Feature Category: Interviews

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. 

After falling in love with the book, and famously tweeting about how he wanted to remake the story in 2017, it’s clear that Edgar Wright has been a lifelong fan of the world of The Running Man. When the stars aligned and the project finally came to fruition, thanks to Paramount, Edgar and his team set out to capture this dystopian, heart-pounding adventure straight from the pages of the Stephen King novel on a unique and grand scale as you have never seen before.

The Running Man sees money-desperate factory worker Ben Richards (Glen Powell) dive headfirst into an unpredictable, nightmare game-show environment that unapologetically pulls viewers right through the screen and straight into the action. To celebrate its physical release (which is PACKED full of exclusive content), STARBURST caught up with Edgar to go behind the scenes on the incredible filming process…

STARBURST: You wanted viewers to see this from Ben Richards’ perspective, so can you elaborate on why you went with that style? 

Edgar Wright: It was something that was in the original book that I found really powerful and intense. It was that the entire narrative is from his perspective. You only saw the game through his eyes. Usually, in films of this ilk, like a Hunger Games or a Squid Game TV show, and even in something like The Fugitive with Harrison Ford, you’ll cut to other characters. You’ll cut back to the pursuers or to the network headquarters. With the book being written entirely from Ben’s point of view, I thought that’s the way to go. If we could keep that ball in the air, it would just make it very intense. Also, in a film where you don’t really know what’s true and what isn’t, you can only go on the information that he has. It made it challenging in some ways and liberating in others, because it would force you to shoot it in a certain way, because you couldn’t really go anywhere else. A lot of my films are like that by design. Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Baby Driver, they all stay with the main character for most of the film.

Ben Richards isn’t your typical protagonist; he’s more of an average citizen. Why did that idea appeal to you?

It was much more faithful to the book. The thing with the previous adaptation in 1987 is that it’s a completely different take on the novel. Arnold Schwarzenegger is playing the part, and at the start of the movie, he’s already a military policeman, an action hero of sorts. He’s already very capable and comes into the game as quite a formidable challenger. The whole point of the Richard Bachman book, and our film, is that Ben Richards is a guy who just comes in off the street. He’s an out-of-work dad; he’s tough because he works in construction and has a thick hide, but he’s not an action hero, he’s not a hit man, he’s not a trained killer.

I thought Glen embodied Ben really well; he’s tough and capable, but not infallible. He’s prone to making mistakes; sometimes, in the game, he’s completely winging it without any strategy whatsoever. He’s being thrown around like a pinball, and that was what was really exciting to us.

Beyond the book, we drew a lot of inspiration from action heroes that we like who have vulnerabilities. The two most obvious examples would be Indiana Jones, certainly in the first film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and John McClane in the first Die Hard, where they both have a level of derring-do and bravery, but also fail frequently and fall flat on their face. That was something with Ben Richards; for me, it made it more exciting, that you needed to feel in the film that the chances of him winning were extremely slim.

In the behind-the-scenes features, we see that Glen Powell was trained to pull his punches, to steer him away from being an action hero, which also makes it much more true to the character Ben is…

I’ve made two films, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and The World’s End, where there’s an element of martial arts in it, but I do think in the last twenty years, there’s a certain form of action that’s taken over. Not necessarily in a bad way, but I slightly tire of it at a certain point, seeing how everybody is able to suddenly do Krav Maga. And we thought Ben could be tough, but he’s not really a fighter. It’s only really in the finale, where he is fuelled by pure rage, that he blusters into a fight, with anger on his side. Anger and fury are like spinach to Popeye, but again, he’s not a trained fighter, and obviously, when he is fighting with trained assassins, they’re going to kick his ass.

At the start of the movie, the dynamic within the family is crucial in setting up what’s at stake. What are some of the elements that you remember the most from working with Glen and Jayme Lawson, who plays Sheila Richards?

I think I can speak for Jayme and Glen, to say that some of the hardest scenes in this film were when we were shooting with real babies. They were great! Having seen the infamous ‘fake baby’ in American Sniper – Google it! – we decided to go with real babies. So we had two-year-old twins on set. It’s definitely like a high-wire act, trying to shoot scenes with a real baby, with Glen and some of the other actors in the scenes, where there’s Jayme and David Zayas, for example, they were really patient, because obviously the twins have no awareness of what’s going on. It really added to it in those early scenes where Glen is watching TV, trying to figure out how to make some money, while holding and trying to calm down a real baby.

