just people, chatting in rooms, effectively,"
KH: I get a Mike Leigh vibe from Down Terrace...
BW: Well I am a big fan of Naked. It is incredible. I remember seeing that, and thinking, 'That is a real Statement!' But then his stuff is quite caricature-y, I find. It is not as if we sat there and watched this stuff as a reference point, I am a fan, I am a fan of Alan Clarke (Scum, Made in Britain), but his stuff doesn't really bare an obvious mark on Down Terrace, well you know, his early stuff is quite theatrical, and then it becomes insanely verite, he died quite young, but if he had been alive today he would have been quite a major player, up there with Paul Greengrass, but what Clarke started was insane, he stuff is stylized and lots of steadicam, he did the original version of Elephant, which was 10 steadicam shots of a man in Northern Ireland walking along and you go, hey what is going on, and he walks into a baths and he goes into a change room and he pulls out a gun and just shoots him. And the next shot is another guy totally somewhere else in the city, just walking along and he goes down into a carpark and walks up to someone else and just shoots him, and that is the film, this happens 9 times in a row and you are sitting there thinking "What the fuck is this," but it is basically about sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, tit for tat, back and forth. Van Sant has probably seen this and has re-appropriated that back into what Elephant is, which is kind of a tame version of that. Not as hardcore or political, but he is a massive influence, Clark, like a specter on British film-making, but he is like a proper serious character up there with Ken Loach in terms of his politics and great filmmaker and that part, and Scum, which is Ray Winstone's first film, he is about 19 in it, and it is the grimmest prison movie ever, and it is about his rise to the top of the prison food chain, 'Whose the daddy now.' Clarke made the film twice. He made it for the BBC but they banned it, then he remade it as a feature film. If you can get a hold of it, a lot of it is difficult to find, being British TV stuff.
KH: Lets talk about the Father/Son element in the movie. The father and son are completely at odds with each other, but there is an unspoken assumption that in 25 years, Karl will be turned into Bill.
BW: Yea, I think that is that thing of family where, you have tender moments and aggressive moments, and it does not mean that he doesn't love him, but criticism and jockeying for position in that house. It is a factor of the close proximity, in one sense it may not even matter if they are related or not, it is the closeness of three people in a small house, and it was always the thing in our household around who would make the tea. If you were asked to make it, you were like ah, I'm making it, and that got you points, and you could really feel that protocol. And banter. For many years with friends, everyone was quite obnoxious to one another, and it sounded really appalling, but that was just the way you spoke, and it gets up to such a point that saying awful things is simply acceptable.
KH: And when an outsider comes in...
BW: It is just different types of language. You can have a family that is very respectable and quiet, but they will have their own thing that they do. It is a patriarchal thing, that no one questions the father, where everyone is fighting to be heard, and that was their thing. I don't think that....It only comes to a head, at the ending when there is no way out, they are so mendacious and double dealing all the time, that Karl probably cannot get his head around it. That was the thing with me and family elders, with a rush of adrenaline I could never really form a proper argument, so you just had to shout people down because it was the only way to deal with it. You couldn't remember the exact specifics of the events in the now (you said this, then I said that, and then...) but it has to finish so it is like beyond being about thought and into something else.
KH: But in this case, Bill has control because he falls back on his particular gift of language.
BW: Bill loses his temper, but he never raises a hand, or does or says anything that gets people into trouble, on the face of it, there is nothing in the script that he is responsible for anything really. He is actually not really clever, it is Maggie who is the one who makes the decisions, because Bill is sort of incapable of making them, essential. Bill cannot even make dinner, he's terrible. I think that was definitely in the script from the start. It is this thing about crime films being about really hard men, "Are you Tough? Are You Tough?" but where are the women, who are these women, what happens when they go home. I cannot believe they sit their being flinty with each other all day long. And it is all these men's games, all this stupid shit of shouting and kind of play wrestling, and oneupmanship. A wolf-pack mentality. The film is about poking at that. What are they doing here with that stuff. And you have female characters thinking you are all idiots and I can see that. And dealing with these slightly retarded men. Cleaning house is fine, it doesn't matter they don't mean anything to the point where her son doesn't mean anything to here.
KH: The character of Maggie is a wonderful performance by Julia Deakin whom I only really new as the boozy landlord in Spaced. Her performance is so broad there, and so interior here, could you talk about the casting of Julia?
