CH=Chris Hill
BW= Ben Wheatley
CH: How are you doing?
BW: I am doing good man, how are you doing?
CH: Good thanks for asking, Thanks for taking time to speak with me. I watched Kill list last night for the second time, I was really hoping you could shed some light on some of the film for me, first off how did you come up with the story and the concept?
BW: It had been something we had been thinking of developing, we’ve been thinking about a couple of other movies that didn’t come off. It had come about from kind of a weird place. The film has come through from ideas about casting first, rather than actual plot, With Neil Maskell and MyAnna, and I wanted to work with Michael Smiley. I wanted to see how those guys fit together and what kind of shape that would make. I developed a film that was going to be with Neil, it was kind of a fish out of water thing, it was going to be a criminal who has gone to a foreign country to rescue his friend who has gone missing on a camping holiday or something. It was going to be where a bad person gets involved with worse people. Kind of an H.P. Lovecraft style of thing, And a lot of elements from that got turned into Kill List. Like the hand being slashed and got infected that kind of stuff. And then for some reason or another it didn’t happen. And then we were developing a short film where Neil and MyAnna played a couple called “NO” which is about a hidden recession. They both work and then get laid off, they got all this debt and they don’t know what to do and they can’t get another job so they turn to crime, again that didn’t happen. And then I worked with Michael Smiley on “Down Terrace” and I really wanted to work with him again. And I thought it would be interesting to team him up with Neil. And then out of that all those elements swirling together was kind of how Kill List came from that.
CH: It said on the credits that additional dialogue by the cast. How much was improvised and how much was written out in the script.
BW: The additional dialogue credit is slightly misleading. What it means is that, a lot of the time we used paraphrasing. So we take the script and instead of improvising they will put it in their own words. what we tend to do is do a take that is exactly as the script, then do a take that is paraphrased and then a take back on the script again and you get this, It’s kind of good, it makes each take different from the next one. And it helps keeping it alive so the actor’s don’t settle in. So it doesn’t become slightly repetitive or wrote. we did kind of start the scene a minute or two before the dialogue so they would have to build up into the dialogue and then the actual scripted dialogue would happen, then I wouldn’t call cut until a minute or so after that to see if they had anything else to add to the sequences. And then we did other stuff. The dinner party scene was a real dinner party with the food being served and then it ran for the full 50 minutes of the dinner party and we shot it documentary and then we picked the bits out that we liked. There a lot of different strategies to keep the film as alive as possible.
CH: In the beginning there is an extensive amount of arguing that is not typical of a standard film, typically they shy away from having the protagonist not really get along with his wife, it was a bold move there.
BW: I don’t know if you see Cassavetes films they don’t usually shy away from that. They usually start with a load of shouting. For my life, my only experience is that arguing isn’t as unhealthy as might be seen in movies. Movies existed where it rarified moralistic worlds. Good or bad are pretty binary. If people are having arguments they usually split up, but that’s not what life is like people argue all the time. Relationships are a negotiation the whole time I think, they are not completely on the level. in a way what we wanted to make sure was that the film was populated with living breathing contradictory people and you don’t get that when you use that kind of slightly anodyne mainstream view of what human relationships are like. Smooth arcs of characters are nothing what life is like.
CH: In the movie there are multiple points that could be described as ambiguous, whether it’s the carving on the back of the picture, the issue with the priest smiling, the librarian thanking. Were those specifically meant to be ambiguous to create conversation or was there something I should have picked up that would have made them more..
BW: I don’t know? Why were they smiling? That’s the thing. There is probably a pretty reasonable reason behind that, I know there is, when I think about it. It’s not ambiguous, in a way it’s kind of, there is an answer to it. No one character says, you don’t get a scene where Jay goes “why the hell are they smiling” and gal says “I think they were smiling for this that the other” and its spelled out. But as you have that conversation and you watch on the screen you are coming up with an idea as to why. And I feel when I read online and the various theories as to what they are coming up with they tend to be pretty much on the money, Which makes me feel the readings that people are getting from this movie are pretty universal and therefore not quite ambiguous. I think for me a lot of the stuff is straightforward. All the information is there, what’s missing is just a summary at the end, no one would thank me for putting a summary at the end.
CH: One of the things I liked was. A lot of times you see movies that connect all the dots for you. It’s just pure escapism and once it’s done you don’t think about the movie at all, While with Kill List that is not the case, when you’re done, your thinking back onto it.
CH: I heard there are a lot of comparisons to the Wicker Man, does that bother you?
BW: No, what can you do, there are some things that are undeniable such as setting a trap. The protagonist is in a trap which he doesn’t know about which is Wicker Man-ish, I would be childish to deny that. But equally I like to think of like the Manchurian Candidate which is probably more on the money. Both are about assassination and large organizations controlling people. It’s an easy association like there are cults in one so it’s like the other. There not totally off beam. It makes a nice hash tag. WTF #Wickerman, #Bullshit. But it doesn’t really matter.
CH: In the beginning when they are playing with the foam swords was that intended to be a bit of foreshadowing to the end?
BW: What, that I coincidentally shot it.
CH: No I meant, how you said that you continue to film without cutting. I didn’t know if they were just having a bit of play.
BW: No, Its intentional, it’s inevitable. Its what’s going to happen to this guy. He is a fly in a web. Since the beginning he’s got no chance. It’s also got to do with the structure of the film. On the surface it’s structured with kind of 3 acts. The dinner party act, the hits, and the final confrontation with the cults act. Equally the film is structure symmetrically where you can fold the film in half and see that the scenes cross over. So the hunchback kill matches the beginning and end. Finding and killing of rabbits is in there, jay and gal rolling on the floor fighting is in there. On one reading of the movie I think of as a curse and it starts with the mark with the beginning of the film and ends with the mark at the end and everything in between is a curse on the audience.
CH: When coming up with the concept it sounds like you had bits and pieces from different projects, how does that come about in terms of being able to take different aspects of different films where it can come together to become a circular film.
BW: I think you can’t help but think of things and thematic ideas all the time, trying to get in your own head how to work out feelings that are going on in your life. In one project I might tackle it one way and in another project tackle it another. A lot of themes in Kill List are in “Down Terrace” as well. The Karl character is not dissimilar to the Jay character. There are strong women in charge of the organization. You can’t help that, having themes in your work, working through your concerns in different ways. when you have a couple of projects that get smashed up they are all the same building blocks your just building a different model with the same pieces.
CH: Did you have any idea that it would be such a polarizing film. The response I have seen is people either love it or they really, really don’t.
BW: I was happy that people liked it. People that don’t, nothing I can do about that. I sympathize with them. It’s one of those things. I often don’t like lots of stuff. I just don’t find myself twittering about it to be fair, But maybe that’s just me. You won’t be finding me calling people idiots on line in print forever. That’s the modern world though isn’t it?
If you make stuff that specifically doesn’t run the risk of upsetting loads of people, you become more and more restricted in the way you can work. Some has to do with money. If you have taken a 100 million off someone you better get it back. and you’re not necessarily going to get it back off the five friends that have the same taste as you in films. So therefore you might have to be a bit broader in how you make your movies. But if you’re making something like “Kill List” which doesn’t cost that much money, you can afford to be a little more true to your own voice.
CH: I appreciated that you went for it and you didn’t create a vanilla film. I like a movie that I am going to think about afterwards and have repeat viewings. And have an opinion. There is nothing worse than a movie that doesn’t strike a nerve.
BW: Yeah, Yeah, don’t get me wrong I am a big fan of Rambo 4 there is no ambiguity in that, that’s for sure but equally I am a fan of Tarkovskiy’s stalker so Different strokes for different folks.