A lot of the stuff that’s in the film is really him. There’s the bit where he’s trying to watch Speed the Wheel, the other game show, because he is thinking, “How can I make some money fast? I need cash like right now.”  You see his initial strategy is not to go on The Running Man, it’s to get on to one of the other games. He’s watching Speed the Wheel, thinking, “Well, I can get on that treadmill, I can make a thousand new dollars right now.” He doesn’t intend to do The Running Man. You see, on that game show, they have that big hamster mascot, and he’s trying to distract his crying daughter by saying, “Look at the fuzzy hamster!” In a way, we were doing that for real on the day.

When we were shooting the scenes with Glen, Jayme, and the baby, we hadn’t yet shot the Speed the Wheel scene, so there was nothing to play on the TV, which came later in the schedule. But I had this cuddly toy behind the camera, so whenever the baby needed distracting, we’d play the music from Speed the Wheel, and I’d be behind the camera with this fuzzy hamster. It’s amazing! There’s a bit in it where Glen goes, “Do you see the fuzzy hamster!?” and the baby goes, “No!” She did see me doing it, but it’s also that thing where babies can be mercurial; the baby was like, “No, I’m upset.” Those were some of the very first scenes that we shot. In fact, the scene when Glen is in the factory office, the opening scene when he’s begging for his job back after being laid off, was the first scene we shot. Obviously, it’s an important scene to do first, but also, Glen had a two-year-old child for the whole scene!

How did you decide on some of the key filming locations?

In the book, it’s all pretty much in the North East USA. Co-Op City is where Ben Richard lives, and that’s a fictional city. Myself and Michael Bacall figured out that if the rest of the film takes place in New York, Boston, and then Maine, including Derry, we thought maybe Co-Op City is another city where you’d get a train to New York from, which is the first journey that he does. So we decided that Pittsburgh had been rebranded as Co-Op City in this alternate 2025. Maybe it was a new development in Pittsburgh, so that was our idea.

The whole thing was set in the North East, but most of the studio stuff and some of the location stuff were in London for the uptown sequences, and then we used Glasgow for New York, Boston, and some of the Co-Op City downtown exteriors.  Bulgaria came up because we needed to do some countryside sequences, some rural locations. It’s difficult to do American roads in the UK; English motorways just don’t look like the States. But in Bulgaria, weirdly, they do. I was quite happy because some people I know in the States and Canada were fooled. My friend, the director Sean Baker, saw the movie, and said, “Did you film that in Vancouver?” and I was like, “No, we’re in Bulgaria!” I’d never been to Bulgaria before, and they had long stretches of freeways that were not linked up to any other roads; they’d been built but never opened. So we had this long stretch of what we call the ghost freeway, where it’s just an empty stretch, with a bridge and ramps, probably about two miles of it. So all the sequences towards the end, when Ben carjacks Amelia Williams [Emilia Jones], were all shot in an abandoned freeway in Bulgaria.

The most ambitious thing in the movie was that it’s not just shooting Ben’s travels during the game, it’s also that you shoot the other contestants who are in other parts of the country. So you see Katy M. O’Brian in Vegas at one point, you see Martin Herlihy, who’s seemingly still in Co-Op City, he didn’t even leave the city he was in! We had to shoot so many other parts, for all of the other TV shows, like The Hardest Hits, or the other kills that you see, there are about 32 of them. Then The Apostle videos, where Daniel Ezra has his conspiracy videos about the game, which are like supercuts of other episodes. We had to cover a diverse range of locations throughout the shoot. We were shooting the main scenes with Glen, and we were always shooting something else as well.

There’s that brief little bit where Chi Lewis-Parry, who plays Negative Dude, blows himself up outside of a strip club, and that was shot in Glasgow’s Chinatown. It was very challenging for production because we had so many locations, something like 180 locations. So, the first people who were working on the movie were myself, Marcus Rowland, the production designer, and the location manager Eugene Strange. Literally the first thing we did, once the film was getting closer to happening, was get on the road and start looking at cities we could shoot in.

What was it like to work with Michael Cera once more, and what did you want him to bring to the movie as Elton Perrakis? Some of those Home Alone-style sequences looked incredible to do.

It was great! I co-wrote the script with Michael Bacall, and we did Scott Pilgrim vs. the World together. That character is in the book, and it wasn’t until the year that we were shooting, in 2024, when we started to think about who could play this part. As soon as we said Michael Cera’s name out loud, we were both like, “Wouldn’t that be great!” We’ve remained friends with Michael all this time; it’s been 16 years since we shot Scott Pilgrim. Obviously, I’ve remained friends with him for all of that time, but I haven’t had the opportunity to give him a part, aside from Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, so it was really great. Michael shot Barbie in London, and he really loved being there, so he was really happy to be back.

