Ben Wheatley popped by Empire Live today to reintroduce High-Rise on the big screen, talk Free Fire and chat about a few other things besides. The new films are coming thick and fast from the Brit, with his eagerly-awaited new '70s thriller following directly from a stunning, if divisive J.G. Ballard adaptation.
"It's part of an ongoing thing of all the movies being very different from each other," he explained of his follow-up to High-Rise. Judging by the Free Fire footage he introduced, showing his narrow-eyed cast of no-gooders (including Brie Larson, Armie Hammer, Michael Smiley exchanging machine-gun patter with Sharlto Copley's arms dealer, this one is several fathoms from the cerebral, existential tenor of High-Rise.
"I wanted to make something that was very dynamic and action-y, as opposed to 'thoughtful'," he added of a project that first germinated around the time of Sightseers. "I wanted it to be procedural and tacticky."
Asked about picking up producer Jeremy Thomas's High-Rise, a movie that had been a decade and several directors in the putting-together, Wheatley claimed that all the earlier scripts were "the height of a small child" when stacked up. Would he go back and look at them now? "No, I'm done," he laughed.
There were memories of his first feature, too. "Down Terrace was the best experience of my career," he revealed. "There were no expectations and no-one looking over my shoulder. Also, we got a lot of hookey Red Bull from India, and lots of chocolate. We were out of minds half the time."
Wheatley revealed that his next project will involve another tour of his homeland, this time to show off Free Fire. Half-jokingly, he promised to take the movie to any town that asked. "We'll be hitting all the places we didn't hit [with High-Rise]," he revealed of his plans to take the film to Newcastle and down the east coast, "and to all the people who complained on Twitter last time".
Free-Fire closes the BFI London Film Festival on 16 October before opening across the UK on 31 March, 2017. If you're in Newcastle, possibly sooner.