Writer-director BEN WHEATLEY has returned to lower-budget filmmaking following the megabucks sequel The Meg 2, and BULK takes DIY filmmaking to the extreme. With handmade props, computer-generated sets, and a simple visual design, it follows a hero who must venture into a multi-dimensional house to clean up the mess after a scientist’s string theory experiments have gone wrong. We quizzed Ben about the film…
STARBURST: What drew you to making Bulk?
Ben Wheatley: A lot of different stuff. One of the big starting points was writing comics. I wrote a graphic novel a couple of years ago called Kosmic Musik and really enjoyed the freedom of comic book writing. I’m doing some stuff for 2000 AD at the moment as well, writing Judge Dredd and that. I’ve always dabbled in comics since I was a kid, and that was what got me into filmmaking in the first place. And I’d been wanting to do something with Sam [Riley] and Alex [Maria Lara] and having those conversations all the time, like “what are we going to do, how are we going to make a film together”. The other thing was, I’d been looking at YouTube and watching ‘how-to’ videos. There’s quite a lot of stuff about how the special effects of Star Wars were achieved. I’ve always been interested in that. I started to realise that the equipment to do that is now really cheap. You can make Star Wars from scratch, just buying stuff from Amazon. That was the thought experiment that started it all off. What could you do if you had to build props and you only had a normal black and white printer? What would the props that you could make with that look like? I started doing these experiments and talking to Nick Gillespie, who’s the DOP, and we looked at the different cameras. It’s all been bubbling along into what’s ended up as Bulk.
How much of the film is a reaction to the current social climate?
I think all films should have an element of reflecting the world you live in, definitely. A touchstone for me is George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, because it’s a foundational genre horror film. It’s really good fun, but also has a social message within it, and that’s what gives it longevity. And with this, it’s thinking about our relationship to stories, and the stories we’re being told, and are they real? How much of everything that we’re looking at is real? Which, as a pre-internet person, going from a world of watching the news and believing it, to knowing it’s slightly not true, but still mainly true, to a world where everyone’s claiming nothing is true, how do you adjust between those different realities?
Have you always had an interest in the subject of alternate realities?
Yeah, since I was a kid, I’ve always thought about alternate reality stuff, definitely. I’ve been influenced by Star Trek, because there are plenty of alt-reality Star Trek episodes, and the extended universe stuff of Kurt Vonnegut is important to me. I drew comics when I was at college, which looked into it as well. I’ve been reading Marvel comics since I was small, so it’s an interesting one. Culturally, it looks like it’s from the film stuff, but it’s not, it’s much earlier than that. It’s a weird dislocation I have, looking at this culture coming through, everyone’s going, “Ooh, Secret Wars is coming, what’s that?” I did that when I was 12. Been there, done that.
That’s the problem when you get older, you see it all again! And how much research did you do into string theory?
I did about 30 seconds. I’d known about it for a while, in a layman’s way, so I had an inkling of it, and then obviously I did a bit of reading on Wikipedia. It suits the metaphor of the film. I wouldn’t teach Bulk in a university science course, that’s for sure!
How much of the film being such a low-budget production is a reaction to doing The Meg 2?
I don’t mind working at low-budget and I don’t mind working at high-budget. There’s fun to be had at both ends of the street. I’ve never done a low-budget film – the budgets have always been right, but sometimes they’re less and sometimes they’re more.
Bulk has a noir feel. Was that a genre that influenced you?
Well, Alphaville is a massive influence on it, and it’s referenced in the film. The newspaper where Sam Riley works is the same one Eddie Constantine’s character works for in Alphaville, and the whole thing about Guadalcanal is directly from Alphaville. I love the fancy footwork of Alphaville, which is to go, “oh, we’re in the future, but it looks like now”. It’s so clever.
It cuts a lot of corners…
Yeah, when you watch you just think it is real, and they put some bits of sound effects over the top. You watch that film now and it’s just as modern as it was when it came out. I think there are moments in Alphaville that are directly referenced later in Blade Runner. That’s another quite foundational sci-fi.
Could you talk a little bit about the sound design?
Well, we made the decision to make it post-sync; in a normal movie, you’d record the dialogue on the day, and then you’d clean it up. But with this, we went back to a ‘50s or ‘60s European thing, like the Italian neo-realists, of not recording any sound and then having to record it later. In some movies from the period, they didn’t even do the dialogue, they just counted, which is awesome. What you get with that method is incredibly clean sound. You get this echoing, weird voice floating in the air and then all the sound design around it becomes very precise because you have to replace everything or incorporate everything. I’d been after that sound for a long time from watching animation and watching Hayao Miyazaki [Studio Ghibli] movies. So the decision was made from the start to dump the sound and re-record it, which was a shame because I didn’t get to work with Bobby Entwistle and the normal sound team. We recorded all the dialogue on the day, but just onto the camera, so it was pretty crappy, but it was just as a reference for the actors later.
BULK is available on Blu-ray now. You can read more from Ben Wheatley in the latest issue of STARBURST Magazine – available here.