BW: I worked with Julia on a show called Modern Toss which is based on a British comic book, half animation, half live action, and we needed a character who was a psychologist or something, and I just thought I'd love to work with her, it would be great, and she did it. But as a person she is quite quiet and interior, and I thought well that is interesting - and her performances in Modern Toss was pretty subtle as well - so the Marsha thing is a comedy character thing (laughs) well, it is real enough. Then I got her again for a show called The Wrong Door and she just really turned in a great performance for that as well. So when I started getting down to the final draft of Down Terrace and it was sort of coming together, I thought of Julia. When you cast a role like that there are only so many actors who fit that description, and everyone is pretty damn good at that age, or they have left the business, are you going to get Dame Judi Dench in a movie of this size?
KH: Besides, they are all doing Harry Potter films anyway...
BW: (Laughs.) but I think as I was going along I ended up writing it for her specifically. I wanted to write something that would attract really good actresses, and that doesn't happen in these types of films that are all about blokes. Why do I watch these films? Do II really want to see a bunch of blokes shouting at each other. I like seeing women on screen in these types of films. Maybe that is just me...
KH: They are all somewhat damaged and somewhat narcissistic, and projecting their own issues onto others, but she is clearly the strongest character in the movie.
BW: OK, you watch The Departed and you think, how the fuck did they get to the point where they have been running a crime thing for 40 years and nobody in there demonstrates they have any kind of guile, and even the Jack Nicholson character is a borderline retard and never does anything right and is fucked all the time. And you need someone...
KH: In this case it is eventually quite clear! When Maggie was first talking to the fellow from London I thought they might simply have been related, but then I realized it is a respect thing, London knows who really is in charge when shit goes down...
BW: She probably knew him when he was a kid. He is about the same age as Karl. Karl probably played with him as a kid, but Karl is now the loser, and he is the guy who you now call when in London. He is the guy who looks after local territory. This was an instance where we cast against type because in a tradition film it would be some incredible enforcer who turns up and terrifies the shit out of you, like Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, but Gareth Tunly, who I have worked with a lot and he is such a nice guy and very calm. You feel he is an intelligent thoughtful person. You cannot be crazy, would would not last five minutes running around like an idiot. And that is the thing, the whole point of the film, they live in this house, but it is not a big house but we've got loads of money - in the same way that mafia dons are all living in shacks in Sicily, because they cannot show they have money. They cannot risk it. It is a really weird situation. You watch these crime investigation movies and you think why don't they just sit outside their house, they are going to catch them doing something. These guys are doing terrible shit all the time in these massive houses. Investigate them for taxes, it would take you ten minutes to do that. But whatever, you know. This family were hidden in a way and they slowly reveal themselves through all this carnage and madness.
KH: All the carnage, as a result of the entire family being on simmer for some time to get to this point. Bill returning from trial and the suspected mole sets them off, but all the gun powder has been piling up for years.
BW: Yea, you get Garvy, the first one to come under suspicion because he mentions his girlfriend in a weird way. The original shorter version of the film intended to be 20 minutes, was only with Garvy, but then we expanded it out. And it expanded out from a few particular images, a pregnant woman with a knife, the killing of a friend. That was there from the start.
KH: Can we talk about the screenplay? How much of it was changed during shooting? The film has a very improvised look and feel to it even as it is visually polished...
BW: An improvised sheen? (laughs) It is more of a paraphrasing over an improvisation. They do not make up stuff up, but they are making up the lines. If the line is like, "Can you hand me a cup of tea?" The might paraphrase it, "We want a tea, can you make one for us?" You do not want the actors starting conversations outside of the conversations in the script, it all ends up too baggy and horrible and you just cannot use any of it. Things get off point. And then you can see it as well. Bad improvisation is lazy and horrible unless you have done six months of rehearsal. If you looked at the script you would see that is pretty damn similar, except for some bits which were specifically asked for that, for instance, Bill's monologue on the sixties. The bulk of that may end up as a 25 minute extra on the DVD, the full speech.
KH: You see it a bit in Karl's character, but you really see it in Bill. This overly loquacious use of language. It is interesting, for me, to see this mid-level gangster guy but he seems to be very well read, or thoughtful about language. He talks a lot bigger than his station in life.
