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Ben Wheatley’s amazing storyboards for ‘High Rise’
08.29.2016
11:40 am
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Film director Ben Wheatley tweeted his storyboard drawings for High Rise over the weekend. Based on the dystopian novel by J. G. Ballard, High Rise is a brilliant and astounding movie. Its cinematic quality again confirms Wheatley’s status as one of the most talented and original film directors at work in film today. As a director Wheatley stands in direct lineage to the likes of Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell, John Boorman and Stanley Kubrick. He is an auteur of exceptional brilliance.

Wheatley plans his films meticulously. He works in partnership with the multitalented screenwriter/editor Amy Jump—who is also his wife. Before filming, Wheatley storyboards the entire film scene by painstaking scene. As evidenced by the selection of drawings below, Wheatley considers everything from shot size and angle to action and camera moves within a sequence. These storyboards will may make better sense if you have seen High Rise—which I recommend you do. It stars as Tom Hiddleston as Dr. Robert Laing, Jeremy Irons as Anthony Royal, Luke Evans as Richard Wilder, Elisabeth Moss as Helen Wilder, Sienna Miller as Charlotte Melville, and Keeley Hawes as Ann Royal. The film takes place in a luxury tower block (designed by Royal) during the 1970s. The block is split into three class structures—with the poorest at the bottom. As the tenants become removed from the outside world—chaos and violence unfold. High Rise is now available on Blu-ray.

The ever industrious Wheatley has just finished his latest film Freefire which will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival next month. Freefire is “a real time shootout” action thriller starring Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, Sharlto Copley and Armie Hammer. Martin Scorsese is the executive producer and I, for one, am certainly looking forward to that…
 
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Ben Wheatley director selfie on the set of ‘High Rise.’
 
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Laing finds Digby the Dog.
 
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Morning.
 
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Morning—High Rise.
 
The rest of Ben Wheatley’s storyboards for ‘High Rise,’ after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.29.2016
11:40 am
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‘A Field in England’: Director Ben Wheatley talks about his head-trip Civil War movie

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There’s an horrific scene in Ben Wheatley’s latest film, the truly excellent A Field in England, which proves the merit of the old adage that the most gruesome moments in any movie are more effectively achieved when they are suggested rather than revealed.

In this particular scene, the character Whitehead (superbly played by Reece Shearsmith) is tortured by the diabolical O’Neill (another excellent performance from Michael Smiley). Rather than showing what happens, Wheatley audaciously keeps any physical violence out-of-vision, leaving only Shearsmith’s terrifying screams to suggest the worst, the very worst. It is one cinema’s genuinely horrific and visceral moments, and yet nothing is ever seen.

A Field in England confirms Ben Wheatley as the most talented and original film-maker to come out of Britain since the glory days of Ken Russell, Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson and John Boorman in the swinging sixties.

Unlike most young directors who show flair with one type of genre film before going on to make variations of the same time-and-again, Wheatley has shown with his first four films that he is an immensely talented and important film-maker, whose movies defy easy categorization yet engage their audience with intelligent and sometimes disturbing ideas.

His first major film Down Terrace was a blackly comic tale of murder and violence set in a working class family home, which Wheatley co-wrote with the film’s star Robin Hill. It was described as being like The Sopranos as directed by Mike Leigh. It’s a nice soundbite but doesn’t quite encapsulate the thrilling intelligence that was at work behind the camera.

Wheatley’s next film was the brutal, disturbing but utterly brilliant Kill List, which contained one of the most harrowing endings ever committed to celluloid. Kill List was written by Wheatley and his wife, the writer Amy Jump, and starred Neil Maskell, MyAnna Buring and Michael Smiley.

Having shown his aptitude for gangster and horror films, Wheatley then made the black comedy Sightseers, written by the film’s lead actors Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, in conjunction with Amy Jump.

Wheatley’s latest film A Field in Englandwas also written by Jump, and together this talented duo have created an intelligent head trip, a radical genre-bender, that mixes alchemy and the occult, with history, horror, psychedelia and folk tales. Starring The League of Gentleman‘s Reece Shearsmith, along with Peter Ferdinando, Richard Glover, Ryan Pope, and a terrifying Michael Smiley, A Field in England is certainly one of the best films of 2013-14.

Without giving too much away, the movie centers around four men escaping from a battle during the English Civil War (1642-1651), when the forces of democracy or Parliament (the Roundheads) fought against the Royalist armies (the Cavaliers) for control of England. The main players in this war were the Cavalier, King Charles I and the Roundhead, Oliver Cromwell, and the poor canon fodder in-between.

Wheatley’s interest in this momentous period of English history came through his work with the Sealed Knot Society, a group of individuals who specialize in reconstructing battles from the English Civil War.
 
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‘A Field in England’ is in cinemas now, or can be watched from Drafthouse Films here.
 

 
The interview with Ben Wheatley follows after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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02.12.2014
08:01 am
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Ben Wheatley’s ‘Kill List’ will creep you out
03.03.2012
03:32 am
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It’s rare these days for a film to genuinely creep me out. After decades of watching horror movies, the great, the good and the intolerably bad, it takes a lot to shake me up. So when I tell you that Ben Wheatley’s Kill List got under my skin like one of those leech-like critters in David Cronenberg’s They Came From Within, it’s both a warning and a recommendation. Kill List should come with its own rating FYU (fuck you up).

Kill List manages to to do something that only really good art does: it is the thing it is about. This hellaciously unnerving film is as evil as the evil it depicts. When I reflect on some of the most disturbing films I’ve seen - Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist - I recall them not as compositions of various crafts - acting, direction, etc. - I re-experience them in their totality, a dark brand seared into the folds of my brain matter. These are not mere movies, they’re a form of magic, as arcane as alchemy and as modern as Blu Ray. They deposit the Devil’s cash in your memory bank, where it gains interest over the years, but the only checks you can write against it are in your nightmares.

Kill List has a mindbending plot, fine acting, direction and a superb score. You can find out more about the film online. The critical chatter is mostly positive. But this is not a review. It is, as I said, a warning and a recommendation. For fans of the kind of horror that sinks into you like the fangs of a blood-famished vampire, Wheatley’s infernal concoction should do the trick.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.03.2012
03:32 am
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