FIELD SCREAMS
Teddy Jamieson talks to Ben Wheatley about his new film, A Field In England – a gloriously mad movie that delivers a full-frontal assault on the senses
IT’S possible, I tell Ben Wheatley, that there’s only one question I need to ask him about his new film, A Field In England. That question is – and I’m being polite here you understand (I may have used another word at the time) – what the hell was that? “I don’t know what the best answer to that is,” he says, laughing, as he climbs the stairs in his home in Brighton. Frankly, I’m not surprised. Wheatley may have already unsettled you with his three previous films – the properly nasty Down Terrace; the haunting, horrible Kill List; his Mike Leigh-meets-Psycho comedy Sightseers – but A Field In England outdoes all of them in its wild, weird what-the-hellness.
It’s a mad movie. Gloriously so, a mash-up of 17th-century politics and psychedelia filmed in black and white in one field with a handful of actors, a tiny budget and a magic mushroom sensibility, culminating in a full frontal assault on the senses as the editing goes well and truly … well, mental (I think that’s the technical term).
And the rest of the film hardly holds back from delivering weirdness. There’s the scene where the sun turns black. There’s the bit with the pox-ridden penis. And then there’s the sequence where Reece Sixsmith can be heard screaming for ages inside a tent before emerging with the most malign grin slapped across his face as if he’s just walked off an Aphex Twin video. “No, it’s not that,” Wheatley corrects me. “To me, it’s Lon Chaney in The Phantom Of The Opera. I think that’s Reece’s in-depth knowledge of horror coming through there.”
What happens in the tent? “Something heinous,” Wheatley says. “The tent’s Room 101. What you imagine elicited those screams may be more terrifying to you than if I told you what it was.”
What you will see is an old midnight movie mixture of gamey content and cinematic pyrotechnics, courtesy of Wheatley’s vision and Amy Jump’s script. The kind of thing you might have seen late at night on Channel 4 back in the early days (before it became obsessed with Big Brother and big ratings). Storywise, all you need to know about the story is that a group of deserters (including Sixsmith) are taking shelter in a field during a battle in the English Civil War when they are captured by an alchemist, played by Michael Smiley, and told to do his bidding. It doesn’t end well for any of them.
WHEATLEY has been f a s c i nated by the period for s o me t i me. “I t ’s t he beginning of science,” he says. “It’s when magic turns to science and they kill the king, which is effectively killing God as far as they’re concerned.”
A time when, in short, the world was turned upside down. Wheatley is doing something similar to film, you could argue. Still, it’s tempting to see reflections of other, older movies, most notably Michael Reeves’s old weird Britain classic
IFyou’re going to makeacomedydrama about elderly gangsters – this could have been called Oldfellas – then Al Pacino and Christopher Walken would be on any shortlist for the cast. Not only do they bring all that iconic heft, but the fact that each of them still seems viable with a gun in his hand speaks volumes about their calibre.
Stand Up Guys may not be the edgiest subject of the week, or the hippest. But with Pacino and Walken together for the first time, joined by Alan Arkin – never much of a hood, but a grumpy old man par excellence – this feels like the one that shouldn’t be passed up. Witchfinder General in it. Actually, Wheatley would rather cite Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s 1975 film Winstanley and Peter Watkins’s film about the battle of Culloden, which basically invented the mock documentary form, as more obvious influences.
Still, Witchfinder General is interesting, he says, but its main influence might have been visual. It made him think that the Civil War era allows you to make the English cowboy movie, “which makes sense because those people would have gone off and gone to America and became cowboys eventually”.
But if so, this is a magic-realist western, full of death and rebirth and manic grinning and a climax that sees the editing process pushed to the maximum. “It’s more like art than normal editing,” admits Wheatley of the sequence. “It was 20 minutes long at one point and I boiled it down and boiled it down and it’s trying to find that moment when it’s a peak point for your brain, when you’re thinking ‘I don’t think I can take any more of this’, and then it stops. We were very nervous about it and we tested it in cinemas at different frame rates just to make sure it wasn’t going to make us sick.”
What it’s not then is a harbinger to a new age of Aquarius. If Kill List and Down Terrace were about this country’s incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq then this one is about the desperate state of the country we live in. “If you’re going to look for a metaphor under it, well, the country is in absolute f***ing chaos and if only there were some people
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