Little Penthouse of Horrors - Ed Murphy talks to Ben Wheatley about his upcoming film High-Rise

On an unusually balmy February in Dublin, director Ben Wheatley is chuckling nervously.
I’ve told him that I’ve come straight from a screening of his new movie, High-Rise.

It stars Tom Hiddleston as a charming doctor who, by movie’s end, is reduced to roasting a dog on a stick, as order breaks down in the luxury apartment complex which gives the movie its title. Why choose Hiddlestone for the role?

“He’s very measured, very smart, but attractive like a matinee idol,” Ben – who shot to prominence with his first, multi-award winning feature, Down Terrace, in 2009 – replies.

“There’s an edge to him, you can’t quite work him out. I really liked all of that. There’s stuff going on beneath of the surface the whole time. I like the idea of a character that might be much cleverer than you are. He’ll be in big budget movies and then in low budget movies, and he sees it all as part of the work. The variety of performances is what fuels his whole career. I really respect that.”

Adapted from J.G. Ballard’s cult novel by screenwriter Amy Jump (also Wheatley’s wife), High-Rise is a science fiction drama about a community living in a ’70s apartment block racked by class violence.

“I read it when I was 16,” he recalls. “But when I went back to read it, when I was 40-odd, I felt I’d been reading it all the time in between. The stuff is so prescient.”

Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans and Elisabeth Moss are among the stars to feature. How did he persuade them to participate in a project he has described as ‘fucked up’?

“Actors in general want to do stuff that is extreme, as much as stuff that’s classical. They’re always looking for the performances that push them to the edges, because they’re the most interesting roles. I don’t think there was a risk necessarily for them. Obviously, they trusted me that it would be alright, that I wouldn’t make them look stupid. That’s the contract between director and actor, always.”

High-Rise was filmed in just seven weeks in Belfast and Bangor. “The attraction of Belfast at the moment is that they’ve got such a thriving film industry, because of Game Of Thrones,” he acknowledges. “I’m a fan of the show. When we first went to Belfast, we got the big tour and went round all the studios. It was amazing. I think Neil Marshall was shooting the end of series four, when they have the big attack on the wall. Everyone was in costume. It was really crazy. I am not usually star-struck. Being on location, with all the actors in costume, it’s a bit overwhelming. I got to sit on the throne as well, which is great.”

His next project, entitled Free Fire, is set in Boston in the ’70s. “Cillian Murphy and Michael Smiley turn up to buy guns for the IRA, from an American gun dealer and it all goes awry,” Ben explains. “They hire two local Boston guy's to help them put the boxes into the van. Then the gun dealers turn up, and they’ve got two local Boston guys to move the boxes out of their van. These two sets of Boston guys were all in a horrible bar fight the night before and when they see each other, it becomes fraught (laughs).

“Basically, Smiley and Cillian are going ‘just calm down’ and it doesn’t. They’ve got these guns – and it all goes off. The rest of the film is them stuck in this warehouse. It’s almost like a real time gun battle that goes on for an hour. It’s the minutiae of, how do you survive? How do you dress the wounds? How do you get from a to b? They’re trapped.”

The director says it was brilliant to at last collaborate with the Irish actor. “We’ve been trying to work together for a few years. He’d called my agent in 2012 or something. We’d had a few drinks and chatted. I wrote Free Fire specifically for Cillian and Michael. I’d been reading FBI ballistic reports about gun battles and how they actually work, how people feel when they are doing it. When you read about how the cops fired a hundred
bullets at these people and missed them, you go ‘oh they’re so stupid, they can’t shoot straight’. It’s really difficult if something is moving and you have a pistol. If someone’s running, and you’re running and firing, you just aren’t going to hit. All these things filtered down into Free Fire.”

High-Rise opens on March 18 and Free Fire is due to be released in September.