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Ben Wheatley and Reece Shearsmith | IN THE EARTH

Written By:

Kieron Moore
in earth

The latest film from Ben Wheatley, IN THE EARTH sees a scientist and a park scout (Joel Fry and Ellora Torchia) venture deep into an unusually fertile woods. Here they encounter not only mysterious hermit Zach (Reece Shearsmith), but also the forest itself coming to life around them. Filmed last summer, the movie takes place against the familiar backdrop of a disastrous pandemic. STARBURST caught up with Wheatley and Shearsmith to find out more…

STARBURST: Several movies have shown up in the past year about the struggle of being locked inside, but In the Earth made us terrified to go outside. How did this idea for a different take on the pandemic era develop?

Ben Wheatley: I started writing within a week of the actual lockdown, to try and make some sense of what was going on. I found myself having a bit of a freak out, which I’m sure lots of people did; you know, you just kind of go, I can’t work it out, because it’s all so unique, it’s never happened before. It seemed to be getting exponentially worse every four or five days. It’s when they released that thing and went, “oh, we’re gonna be locked down for a year,” everyone went: “a year, that’s mad.” And if they’d have said in two weeks’ time, “and now we’ve organised a set of games where you have to fight for food,” you’d have gone, “oh yeah, OK, that seems reasonable, the way things are changing.”

So I sat down, and I started writing this thing, and part of it was projecting into the future to be a bit more optimistic that we were gonna get out of it. And then I started looking at stuff online, and all the VOD movies up until that point all felt suddenly really out of date. Anything that had a crowd in it seemed really bizarre. All the movies I have made have been about a reaction to the current situation – Colin Burstead’s the same, Kill List is the same. And I thought, I need to make something that encapsulates the nowness of what’s going on.

There are some familiar pandemic-era sights in the film – characters wearing masks and sanitising – and references to current events in the dialogue, but it feels like background detail rather than being overbearing. That must have been a difficult balance to hit.

Wheatley: Well, it’s to do with the idea of horror as metaphor. There’s no point making a film directly about what happened to us, because we all understand exactly what it is. The redelivering of the news of the pandemic back to the population – it’s like, we’ve just lived through it, you know, so it’s not important.

But the idea that you would ignore the fact that everyone had lived through it seemed to be strange to me. That’s a current thinking – some dramas are coming out that don’t even mention it. It’s almost like they’re in a divergent timeline where it never happened. I think that’s very, very strange. It’s infantilising – it’s all too nasty to think about, so we’ll never think about it again.

But if you look at historical events like 9/11, the Second World War, or Vietnam, you have to come to terms with these things eventually, and it has to come back into the culture. So I was like, well, this is happening, but also, other stories are happening at the same time.

And Reece, what did you think when you saw Ben’s script?

Reece Shearsmith: I was really thrilled to be asked to do it, because it got me out the house! It felt like we were going back to a great experience that we had together when we filmed A Field in England, which was all outside and we filmed it in two weeks, in order, in a field. This was in the woods, and it felt an interesting jumping off point from the pandemic, where you go somewhere where you think it’s not going to get you. Zach, my character, has gone off grid into the woods, where there’s no people, to escape it.

And yet we get this essay on science and nature and how humans tell themselves a story to convince themselves that there’s reason and meaning behind the things that are happening. Zach has got a very definite story in his head about what’s happening and why it’s happening, and then we meet the counterpoint to him, Doctor Wendle, who’s the science version. 
In the Earth Reece Shearsmith

What was the on-set experience like? Did the safety measures affect the way you told the story?

Wheatley: I’ve made four or five movies that are at this scale, so it wasn’t any different really from those productions, except for the PPE, which we were all worried about, but turned out to be nothing. I was a bit like, “I don’t want to wear a mask”, but then after a day, I didn’t even notice I’d got a mask on, it was fine. And then the rest of it was just a lot more handwashing.