BW: He talks bigger than 'film people' talk, but people you meet all the time do. You meet a working class guy who is really well read, it is not necessarily a surprise. You meet intelligent people in every walk of life. It is that in films, you don't so often. Or it is like in a noir film where everyone talks very crisp and very short. In Howard Hawkes films the characters do not so much have interests outside what is going on in the plot of the film. Or Mamet. Which is great, but that is his thing. But I wanted characters who liked music, and smoked dope and the house is full of books...
KH: Lets talk about the guitar scenes and the music in the household.
BW: I like movies with music in them. It used to happen all the time, you'd have a movie like a cowboy film and there would be a bit of a song in the middle and then it would carry on. Movies would have a bit of variety, and it was nice to have a break, and listen to some music which is not some pounding pop-track, which is used over some cool sequence. Very early on we wanted to have that, and because it is written around Bob Hill who does himself play the guitar a lot. Rob and I have made little films about him playing the guitar for years, it always makes us laugh. There used to be a thing on local TV called 'Free Screen' where you could send in home movies and they'd put them on and pay you 50 pound. It was something for the station to get their charter, quota.
KH: Here we have Can-Con, a quota of local content on public and commercial broadcasts.
BW: When I was in college, we used to make these movies, "Bob Hill's Reality Studio" and he be sitting in that exact chair, and playing. We just filmed that and it was on TV all the time. And we'd watch it and laugh and occasionally get 50 pound. Basically, Down Terrace is the end of a long sequence of films that we have shot over the years. That is why it is called Down Terrace, because all of them we have shot on that street. Our little reference too it. And it always makes us laugh to see Down Terrace written in places like the Sunday Times Magazine. From the very start there had to be music, and it had to be English folks stuff and that was written into the script from the start. Contextualizing the people to indicate that they have been there a long time. There is something about American Crime stuff or American films in general. There is no harking back more than 200 years, because there is nothing. It goes back to whatever old country they have all come from. It gets all confused as to background. Whereas in this you could find people that have lived in the same place for 10 generation. The Copper Family music that we use in the film, the Copper Family have been there for generations, generations, generations and all sung always. And they have always had this group called The Copper Family, but the old one at the end drops off and the young ones take their place. All tradition and they play and pass down the songs and the about sixty years ago they wrote the songs down, and it was the first time they had ever been written down and that is like a cultural document, this book of songs. And so that was it. You take that and put it under everything. You expect the Rolling Stones underneath it, but really, this is the music that underpins everything. And this is the stuff that is underpinning music in general.
KH: The stuff people listen to and absorb and then go on to commercial careers...
BW: Deep down in the culture. It's the mulch. People often do like it either. They don't like folk music, it is like what Country and Western was 40 years ago. People just didn't want to hear it, and I think for me it really talks into my heart, this is music about tending the land, and life and death shit. The crops failed, or there was murder or smuggling, or the land owners kill you and you are in love with a girl. It is very binding, without the nonsense in modern music. These are basic stories. There is this whole thing about the English and soil. It's a small place, and a lot of bad shit has happened and a lot of people have been killed, and you can feel it in the people. You get outside of London (which is very mixed, mixed, mixed) and you get the island people and they are quite different. You see the sussex accent really come out. I come from Essex and the accent is really flat, dead. There is a kind of weird menace to that and it is never really talked about and that is interesting to me.
KH: Straw Dogs?
BW: (laughs) No they are really, really far out!
KH: With Robin and Robert in the movie, that is a huge win for you, you have Father and Son playing father and son and working out all of these passive/aggressive things they have going on in the movie. And I understand that Robert is not even an actor by profession...