That scene turned out really well; it was definitely tough because Glen injured himself during the movie, which we talk about on the commentary track. There was a point where we were shooting that scene, where Glen was injured and had to take a few days off, Michael Cera had norovirus, and the only person who was around was Sandra Dickinson, who plays Victoria Parrakis. I think that scene is most people’s favourite, yet when we were shooting it, we started to feel like it was cursed because we were having so many difficulties starting it or getting through it.

I’m really proud of the scene, I think it just cuts together great. It was so much fun to put together once it was going. It was one of the sequences, at the start of it, where everything that could go wrong went wrong, and you start to think, “Is this whole set piece jinxed?” I think my favourite moments in it are Michael Cera hitting this picture of a cat on the wall, which is a drawing of producer Nira Park’s cat, cracking the glass, setting off the infrared, and then jumping straight through a wall. I love it when it gets into all of that. The fake wall, the fire pole in the shower, all of that was so fun.

The sequences on the jet looked amazing and must have been claustrophobic to capture. In the behind-the-scenes footage, you described this as one of the toughest sets to work on for The Running Man. Can you tell us why that is, and what you remember the most from working on it?

Yeah, I think I say in the making-of documentary that I’m really proud of the sequence, but I’m really happy to not be on the jet anymore. It’s strange sometimes when you shoot a scene, and the intensity of the scene starts to bleed out over into the making of it. There were two different cockpits, one that goes side to side, and one that was made in foam, which could fully dive for the bits where Glen and the other hunters are briefly in zero gravity. Being on the set of a plane, with a gimbal that shakes and tilts, and a cockpit, yeah, it was really difficult. It was really difficult doing the close-quarters fight in the cockpit because you’ve got three actors in a scene, brawling in a very small set. It’s tough to shoot. You’ve got to get two cameras in there, because we have one camera that’s like the movie camera, and because there are all the drones, the rovers are all in there, we always had to have a second camera in there, sometimes two.

So, usually, whenever you’d see a shot with a TV screen in the background, we’d have to have a separate camera on like a pogo stick. It would usually be a little Osmo camera. A different operator would have it on a pogo stick and usually be hiding in a corner, pretending to be the rover. So yeah, it was complicated, and I think several people, myself included, had to step off the jet at some point and go and see the medic, because we had high blood pressure. It was definitely a thing where you had to take a break from being on the plane. I don’t know how else to describe it. So when I see TV shows and films that are entirely set on a plane – Ruben Östlund just did a movie like that [The Entertainment System Is Down] – it sounds like a nightmare! No airports for me, please!

 

Do you worry people will compare your film to the 1987 version?

I hope people will enjoy it in the spirit in which it was intended. We were really excited and really proud to make this film. As a Stephen King fan since I was 12 years old, the chance to work on an adaptation was just a total thrill, especially to work on this one, because I’ve loved the book since I was a teenager. I’d read the original Richard Bachman book before I saw the 1987 movie, because that film came out when I was 14, and it was an 18 certificate, so I didn’t see it for a couple of years until it was on VHS, by which point I’d read the book. The book and the film are two completely separate things, so I remember watching the film and being a little confused. That was really my whole inspiration to do it.

It wasn’t like I was remaking an ’80s film, or remaking that film, and even if I was, there’s no reason to do that. I’m not really a fan of remakes that are beat-for-beat the same movie. I always call them karaoke films. The best remakes are the ones that do something wildly different, and this was just a thrill to do, on every level, cast and crew. And, just the experience of making it. We only finished making the film in late October last year, like literally a few weeks before it came out. So, it’s crazy. I was doing signings and people were saying, “What are you working on now?”, and I said, “I just need a minute! I’m figuring it out” I feel like I only finished the film yesterday!

 

 

Is it true that you were given one of your shortest windows to date to put The Running Man together? It’s an incredible achievement.

Yeah! I don’t want the takeaway from that to be that the film was rushed, because I think that we were incredibly thorough. We knew that going into it. It was actually one of the few times in my career when I had a release date for the film before I started; that’s a lot of pressure. It was before the whole merger and everything at Paramount.

It was actually Mike Ireland, who was the previous head at Paramount, who called me in early 2024. I’d been working on a different film, and The Running Man had been in development. Michael Bacall had done two drafts, and the other film I was working on had fallen apart schedule-wise because of the actors’ and writers’ strike. He called me and said, “Why aren’t you doing The Running Man? You could be in production by the end of the year, and we can have it out in November of 2025”. That’s a very rare thing for a studio head to say.