Shearsmith: There’s always more people than you think – even when there’s three of us in the tent, there’s twenty-five people outside, so it did feel like normal filming in one way. But then in another way, it was sort of extraordinary that we knew no one else was doing this now – we were the first that crept out into the world and were capturing this thing.

And it was strange to be mirroring the story in the fact that all the crew had PPE on, masks and gloves and everything. It was a bit odd, a bit alien, because you didn’t have that normal connection that you have with people on set, and everyone was being careful, socially distanced. But we were tested every day and it was probably the safest it had ever been at that point, because it was low in the community in August. So we felt fine, but it was just a real thrill; it felt like a ray of hope that it was possible to make a film.

Reece, you’ve worked with Ben a few times now. What is it about his films that keeps you coming back?

Shearsmith: He always tells really great, interesting stories, and uses the palette that he has to tell a story in a way you might not have seen before. In a way, he’s similar to what we try to do with our TV show, Inside No. 9, which is to use the tools of how to tell a story, and not just tell a story, but to stretch the very medium itself to its limits in how you present your story.

A Field in England did that, at the end when he went into this psychedelic trip with the editing. And then we get this film, where again he’s using light and sound front and centre as part of your experience. I can’t wait to see it in a cinema, because I’m sure it’ll be a real onslaught on the senses.

We get some more of that psychedelic style of editing in In the Earth. How do you approach putting these sequences together, Ben?

Wheatley: A lot of that stuff is about the communication with the creature in the woods. I figure that the creature doesn’t communicate in a standard way. It doesn’t appreciate time in the same way that we do. And what would communication between an alien and a human be like?

And in the nuts and bolts of it, the creature thinks in a recursive, circular way about time, but humans don’t, so what you get within those psychedelic moments is the recursive animations that Cyriak Harris did, but also the film is kind of blitzed and reversed and passed backwards and forwards within itself, and then there’s rhythms within that which are more like music in the way of motifs. So there’s a logic to it, but it’s a kind of logic that’s not explained. So you can see there’s a pattern there, but as a human you can’t understand it… on purpose.

A large part of the experience of watching the film relates to that editing and to Clint Mansell’s score. When you’re on set, Reece, do you have any idea what the finished film will be like?

Shearsmith: Ben has got it all in his head, and it’s not by accident that anything is there. Because he’s an editor and he edits it himself, we’d film a day and he’d go back to his hotel room and edit the day’s work. He was editing as we went, so he’d be very on top of what we needed if we needed to go back and do anything else. He’s very sure of the story he wants to tell and how to tell it.

He does another great thing, which is he plays in music. So these big speakers were brought in and this big ambient music was playing. Your life is suddenly scored, and you feel like you get another level of performance that you might not get if that wasn’t there.

So there were a lot of great anchor points that give you clues into how it’s gonna actually feel watching it. It’s that weird thing of, it’s written, then it’s filmed, then you hoover up the bits you need, and it’s all reconstructed again in the edit, but he manages to blur that feeling of how it’s gonna actually be by bringing some of that end result to the actual field.

The film is set to be released in cinemas this month. With restrictions slowly easing, how confident are you about releasing your film this way?

Wheatley: If the last year and a half has taught me anything, it’s: don’t expect anything. We will see what we will see. Everything seems to be OK at the moment in terms of the release patterns, but… I just dunno.

The thing is, I haven’t seen the film yet in the cinema with an audience. It’s a very bizarre situation. It had a general release in the States, and people went out to see it there, so that was good. I hope people get the chance to see it in the cinema.

Would you be confident going to a cinema to see it, Reece?

Shearsmith: I think I would. I suspect it would still be socially distanced and there’ll be gaps in the seats, but I would happily go in with a mask on and watch a film. I’d love to think that people will be confident enough to go and see it in a full cinema. I’m not sure whether people would do that yet, but I’m very excited to see it on the big screen. But I’m daring to think it’s gonna be all right.

IN THE EARTH is in cinemas 18th June, with advanced previews on 17th June.

 

Kieron Moore

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