How Writer-Director Ben Wheatley Brought 'Kill List' To Life

In 2009, Ben Wheatley made the film Down Terrace, a bleak little comedy about two ex-convicts consumed with finding out who got them nicked. Since then, it's seemed as if Wheatley himself was poised to be snatched up by Hollywood, and his new film Kill List all but guarantees he'll be guilty of moving on to even bigger things. Boxoffice caught up with Wheatley via telephone during the South by Southwest Film festival, where his film was the first among the festival's SX Fantastic sidebar to find distribution. In addition to talking about his conception of Kill List, Wheatley examined the underlying techniques that tied together the film's disparate ideas, and offered a few insights on where he and his career might go from here.

Talk about your earliest conception of this. How did you sort of envision marrying a hit-man movie to something more sinister?

It came from a couple of places. One of them was casting, really; I'd worked with both Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley on different projects, and I just wanted to see them together in something. So there was that, that pairing of two great character actors, and then I kind of had it in mind to write something that was a horror film. And I'd been thinking about things that really scared me, things from dreams and nightmares I'd had as a kid, so I kind of thought about those and wrote those down. And then general fears of like I've got a young son as well, and that kind of thing with being a father is that you worry about the fear of me accidentally crashing a car or something and killing your family and it being your fault. So there was that kind of fear, and then the whole thing with the cults is I used to dream a lot about following cults in the wood and them seeing me, chasing me and killing me, so it was kind a mixture of those two. And then it was just mixing together and finding a throughline that would be able to kind of just tie those terrifying moments together - and that's where the list came from.

How much sort of definition do you do of what things mean or why thing happened that are not going to be explained because you want there to be that purposeful ambiguity?

Yeah, I mean I think---I know what the cult is and I know how it works and I've got projected ideas through for other films. I like to do that with and it was the same with Down Terrace, I projected like a prequel and a sequel for that; whether they get made or not, I don't know, but I always think of characters in terms of the continuity, so there's lots of details about the cult, which they kind of have a solid grounding. But as an audience member you want—you are identifying with Jay and Gal and you don't need to know what the cult is about in that film. And they're more scary because you don't know, and that's something I learned from watching American episodic TV. Like Battlestar Galactica is really interesting when you don't know what's going on, and it becomes less interesting as you know. The same could be true of like Heroes, that was a similar thing, and Lost as well for me. But it's the questions which are really scary because you find your own fears within your own head to worry about. If I tell you very specifically the minutiae of what is going on, then it might be disappointing to you than what you were insisting I be afraid of. But that's why it's kind of open like that. But things you don't know about are much scarier then the things you do know.

How much did you draw upon the actors to sort of flesh out the personality of these characters and specifically did you define them sort of beforehand?

Yeah, I went specifically to these actors so obviously I was looking at their other performances and stuff I knew that Michael Smiley is kind of a soulful wiser older man, and Neil is, you can see it in his eyes that he can be wild. And I think that obviously Neil's a much angrier version of himself, obviously he's not like that really, but he does have that energy, and Michael is the same, so they're kind of exaggerated versions of the people that they are from my point of view. But yeah that kind of casting works like that, where you kind fantasize a bit about how you know people, and then you write about what that version of them would be like in that situation rather than—it's not the same as the kind of thing were you go like as you go. Normal casting when you write a character then you have to find the best actor to fit that character. It's a bespoke performance, a bespoke part of it written for them, so it worked really well on Down Terrace, because I don't have to go into massive amounts of detail on the day. It's a shorthand and it works. You know what kind of performance you're going to get, basically, from the start, and you've constructed a part around that.

Why was it important to depict this movie so unflinchingly, and how tough was it to make sure that actually suits the story and the characters rather then sort of just being a moment of provocation to the audience or something like that?

Well, I think it was always going to be like that in the film from the beginning. And the reason for that is there's a lot of hitman films, and there's like Pulp Fiction and stuff like that, and I love Pulp Fiction, but at the end of the day, if you like hit men, and you identify with them there is something is wrong with you because they're morally fucking horrible. That they would go out and murder people for money is terrible, and why are they heroes in films? I can't understand it. They're scum. And genre-wise in the film, you see them and it's like, oh yeah, they're cool, and then you see what it is to murder someone, and you see it but you have to show it in the most brutal way possible to tell the audience you're wrong. You're now responsible because you like these people, and you support them in the film, but now you are wrong, and that's what makes you feel so sick when you watch it, I think. And it's a moment that just says, if you enjoy this kind of shit then there's something wrong with you. It's also the middle of the film that becomes one of those Hostels with a torture scene, like torture porn and that genre, but this is just horrific and there's nothing entertaining about this in any way. It just reflects it back to the audience, and you understand why this is proper horror; you're looking into a world through the looking glass of kind of play-acting into like internet executions and snuff and that's what I wanted to do. And also, the other thing I was thinking about was the idea that - did you see The Orphanage? I love that film and it was that scene where that woman gets run over, and they play a game in that where they don't show the woman's face for a bit, and as an audience member you go, oh, they're going to cut—they don't have the balls to show the shot, and then they show the shot of the mashed-in face and you go, oh Christ! And the film grammar suggests that they will not show this again, and then they show it a third time, and you go, oh, I didn't want to see that! and then in this film you're terrified that they're going to show you like when they find the bodies of the kids, you're like just terrified you're going to see dead children all the way through that film and it's horrible, but you don't trust the filmmakers after that scene and it needed a scene in this film after which you would not trust me, and that's what makes it so scary. It's like, fuck - if he's going to do that, then who knows where it's going to go and what we're going to see next? That's why it had to be as brutal as possible, because it's money in the bank for the rest of the movie; you can't you don't really have to show much else after that, because it's progressive, the repercussions of that scene just run on through the rest of the film.

How much do you see the films you've done so far as stepping stones to different kinds of things or larger things? Or do you feel like your operating on the level you want to continue on in the future?

I direct adverts, so I direct a lot of ads in the UK, and I've directed a lot of television as well. So it might seem like quite a niche film, Kill List, in some respects, but I like working at the low end, because it's total freedom. But I've also got ideas for things that are more mainstream, so I don't see it as a progression in terms of I'm not succeeding if I don't get a bigger budget each time - I don't see that. The way I see it is I'll always make stuff that's lower budget, but as time goes on, hopefully I'll be able to make stuff that is hopefully a larger budget as well. Amy and I have written a script at the moment which is much more kind of action-y, and it's still quite crazy, but it could be mainstream, I think. And then the next film I'm doing is comedy with Nick Frost so—I think there's a lot of opportunity in the low-budget stuff and that who fantastic melies festival world is very, very creative, and that gives you a lot of opportunity to explore the really interesting stuff but I maybe not get to do a higher budget level. But I also wouldn't want to do like a 100 million pound version of Kill List, because I don't think you can make beyond having more naked people running through the woods, it wouldn't necessarily be much better. I'll probably live to regret that when they ask me to remake it.