So we knew, going into it, what the schedule was, and, as such, even though that was tough on the shoot and particularly on the post, we were able to plan for it. The biggest part of that was editing as we went along, so we were constantly editing on set during the entire production. But also, for Industrial Light & Magic to finish all of their work – and I think their work on the film is just exceptional – we had to have all of our designs figured out before we started filming.

During the shoot, you would turn over shots. So that would mean you’d turn over shots before you finished, and you’d have started editing. That was easy to do, you’d sit there and watch a hero’s stunt shot, and say “Let’s look at takes one to four. OK it’s definitely take three, let’s hand that over.” You’re doing that as you’re shooting, so by the time we had finished filming in April, we went to CinemaCon and showed the teaser trailer and Industrial Light & Magic had finished some shots, which was amazing, so that really helped. I can’t say enough about how hard everybody worked on the post. I don’t want to say that it was a short time frame. I don’t want to make it sound like we rushed the movie or anything, because we were incredibly thorough, and I just think the work done in post was exceptional.

THE RUNNING MAN is available on 4K SteelBook, Blu-ray, DVD, and digital.  You can follow Edgar Wright on Instagram.

 

 

To celebrate the release of Ghost Killer, the newest epic action comedy from our friends in Japan, we sat down with director Kensuke Sonomura to talk about the film…

STARBURST: Congratulations on the release of Ghost Killer, it’s an absolute riot!

Kensuke Sonomura: Thank you so much, I’m glad you enjoyed it.

So Ghost Killer is a wonderful blend of impeccable action, J-drama and comedy. What was it about this particular project that drew you to being the director?

I’d worked with the distributor, RightsCube, before, and after that collaboration, they approached me about doing another film. I’d helped write the script for Baby Assassins, and this time they said, “Why don’t you direct, and let Mr. Sakamoto handle the script?” – so that’s what we did.

We are big fans of Baby Assassins, so it was great to see Akari Takaishi back in a big role. Essentially, she’s playing two polar opposite parts in quick succession, back and forth in some scenes. How was it working again with such a talented actor, and what made you feel that she had to be in the lead role for this?

When I first met Takaishi‑san, I already knew her work well. I’d seen her in so many films, and what struck me was her range – she carries so many different styles and emotional registers within her. There’s a real depth of material in her.

When I read the script for the first time, I could immediately picture her as the lead. It wasn’t even a question; the character felt like it had to be Akari Takaishi. No one else made sense in that role.

So I asked her to read the script, and once she was fully on board, we sat down and talked through the film in detail – everything from tone to character psychology. After that, I gave her the space to explore and build the character in her own way. I trusted her instincts, and I wanted her to have the freedom to expand the role beyond what was on the page.

Your history in film is very heavily involved with stunts and action. How important was it for you as a director to get everything right in terms of the stunts and the choreography? Because there’s a lot going on, especially in the final act of the film.

I come from the stunt world originally, so I oversaw all the stunt work and the stunt coordinators on this film. I brought in a team of people I trust – people whose ideas I really value. From the start, I laid out the direction I wanted the action to take, the tone, the physical language of the film. Once that foundation was set, we all started generating ideas together.

I’ve worked with a lot of professional stunt performers and action directors over the years, and I collaborated with many of them on this project. They’re incredibly skilled at figuring out how to make an action beat land in the most dynamic way.

After I shared my vision for how each sequence should feel, they’d come back with a range of concepts and possibilities. I’d look through everything, choose the strongest ideas, and then we’d refine them into the final choreography you see on screen.

It was a genuinely collective process – everyone bringing their expertise, everyone shaping the movement. That’s how we got the action to feel precise, alive, and true to the film.

Sound is a crucial element to any film, but especially in action. The sound design in Ghost Killer is exceptional. Every single punch feels visceral. How closely did you work with your sound team? What emotions did you want the audience to feel with every single punch?

I’ve built up a lot of experience working with sound – adding effects, stripping them back, and shaping how they sit in a scene. For this project, I worked closely with the sound team. They’d install the effects, send over the data, and I’d go through everything, checking how the speakers were behaving and how the sound was actually operating in the space.

There were moments where I’d ask them to shift things suddenly, or add a bit more nuance – maybe a sharper attack, maybe something softer or more atmospheric. We went back and forth a lot. It was a really collaborative process, and because of that, I’ve developed a very clear sense of what kind of sound effect actually lands, especially in an action-heavy environment.