BW: We shot very quick, 8 days, and that is not a story or an exaggeration, it is the truth. We didn't go back and reshoot anything either. They were just on it. We finished it and we shot it, we went, 'fuck what happened?' We couldn't quite believe it. Then we cut it and watched it and said, "Oh, we made...that." When you are doing it it is all just a blur and what was really interesting about it was the whole thing of when you shoot things normally (I've just done a 40 day shoot on a TV series) and every time you movie the camera, it is half and hour, and the actors are fucking off to their dressing rooms to lay down or do Facebook or thinking about some other shit that is going on in their lives. But in this, there was nothing. Film, acting, filming acting, all day. It was like we were caught in a bubble. Not to sound too pretentious, but it is like performance art type stuff where it is like an ongoing mood if you are there it is really heavy and it is happening. In a way it kind of made it easier for Bob, and also because he was using his own house. It was tough on them, because obviously, not to say that as people they argue a lot or they don't like each other or whatever, but as father and son they have obviously had arguments in that house and [Robins] Mom, Janet, was there as well and I could see between the three of them it was (*sucks his breath in*), these are like psychic echoes of stuff that has happened in this house. And that is why it can get so grim at points, they really got into it. Some of the larger scenes were shot in 15 to 20 minutes. Fucking crazy. It was all happening one thing after the other, before they got the chance to think about it. It was really nice, what with all the crew knowing all of us, and Rob, and a lot of the actors, and that is probably the only way to make stuff like this. And the next thing we are going to do is going to be the same thing. Hardly any crew, natural light, concentrate on performance and getting that rawness to it. Thing is, I make ads, flashy looking ads and all sorts of stuff and TV stuff is all tracking and beautifully lit and bloody blah, so I love working the other way, there is a real joy when you work really quick with the actors. What it feels like making films when you were a kid, you could just make it up.
KH: Guerrilla...
BW: Yea, but it is more like getting rid of the distance between you and the making, which can become massive when it there are loads of money and loads of people and loads of producers. And everyone has got a say and when you are working like this, on Down Terrace, you could have thrown all that stuff away and you would have been fine. We were going in like Kamikaze, we knew that we had nothing to lose so that made us much bolder that if we had a lot of money.
KH: Well, there is nonetheless some level of embedded high level professionalism. Take for instance the hand-held shot when they are in the room, and the door is only a crack open, yet it is one take and it doesn't look handheld. That shot is exactly what it should be.
BW: We did a lot of takes beforehand, and it was fucking terrible, and we were close enough to shoot the whole film with hand-helds, but that camera, The Red, was fucking amazing, and that camera was the difference. When you look at a lot of French New Wave films they are not over lit, yet they look beautiful, they are bouncing a lot of light over stuff, off the ceilings, off to the side, and out on the streets of Paris, shooting on 35mm, so it looks alright, but if they shot it on Super-8, then it doesn't quite....you play this percentage game where you are taking a lot of things away from the audience of what they are used to, but you've got to give them something. Once you establish the jump cut, you can deal with a lot of problems really quick, technical issues and story issues, and so you can jump cut whenever something goes wrong, it doesn't matter, just slam the best performances together, jump cut and it's fine. In a normal film, if you put a single jump cut, you are terrified the audience will just go, 'Aaaaahhh! What the hell happened there?' Once you are going down that road of traditional Hollywood blocking and camerawork, if you do it wrong, you're fucked. If you establish a looser style up front, then you can get away with anything.
KH: It comes down to setting the rules in the first three or four scenes, although some filmmakers do fuck with their audience by setting the rules and break them later, but here you have that initial car ride, and it is clearly shit going on, but it is also down time. And that rhythm sets up the whole ball rolling.
BW: Yea, it takes its time, it is a pace thing. Like Tarkovsky's stuff, you know: Oh. Right, that is the way it is going to be.
KH: But you get acclimatized.
BW: It is what people going into expect. We got some snarky comments, tweets or something, I noticed during some of the screenings, and I think what happened was we got reviews, that said it was Mike Leigh meets the Sopranos or something like that, but then the Mike Leigh stuff started disappearing off the end of the reviews. And then it just said, "It's like the Sopranos." So people during the movie were saying, "It's not like the Soprano's! Fuck!" It's all about how it is framed, isn't it? It is like I've not seen A Serbian film yet, but it's like "This is the most transgressive film you've ever seen, so it is like after you see it, you think, No, it's not, but it is still good.
KH: Something like Down Terrace, for me, is like a 'hanging out movie' where it actually improves with multiple viewings. The first time you are hung up on plot, what's going on, who is the informant, what is their business, et cetera but by the second time that all drops away and by the third time, you are thinking, why was I hung up about any of that stuff, yea, stuff is happening, but it is about the characters in their down time and it becomes this relationship between you and the movie, you are hanging out with those characters. It becomes almost endearing, because those characters are almost your familiar friends at this point.
