Kill List is the upcoming film from writer/director Ben Wheatley (Down Terrace); focussing on the life of a British soldier who returns home from overseas to join an old friend as a contract killer, but sees his disturbed past bubble to the surface and affect his work; as ominous employers begin to raise the stakes of the game.
Recently, we were lucky enough to hear Ben, lead actor Neil Maskell (Basic Instinct 2), and lead actress MyAnna Buring (The Descent), discuss the film, it’s dark tone, where it came from, and the multitude of horrified reactions its received so far, when the film was promoted during Empire Presents Big Screen, and you can find some of what was discussed at the Kill List press conference below.
Q. Ben, could you explain all about Kill List and the film?
Ben: No. You know, we’ve been very careful not to give it away, it’s film thats got lots of different genre elements; horror elements, and thriller elements; and all you need to know is that we come out of screenings and people have been really upset; so that’s good.
Q. So does it differ from what you think people might expect from a British film?
Ben: Maybe from one of this period, I don’t think it’d have been so strange 30 years ago, or back with the 70s sort of movies; in a time where you were expected to work a little harder, and everything’s not all served up with the filmmakers telling you exactly what it is, or how it is, or how to feel about it; you have to work it out by watching it.
Q. Do you think that’s the fault of Hollywood; for spoon-feeding big franchises to people for the last 20 years, and making viewers need that explanation?
Ben: I don’t know, if you look at HBO stuff, and a lot of it is quite hard, quite difficult to understand; The Wire is a bit tangental and difficult, and Deadwood is difficult; but if I go to see a Spider-Man film I don’t want it to be like Tarkovsky; so I don’t think its a fault, it’s just a different way of making a different type of film.
“ Kill List is a collection of my recurring nightmares.” – Ben Wheatley.
Q. So where did the idea for Kill List come from?
Ben: It came from a lot of different places. One element was some of the casting; having a load of different actors that I really liked and really wanted to work with, so Amy Jump [Kill List co-writer] and I really tailored it to those people; another element was that I really wanted to make a kind of horror film, and another element started with Down Terrace; where you start with very specific moments and images; and it was taken from a lot of dreams I’d had as a kid, and recurring nightmares, and we wrote those down, and thought how can we fit those together into a movie?
Q. It seems like both this and Down Terrace have a few thematic things in common; such as failing businesses; was that a conscious thing?
Ben: Yeh. It’s a metaphor that works on different levels; their relationships are like businesses that are failing, they’re people in England who are trying to make a go of it and that’s failing, and then if you look at the bigger picture the whole thing is failing. The whole of Britain is fucking failing isn’t it? and a lot of that comes from from my own experience of running small businesses.
Q. How much of a factor is it knowing that people are going to watch the film again on Blu-ray or DVD, and how much do you make just for a one shot viewing?
Ben: Well it’d be nice if people watched it again and again. Treat it like Titanic; like a date movie.
*Laughs*
Ben: We’ve seen it with Twitter, where people have come out saying “what the fuck?”, but gone back, then said they’ve thought about it more and more, seen it again, and said that now they understand it. A few people have said the ending comes out of nowhere, but I don’t understand that; they should realize it’s all really considered; it doesn’t suddenly jump to one thing; it’s like they think movies are being made up on the spot and that the filmmakers get themselves into a corner and don’t know how they got there; its nothing like that, it’s very structured, and if you go back on set you can find the pieces of the puzzle; and the puzzle’s not complete obviously, but there are enough bits there to make sense out of it.
Q. Numerous people have come out of screenings and said that Kill List is “amazing”, and at the same time said that they felt genuinely physically ill; so was there a point where you thought you’d gone too far, and did you hold anything back in some cuts?
Ben: No.We were really happy that people felt ill.
*Laughs*
Ben: Otherwise you’re just pissing about aren’t you? If you make a film that’s supposed to be like a horror film, and you come out of it with people going “cool” and “I really enjoyed that, I’m really happy”, then it’s not really worked. And I think that if you’re going to commit to the genre you’ve got to commit 100% so no, we didn’t pull any of it back; and that was one of the really interesting things about working on this project; no-one in the process ever said pull it back, so we went as far as we could.
The BBFC certified it as an 18 straight away, which I was happy about; because you don’t want to make a horror film that’s a 15, because then you’ve not really succeeded have you? So I was relieved it came in as an 18.
Q. What’s been you’re favourite reaction from people that have seen the film?
MyAnna: This Face *does shocked face impression that looks oddly like a Home Alone cover*.
Neil: My agent and a friend of mine saw it together, and as they came out my friend said to her “are you ok?” and she just burst into tears.
MyAnna: We do sound really dark don’t we?
Ben: Well someone was ambulanced out of the first screening.
“Anyone who doesn’t like my films is an idiot.” – Ben Wheatley.
Q. Is the darkness going to continue, or is there a fluffy rom-com script hiding back there?
Ben: There is, I don’t know how fluffy it’ll be, but we are doing two comedies in a row next. My background is in comedies anyway, and it’s just because the crime genre, and horror genre, lend themselves to being dark; so that’s why these have gone this way; but I don’t think I’ll ever do a 3D dance film…
MyAnna: Never say never Ben!
Q. There’s a lot of black humour in Kill List, and you guys obviously like to have a joke with one another, but did you have a lot of freedom with improvisation on set?
MyAnna: Ben has a great system where he lets us work on the script, paraphrase, and then go back to the script; it’s a process that gives you everything, especially when you have actors like Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley [the Spaced actor who plays Kill List’s other male lead] who just go off on the most beautiful phenomenal tangents.
Ben: We ran in and out of the scenes as well, so that when the action was over we just wouldn’t call cut sometimes, and we found some moments in that extra time would work really well. And because we established quite early on that we were going to jump cut, we could always just take the best bits, and push them back together again. It’s one of those things that expands out with improvisation, but by the time you come back to the editing room it’s cut right back down and you’re just left with the little choice nuggets of it that work; it then has the sheen of feeling like its made up on the spot, but a lot of it isn’t.
Neil: and what comes form improv isn’t necessarily that it gets used in the film, it’s that you can then do more between the characters thats unspoken because you’ve had those conversations as the characters; in life you have a partner, or close relation, or friend, and theres often little that you have to say in certain situations; and without wanting to sound too poncy about it, the characters can get to know each other through our improvisation, so that even though the dialogue is sparse, a lot more is being said.
Q. Do you think that makes the relationship more plausible?
Neil: Exactly. It just meant a lot of the stuff between me and MyAnna is unspoken; there are little references to the boy, but that’s really there because we did loads of improv with the boy before we started shooting; we’ve got a version of the history that you’d have between two characters, without having to show loads of yabber on screen.
Ben: Exposition that’s up there on screen is often boring as fuck, and you’ll get some people moaning that they don’t know whats going on, but they do really; they just have to catch up. I don’t care anyway, I don’t want the characters having to parrot out a load of stuff explaining the plot of the film, because I think thats wrong headed.
Q. You make films for intelligent, discerning, viewers then?
Ben: Exactly. And people who say they’re bad are idiots!
*Laughs*
Kill List is being released in the UK and Ireland on September 2nd (no US release date has been announced as yet).