I think a lot about intensity – how loud something should be, how restrained, what emotional texture it needs to maximise the impact of the moment. Once the sound designer created a track, they’d send it to me, and I’d listen closely. If I felt the scene needed a different nuance to really push the action, I’d suggest adjustments.

It was a very iterative process, but a really effective one. And because the film is so action‑driven, with so many moving parts, that level of precision in the sound design became essential.

What were some of the challenges that you faced and overcame during the production?

The hardest part for me this time was actually the comedy. I’ve never included comedic elements in my previous films, so stepping into that territory was completely new. Yugo Sakamoto’s writing has a very particular nuance to it – his humour is sharp but subtle – and I really had to figure out how to translate that onto the screen.

So the challenge became: how do I take the comedic rhythm he wrote and materialise it visually, without losing the tone of the film? That was something I had to work through carefully.

But even though it was a challenge, I’m really happy with how it turned out. The film manages to be funny, full of adrenaline, and surprisingly heartfelt all at once. Finding that balance was important, and I think we landed it.

What was your favourite sequence to film? And how important was your favourite sequence to you as a filmmaker?

My favourite sequence is actually the ending. I can’t go into detail without giving too much away, but there’s a very quiet emotional shift in that final moment that means a lot to me. Instead of leaning into a big, dramatic farewell – something you often see in Japanese cinema – I wanted to capture a different kind of feeling. It’s that subtle sense of loss that comes from not being able to say goodbye, the way someone can slip out of your life without fanfare.

That understated emotion was really important to me. By keeping the moment gentle and almost unnoticed, I felt I could express something more honest than a traditional tear‑jerking climax. That tone, that quiet ache, is why the ending is my favourite scene.

Could you share with us what you are working on next?

I can – It’s a period drama based on Shinya Umemura’s manga Chiruran: Shinsengumi Requiem. The adaptation is coming out this spring on U‑Next, the Japanese streaming platform. I had a great time making it – very different energy from my other projects, but a lot of fun to dive into.

Ghost Killer is available to watch in the UK on April 6th via streaming services, and is currently a part of the Japan Foundation’s Touring Film Programme.

Few science fiction films have grown in stature as dramatically as Michael Crichton’s Westworld. Released in 1973, the picture was viewed initially as an intriguing genre experiment – a sci-fi western. Yet over the decades, it has come to be regarded as one of the most prophetic films of its era, anticipating debates about artificial intelligence, virtual escapism, and the ethics of technology long before such questions entered everyday conversation.

At the centre of the film is Richard Benjamin as Peter Martin, an ordinary man whose holiday in Delos, a high-tech amusement park, becomes a desperate fight for survival when the park’s lifelike androids begin to malfunction. While Yul Brynner’s black-clad Gunslinger provides the film’s iconic image, Benjamin’s grounded, increasingly fearful performance anchors the story and allows the audience to experience the terror alongside him. More than fifty years after its release, Westworld feels less like speculative fantasy and more like uneasy prediction. We spoke with Richard about working with novelist-turned-director Michael Crichton, acting opposite the formidable Yul Brynner, and why a film made in the early 1970s continues to resonate in the age of artificial intelligence…

STARBURST: How did Westworld first come to you?

Richard Benjamin: I had a wonderful, eccentric agent. Her name was Sue Mengers. She was outrageous in so many different ways. My wife, Paula Prentiss, and I were living in New York when I got a call from her saying there was this movie – she never read the scripts. She said, “I don’t know what it is. It’s a western, but it’s not a western. They’re interested in you”. And I said, “All right, let me read it”. She said, “You can read it if you want to, but I’ve already told them you’re going to do it”. That’s the way she worked. She said it was by Michael Crichton. I had known of him from the film The Andromeda Strain. So I said OK, read the script, and thought it was great. I thought, here I am, a kid from New York City who’s going to be in a western – and then it turns out it’s a science fiction western. There were two things I loved growing up: westerns and science fiction. So, of course, I said yes!

What was Michael Crichton like as a director, especially since this was his first feature film?

Michael knew exactly what he wanted to do – every shot, everything. There were no discussions about whether we should do this or that. We all wanted to do whatever he had planned. The whole shooting experience was a total pleasure. He was a lovely guy. Later, we became very good friends.

The dynamic between you and James Brolin on screen was excellent. What was he like to work with?

Jim was great. We didn’t know each other beforehand, but we just fell in with each other straight away. He was the one who kept saying, “You’re going to love being in this movie,” and that sort of thing. We really got along very well.

Yul Brynner’s Gunslinger is one of cinema’s classic villains. What was it like working with him?

