Bubble & trouble
Ben Wheatley on finding creativity in the time of Covid by returning to the horror genre…
The first couple of weeks of lockdown I just didn’t know what was going on – like a lot of people, just completely freaking out. I thought I was going to watch a lot of stuff... I was going, “Oh, this is the perfect excuse, I can’t do anything but watch movies!” but I didn’t want to watch anything, I was just miserable. I felt like it wasn’t a time to be entertained. So I thought I’d write something. I started writing and then I talked to Andy Stark, the producer I work with at Rook Films. And we thought maybe there’s a way we could do this, where just as we come out of lockdown there’s a grey area, where everyone [cast and crew] will be like, “Oh, we’re free, haven’t worked for months.” Maybe we’d be able to scoop everybody up and do something before everyone’s jobs started again.
So that was our plan, and we made this film... and it was just amazing to get out. We managed to do it just at the bottom of the horseshoe [when Covid-19 cases decreased after the UK lockdown and before they climbed again]. We were in the Covid bubble, and we had to hire a whole hotel they opened up for us, which had been closed down because of Covid. Everyone was so excited to be out, working, and it felt like we were human beings again for a bit.
What the film actually is, I’m keeping under wraps, because you can only ever say that once. And we’re probably better to say what it is closer to when it comes out. But it’s a return to a down-and-dirty horror film. It’s informed by Covid to a degree, in that Covid itself, or lockdown, is something that’s such a massive moment. It’s a bit like coming back from the other side of the Second World War or something like that, in that everything changes after it. But it felt to me that a lot of stuff that I was watching [during the pandemic] made little or no sense. Also, the pandemic is just such a massive genre-crusher as well – and no one should shed a tear for this – because it wipes whole cinematic genres off the slate, because they just don’t make any sense any more, because we’ve lived through it.
So the script itself is not about Covid, but it incorporates it... Who knows, maybe the thing we’ve made won’t even make any sense by the time it releases, when we’re all riding around on motorbikes in Mohicans fighting over tins of beans in six months’ time!
REBECCA IS STREAMING NOW ON NETFLIX.