BW: Well, also in Down Terrace there is a lot of dialogue off screen, or the character is off screen; you don't see what people are saying, and that kind of makes it harder to follow some times, because when you see peoples faces, you get a lot of facial language, and I think on multiple viewings you start to 'hear' more of the off dialogue and catch the rhythm of the way they speak. I enjoy still watching the actors, I like seeing Rob act, it's great, I like people like David Schaal who plays Eric, he adds amazing value.
KH: Where is the line between comedy and tragedy, it can get razor thin in this film.
BW: I don't think there is one. I think of my sister, she had a really bad leg and she had a hip replacement thing happen when she was 15, and she had this scar right down to her knee, it was a massive scar. And I was, 'I'm really glad you are back' and I just (for no fathomable reason) punched her in the scar and she went bang, down like that and I was like 'fuck, why did I do that?' and it is that kind of thing where things are funny, but they are not funny, they are appalling actually, and I do not think of Down Terrace as a comedy in terms of the genre of comedy, it is funny, but there is a distinction, it is characters that have a sense of humour rather than people who are trying to make jokes. I direct a lot of TV comedy and that is very different discipline where it is like: Joke. Feed line. Punch line. Feed line. Close-up. Reaction. Close-up. You know, that is not what Down Terrace is, it is kind of the jokes are much more observational, they are not gags.
KH: It's a knowing humour. I've seen that, I know that. I certainly laughed as much at the audaciousness of the cruelty of one character to another. I think a lot of people process this type of humour not so much laugh-out-loud, but rather an interior...
BW: It's called "Smile Humour," that. I've seen it at Rotterdam, and they howled all the way through it, I've never seen anything like it, they took out parts of the next scene sometimes from long laughs. Then I watched it with an English audience and they take it as much more of a drama, not as much laughs. It kind of swings both ways. American audiences laugh a lot more, the Fantastic Fest audience was laughing at the first beat, but in the UK not so much. At festivals I have been leaving the screening after the first laugh, and then I go. I've done 20 minutes in the UK, which is really scary, but in Canada it is much quicker. It has the potential to play differently everywhere, it is not like a straight up genre film where people are going to be whooping and hollering.
KH: Your next film is going to be a horror film, can you elaborate.
BW: The thing that came across in Down Terraces is that you can suck up a lot of emotion in that style. It really affects people. I have not really seen a horror film done like that. It is like mixing really emotional bonds with real horror. There are a lot of horror films that do not bother with any of the characterization of the people, they are all ciphers, or stock characters, or it is all wafer thin. And I think that is a problem, because you don't give a fuck about what happens to them.
KH: This is what happened in the 1980s slasher cycle when people started cheering for the killer and don't give a crap about the victims other than that they are offed for the audience entertainment.
BW: It's slapstick, isn't it? It is like the three stooges. Raimi saw it thoroughly. The characters you don't give a fuck. It's ride horror, rather than the Exorcist or something like that. The scariest thing for me in the Exorcists is when she goes in for the medical tests. Like she could be ill. Call me soft, but that is the type of thing makes me upset, especially with kids. It is that kind of seriousness. It works really well, I still really like, Blair Witch I think that is the kind of thing I've been looking at, and then there is Man Bites Dog, and then back all the way to Cannibal Holocaust - you spend the first part of the film introducing the character, then they are sort of monsters, then they meet worse monsters. But in my story, they are not like leering sadists like in a Rob Zombie movie, they are kind of professional killers, soldiers basically, blue collar, then they realize the people they are killing are actually part of some sort of cult, and then it starts to slip away and get weirder and weirder. Hopefully by that time you have brought the audience in with it being really, really real. No supernatural stuff, but if there were supernatural stuff it is easier to swallow. You run the risk with occult stuff with it coming off as really, really silly that was an issue I had with House of the Devil. The last minutes. Aww, really? All it is is that Heavy Metal has fucked it up by appropriating all that stuff, so when you see a goats skull and dripping blood, and that you just go, ehh. But as a kid, Race with the Devil really freaked me out. I've always had nightmares about cult stuff and I wanted to make something that had the feeling of discovering a cult by mistake in the woods. You look, they turn out to see you, eye contact is made, and it is like a primal fear. For me, I've always been afraid of the woods. And people are afraid of the woods for good reason because you go in unprepared and you just die. And it is not leering stuff, it hardwired into the brain. It is scary and you can easily die of exposure. It is that stuff, but with a really nasty ending, which I think will, hopefully will, have everyone just stagger out.
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