In Westworld, Yul Brynner was basically wearing what he wore in The Magnificent Seven. It was the same outfit. He, too, turned out to be very down to earth. He was terrific. He loved making movies. There was one day when we were shooting, and he showed up on set. The assistant director went a little crazy and said, “Who called him?” The first assistant went to the second assistant and said, “Did you call him?” They said, “No, he’s not working today. Someone’s made a terrible mistake. Someone’s called him, and there is going to be hell to pay”. The assistant director went up to him and said, “Mr Brynner, did someone call you?” Yul replied, “Nobody called me. I just like to be here. Can you think of a better place to be than on a movie set?” He just hung out while we were shooting. He told me a lot of great things. He was very generous. Because I had to fire these guns – they had blanks in them, but they made a lot of noise – he gave me some advice. He said the big western stars blink on screen when the gun fires. He said, “I’m going to teach you how to fire these guns without blinking.” He took me onto the backlot at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with blank ammunition and the six-guns we were using, and he conditioned me so I didn’t blink when the guns fired. The other thing he said was, “Don’t let them shoot you getting up on the horse from the ground – climbing onto the horse and then settling into the saddle. It’s very awkward. Make them cut as you start to grab onto the horse, then get them to show you settling into the saddle. It will look very smooth.” He was giving me all this great advice in a very generous way.

How physically demanding were the scenes in the desert with Yul Brynner chasing you on horseback?

You’ve heard that joke about actors – when you’re asked, “Can you ride a horse?” and you say, “Oh sure,” and then have to run out and learn how to ride. Fortunately, I had ridden a horse as a kid, so it wasn’t a problem. There was a lot of physical work in the desert, but I was young, and I kept thinking, I’m in a western here! I was having the time of my life!

Did you have any idea Westworld would become a cult classic?

No, but we all thought that Michael was onto something about trusting machines – you’re going to get yourself into trouble if you totally trust them. And now, with AI and robotics, you can see what he meant. He was always ahead of everything. Look at it now. It’s really dangerous when AI gives you false information and the like. Michael was ahead of all of that. Back in the 1970s, we hadn’t really thought about it. There wasn’t the technology that could cause havoc in the way it can today. Westworld made us think about it.

Were you offered the chance to star in the sequel, Futureworld?

They talked to me about that, but it wasn’t going to be Michael Crichton. For me, everything was about Michael, so if he wasn’t going to be doing it, I wasn’t interested. For me, sequels are like you’ve been there and done that. I can understand why sequels are made, but to me, I don’t think you should go back again.

What did you think of the Westworld reboot with Anthony Hopkins?

It was very different. It delved into all kinds of areas and psychological places. I don’t compare it to the film. For me, it’s a very different animal.

If Delos really existed, what world would you choose?

I’d like to go back to Westworld!

What are your thoughts on the film’s release on 4K?

I’m so pleased that they’re doing this. A whole new generation of people can now see the film. It looks absolutely great in 4K. We’ve had the whole new TV series, but the original film just keeps coming back. It’s such a nice thing. I never realised that over 50 years later, people would still be talking to me about it. I think Westworld keeps having a new life because it’s so original.

WESTWORLD is available on 4K UHD Blu-ray from Arrow Video.

Alongside the new 4K restoration, Arrow Films has produced brand-new interviews with stars Richard Benjamin and James Brolin, screenwriter Larry Karaszewski, and producer Paul N. Lazarus III. The release also features a commentary track by film historian Daniel Kremer and a new featurette presented by film scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Other special features include On Location with Westworld, an archival 1973 behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film, along with the 48-minute pilot episode of the 1980 television follow-up series, Beyond Westworld. The release also contains the original theatrical trailer, an image gallery, a reversible sleeve featuring both the original artwork and newly commissioned art by Arik Roper, and a collector’s booklet with new writing on the film by David Michael Brown, Priscilla Page, Paul Anthony Nelson, and Abbey Bender.

An ancient artefact is the subject of WHISTLE, the latest from director CORIN HARDY. In the film, a group of teens fall foul of a Mayan death whistle that, once blown, unleashes a demonic force that brings their eventual horrific deaths forward to the present day. Hardy takes us behind the scenes of the hit movie…

STARBURST: What drew you to the project?

Corin Hardy: I read Owen Edgerton’s script, and I loved the simple but strong mythology surrounding an ancient, cursed object, an Aztec death whistle, and I hadn’t seen the movie of that object before. It’s so hard to find new mythologies in horror. I loved what the script had going for it. The balance of emotional stories about the teenage characters and commentary on death itself, as well as the simple mythology. If you hear the whistle scream, it calls upon your future death to hunt you down. I was like, “I can say that in one line, and it’s got its own mystery and fear about it”. On top of that, there’s also a handful of very kind of tantalising death sequences. They’re quite imaginative and visual. And as a fan of special effects, I was thinking how am I going to create some of these things? That’s what got me to sign on board.

