If you haven’t seen Kill List yet, do it. Right now.
Partly because it’s such a wonderful example of how crazy a low budget Brit-flick can be, but also because this interview is full of spoilers that reading much past this sentence will give the game away. It’s OK, we’ll still be here when you get back.
Enjoy it? We certainly did.
Unsurprisingly, we had a few questions about the film, ranging from the obvious about how it came to be, to quite why director Ben Wheatley decided to start with such a common premise for a British movie, and then launch wholesale into something so very different.
HeyUGuys: The film starts out as a reasonably conventional British hit man-type film, and ceases to be that somewhere around the end of the second act. Could you explain why you went that way with it?
BEN WHEATLEY: It west out to be a horror film, and it was always going to be slipping between the two genres, or multiple genres, and the way I figured it, what I wanted to do was to set out the story using that socio-realist, documentary style to make you invest in the characters more heavily. So that when the insane stuff happens at the end, you believe it more. You can imagine a Hollywood remake of that movie which starts with a cult in the woods, sacrificing someone, and goes back and finds the family. If you did it like that, the audience would be almost slightly off the hook, because they’d know what kind of film they’d be in for, and they wouldn’t be as scared I don’t think. Or if you’d shown extreme violence at the start, a lot of horror movies start with some kind of horrific moment, and then there’s a period of set up, and it goes back into the violence, it kind of lets you off. If you go into it slowly, and you like and understand the characters, then when things happen later on you’re more filled with dread and terror than if they’re more condensed and cipher-like, like you’d find in a traditional horror flick.
I presume you didn’t ‘Ken Loach’ it, and throw everything upon your cast.
BW: No, but I do like the idea of that though. I’ve been reading about the Andrea Arnold stuff, giving people pages of the script as they go along, and I think that’s a great idea.
NEIL MASKELL: I have mixed opinions about it. In some ways I think it makes it very effective in Loach’s stuff particularly,
BW: Well, he doesn’t do that strictly, does he? What he’ll do is shoot in strict chronological order, but they know what the script is.
NM: No. They get pages. The proof is in the pudding, there’s loads of good work there, but with something like Kill List, for instance, if you’ve got good actors it’s useful for them to know where you’re going. It’s more collaborative, and I like to collaborate on a film rather than be the subject of it.
MICHAEL SMILEY: And also there’s a dynamic in it as well. You can work your dynamic and go bigger or smaller, but if you’re just being given a series of pages the night before, then that becomes the scene that you’re working on, and it’s disjointed.
BW: And also, you might feel miserable about your performance before, when you get the pages later on you go, ‘oh fuck, that’s where that was going’. But then, I suppose the characters aren’t psychic, so they can’t see the future, so it shouldn’t really colour the performance.
NM: The big challenge in acting is knowledge of the future, isn’t it? And turning that off, but if you’re an experienced actor, you should be able to switch it off.
On that note, how did you, Michael and Neil, avoid having it colour your performance. The tone of the film changes so much, how could you not have it change your performance to a degree?
MS: Just being in the moment, and not trying to project into the next scenes and the next scenes.
BW: You don’t really know what’s going on, do you? And as an audience member you don’t really know what’s going on. You’re from their perspective, and you gather the information as you go forward and you try to put it together as they do.
MS: The dinner party scene, for example, was an intense experience, and we had a great time doing it, and it took a long time to do the scene, but at no time doing it did I think, ’and in a minute we’re going to go into the garage and there’s going to be the big reveal of the gun. I must remember I’m doing that next’. When you’re acting, you’re not doing that, you’re doing this, and you do it to the best of your ability until the director goes, ‘that’s wrapped, let’s move on to the next one’. What we’re moving on for, that’s a take. That’s what you’re aiming for, when the person behind the camera goes, ‘that’s great, that’s my vision. Let’s move on to the next one’.
BW: I was reading a thing about, Kronenberg was talking about how he directs, and when he’s directing they say, ‘how do you keep the whole film in your head?’ and he said, ‘just dealing with it one thing at a time, and building it slowly, block-by-block’. I think that’s very true. Just because it’s exhausting anyway.