The film’s sound design is great. Were you hands-on with that side of things?

It’s such a big part of the movie. It’s a big part of any horror movie, the sound design, you know, 50% of it, the experience is coming from the audio. If you go on YouTube and search death whistle, you can hear some of the sounds, and they’re pretty unnerving, and the mythology behind them and the reasons is very mysterious. I knew I needed to create a multi-layered sound that had to be scary. It’s a given that it’s going to be a terrifying sound. But what really did it for me was informed by the narrative. The idea is that this object is ancient, and has been responsible for probably hundreds of thousands of deaths, because it’s been around for thousands of years. I like the idea that it claims their voice in the next scream. And the idea that what you’re hearing is the victims of the whistle in this culmination.

How did you create the sound of the whistle?

We used many layers of sound for the different times you hear it. Of course, you don’t hear all of these nuances. But I got the actors themselves to perform screams that go back into the whistle. We had voice artists performing languages played backwards and slowed down, and there are animal sounds. All trying to reflect the idea of something ancient with a history. And it’s almost like the sound moves around you. Hopefully, you’re in the cinema when you see it, and its sound will consume you.

It feels like one of those ensemble films from the ‘80s…

We were looking at films like The Lost Boys, A Nightmare on Elm Street, or The Breakfast Club, wanting to capture that teenage feel of bubbling energy amongst them. We didn’t have very much time to prepare, so rather than do lots of rehearsals, I took them to an escape room. Nick Frost wasn’t there yet, so I played his Mr Craven part. I said, “Let’s do the escape room, but in your characters, not doing the lines from the movie, just embody your character”. So they all enjoyed a kind of playtime while being those characters. Some of them had crushes on others, some of them didn’t like others, some of them, Sophie and Dafne were having this early stage of attraction. It was very helpful. And then two days later, when it was minus 15 degrees in the swimming pool at night, they were able to concentrate on the scene as opposed to what they were like with each other.

It’s very good to see that it’s not all just CGI effects.

Yeah. Steve Newburn and Paul Jones were our practical effects guys, they’re doing phenomenal work at the moment. They’ve just done Frankenstein, Ari Aster movies, and What We Do in the Shadows. They did such great work on Whistle, sculpture and animatronics and stuff. And combined with Björn Charpentier’s cinematography, where we really looked at movies from the ‘80s, like The Lost Boys, to kind of get that colour. There’s a real beautiful look to the cinematography of The Lost Boys. There’s almost silver in there. And Björn did an incredible job with that world. And Jen Spence, who’s a production designer who did The Nun, also worked on Whistle.

We’re glad you mentioned Björn, as the cinematography is fantastic, and the film looks amazing. We assume you brought Björn on board from working with him on Gangs of London?

That’s right. Yeah. Björn and I worked together on Season Two and hit it off. And when I got Whistle, I asked if he’d do a horror movie. He’d done the folk horror film Blood with Brad Anderson, who did Session 9, but he wasn’t a massive sort of horror trivia guy. But he’s an absolute cinematography fanatic. He really studied certain looks that we were going for. He came and lived with me when we were in Toronto during production. I loved the way he mixed light and colour, because I knew I wanted Whistle to be a colourful movie, not a kind of bleak, washed out movie. I want it to feel although I like, you know, you can achieve a scarier look in horror when you kind of like, almost degrade the image or make it look like found footage. I wanted this to feel like a classic movie, some of the movies I grew up on, whether it’s The Thing or A Nightmare on Elm Street, or Fright Night, or The Blob, and give it a really solid cinematic look, so I’m pleased you like the look of it.

It certainly comes across…

Yeah, particularly in the Harvest Festival sequence, I love this idea of the middle of the movie taken off into a different world outside the high school. I grew up loving Bonfire Night and going to festivals with the fireworks and romance in the air. And having that as a place they all go while their death is hunting them down felt exciting.

WHISTLE is in cinema from February 13th.

With the unique opportunity of telling one story arc over three movies, which were all filmed at the same time, director Renny Harlin joins STARBURST to reveal everything you need to know about The Strangers – Chapter 3. The trilogy conclusion sees Maya Lucas (Madelaine Petsch) continue her unpredictable ride through brutal horror, mayhem, and story reveals, which slowly take an even further toll on her psychological state. We also unearth further details of The Strangers supercut, which captures all three chapters in one viewing…

STARBURST: The first chapter is a home Invasion movie that celebrates The Strangers films that came before it, and the second chapter you’ve described as Rambo: First Blood. How would you describe The Strangers – Chapter 3, and what kind of tone did you want to capture for the final movie? 

Renny Harlin: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Chapter 3 is quite different from the others. Chapter 1 was the set-up, Chapter 2 was the bridge, and Chapter 3 is the conclusion. I hope that the audience has and will stay with the movies, because it is one four and a half hour movie that we chopped into three pieces. You can’t really appreciate it before you’ve seen the third one, and the third one will – hopefully – really bring everything to a conclusion for everybody, and show Maya’s psychological journey. It reveals a lot about her and The Strangers without changing the fact that the violence is random and unexplainable. It sheds a little more light on all of the characters. It even goes into a dark romance aspect. To me, the third movie is more measured and intimate, and quiet in a way. Hopefully, it is more scary than any of the previous movies. If the second movie was a lot about Maya being chased by The Strangers this is her really facing The Strangers. It’s no secret and you can see this in the trailer, it’s obvious that she gets captured by them, and then, what happens between them is really the main game.

How would you say Maya compares to other legendary horror final girls; what do you think makes her stand out?

It’s unique that we got to tell a one character story arc in a giant four and a half hour movie, and make three movies that only take place in a matter of a few days, instead of the classic structure of making a movie, it has a beginning, middle, end, you wait a few years, if you’re successful, you’ll make a sequel, and so on. Now we are following the same character over a matter of days. We’re really able to see the progression or the digression of Maya’s mental state, I think it’s a really unique opportunity. I can’t think of any other movie or series of movies that does that. Where you can see the deterioration of somebody. What happens if you’re the victim of this kind of, a senseless crime where you almost get killed. In today’s world, there’s so much violence, and there are so many innocent victims of violence. What happens to the survivors? What could happen to them if they survived? This third movie is really the culmination of this psychological journey that I think will surprise the audience a lot.

As the trilogy progresses, you dig into the backstory of The Strangers more and more. Going into Chapter 3, can you tell us how you went about balancing that mysterious approach of The Strangers, along with backstory reveals? What is the process behind getting that crucial balance right?

As a big fan of the original movie, I felt like I, and a lot of the fans, wanted to know more. It doesn’t mean that we reveal everything and say, “This is who they are, and this is how they became this”, etc. They just happen to be sociopaths that were born that way. We don’t give it rhyme or reason. We still keep the mystery of the randomness of their crimes. But at the same time, we give them more dimension, and in certain ways, more humanity and emotion. I am not saying that you start rooting for them, but, with any serial killer, I think it’s always interesting to start figuring out like, “Where are they coming from?” and finding some sort of sign posts to “Why are they doing this” and “What brought them to this situation.” I think the little bits of backstory, and revelations about their previous lives are necessary and interesting, and they shed a right amount of light to who they are without simplifying and telling everything about them.

When it comes to horror, Richard Brake is a familiar face. Can you tell us about what you enjoyed the most about working with him, and what you think he brought to this final chapter as Sheriff Rotter? 

Richard’s just a fantastic guy. He’s a fantastic actor, and he’s just a really-fun person to be around, I love him. I think that horror fans like him so much because he plays all of these quite horrific characters, but you can just sense that he’s a good person. I would love to have him in any future movie that I ever make. He’s so great and really embodies the characters that he plays. In this movie, he really brings his charisma and weight of who he is and what he can do. Obviously, people expect him to be the bad guy and maybe in certain ways he is and in others he isn’t. In a way, he’s a victim of the circumstances, and just trying to make the best out of a bad situation. So, I think it’s a very interesting, conflicting character, that the audience will have fun watching.

Recently, a supercut of all three chapters played in Los Angeles. Did you manage to attend that, and also, will that idea return to cinemas in the not-too distant future? 

Yes! Unfortunately, as I live far away I wasn’t able to travel to the screening, which was heartbreaking for me but I’m sure we will have more screenings of that supercut. I love that combination. From the very beginning, I always talked about how these movies should be presented as one story. I’m happy that Lionsgate is supporting that idea. I think, without making promises, I believe that somewhere in the near future they will release all three movies as one cut. It doesn’t mean that we just took the three movies and glued them, back-to-back, we actually made a lot of changes. The story is tighter. More meat, and less filler!

THE STRANGERS – CHAPTER 3 is in UK cinemas from February 6th.