NM: I think in terms of performances as well, just knowing the ending as an actor, rather than as a character, because he’s absolutely right about what he’s saying, just playing the moment, At the point where you know they’re two hit men, the assumption might be as an actor, ‘OK, we’re playing two brutal, heavy men’;, but because you know how it’s going to end up, you know that the character’s naivety is going to become increasingly important in the storytelling as the story goes on, so in the moments in the script that you wouldn’t notice did you not know how it was going to end, where the character’s naivety is highlighted early on, you know you need to hit those notes to make sense of the story for the audience ads you reach the climax.
BW: Also, how the script’s written. The script throws away information all the time in the way that the characters do in that nothing really fazes them that much, and that’s consistent throughout the movie, right up until the end really. He’s not terribly fazed when he wins the hat.
MS: [Laughing] When he wins the hat!
NM: The film was initially called, ‘Winning the Hat’.
We’ll get onto the hat winning in a second, but if we could focus on the dinner party scene for a second, one of the things that struck me throughout was that the performances had an improvised quality to them. Am I right in thinking this was the case?
MS: Yes and no. There was a lot of improv that didn’t make the screen, so what the improv then did was inform the script., so that what you saw on screen, there’s been a lot of work before the take that was used. Within the film there’s sprinkles of improv that stayed in, but the majority of the script is there.
BW: There’s kind of two things that are going on. One is running the scenes in, and running them out, so you have a load of improv, and then the scene, then you have a load of improv after the scene, and then we were doing a thing as well, where you do a version on the script, and then a paraphrased version. It would still be the script meaning, but maybe the words were swapped round a bit, put back into the idiom of performance, so you the that rawness of not knowing what the other person is going to say, and then reacting live to it. If you do too much improv, it gets so far away from the meaning of the script that when you come to editing, all that really good improv just gets thrown away, it can’t really earn its place, no matter how well its performed. Having said that, the dinner party scene is an example; the dinner party was done as a real dinner party, so the food is served, they eat the food, and then they talk all the way to the end. The first half of it that appears in the film, the first minute and a half of it is improv and the last two minutes is scripted, so it gets sharper as it goes in, and we pick the best parts of the improv. But all the improv was very much on meaning, it was on theme, so it was easy to use.
The ending, with the cult scene, there’s something very reminiscent of Bohemian Grove, and the very rich men in America gathering around an effigy of a burning owl. Was that deliberate?
BW: What it came from was a recurring nightmare I’d had. I used to live near the woods as a kid, and I used to get nightmares a lot about the woods. One of those nightmares was following a group through the woods, who had torches and stuff, and they’d go and do some weird occult thing, I’d be watching it, and they’d all turn and chase me. It had all come from that.
Did the whole film come from your nightmares?
BW: There’s lots of bits of the movie that are from dreams, and it’s a kind of thinking of, if it’s a primal, reoccurring nightmare like that, it would affect other people as well. The main thing that’s influenced by The Wicker Man is probably the ending, that kind of idea that you’re in a trap you don’t know you’re in, but equally, I’m a big fan of Parallax View as well, so it could have come from that. The other stuff, they wear masks, but there are no masks in The Wicker Man. I’ve spent quite a lot of Q&A time talking about that and A-fucking-Serbian Film.
NM: I always thought, what was interesting, it wasn’t really in the film, but in the script, and in the improvisation we shot, a lot of it was about the equipment and the gear, and Shel getting the right clothes, and us talking about the equipment we had and the clothes we had. We’d got every single form of defensive form of dress and equipment, and at the end of the film, these people who are naked are much more powerful than us, and I always found that that threw up a lot of interesting ideas and questions actually, inside just that.
BW: It’s the idea also, of victims saying thanks, and kind of, completely disarming violent men because they don’t care.
MS: Also, it’s the countryside in the dark. It’s just going to win. When Jay runs out of the house and he leaves Shel in the cottage with the gun and he goes out to save the day, you know he’s walking into the dark, and the darkness is just going to take him.
NM: The film’s really pastoral in that way.
MS: And that bit where we come out of the tunnel, when I see that, it’s sort of like, ‘oh, they’re out of their comfort zone now’, and even though it’s bright, and they’ve done this before, because you can see we’re making the hut, as a viewer, I think they’re vulnerable, and it’s going to get dark.
Kill List is out on Blu-ray and DVD now.
