UK filmmaker Ben Wheatley has two new features receiving their world premieres in Midnight Madness sections within weeks of each other.
“Unless you’re Steven Soderbergh,” the director jokes when asked if it’s unusual to be launching two movies at once.
In early September, Toronto International Film Festival audiences will see Normal starring Bob Odenkirk. This was cast and financed in the traditional way, and is handled in the market by WME International. It’s scripted by Derek Kolstad, best known for his work on the John Wick franchise, and is a hardboiled action thriller about a substitute sheriff in a small town who discovers dark secrets about the community following a bank robbery.
Normal has been licensed to multiple territories including Amazon MGM in several territories, Sky Studios in the UK and Metropolitan Filmexport in France.
Ahead of the TIFF premiere for Normal, Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) hosts the world premiere of a Wheatley movie in a very different register – the black-and-white sci-fi adventure Bulk, narrated by Bill Nighy and starring Sam Riley, Alexandra Maria Lara, Noah Taylor and Mark Moreno.
Produced through Rook Films and executive produced by Ollie Madden and David Kimbangi for Film4, the film is yet to even start its international sales journey. Hatched almost entirely in secret, Wheatley made it on the sly after completing his Channel 4 comedy-horror TV series Generation Z.
“When you do endless press releases about stuff, I think you slightly damage the specialness of the event,” Wheatley explains of the decision to keep Bulk under wraps. “Talking about things all the time and teasing them makes sense in some ways, but in other ways it burns out the movie even before it comes out.”
Home made
Two years ago, Wheatley was working with a reported budget of around $140m on Warner Bros’ giant-shark sequel Meg 2: The Trench. Bulk was made for a tiny fraction of that.
The writer-director refuses to divulge the budget but the credits, which he handwrote himself, reveal the film was shot on Sony camcorders, iPhones, Go Pros and SVHS, the sound was synched in post, and the helicopters and planes that feature in the inventive action sequences were built from old model kits Wheatley purchased on EBay.
Shot in 4:3 (aka Academy ratio), partly on MetFilm’s Brighton campus, this is a proudly homemade movie, albeit with a little help from AI and with the VHS camcorder footage “up-rezed” to 4K, as the director describes how the rough analogue material he shot was spruced up and digitised.
It’s a Quatermass-style yarn about Corey Harlan (Riley), a prize-winning freelance journalist with PTSD who is kidnapped and taken to a strange suburban house. His captors are Aclima (Riley’s real-life partner Maria Lara) and Sessler (Taylor).
They need his help rescuing “oligarch tech guy” Anton Chambers (Moreno) who disappeared in an explosion after his latest project, the “brain collider”, went wrong. He travels “interdimensionally” through time and space, often accompanied by Aclima and encountering strange characters en route, most of them played by Taylor.
The movie reflects its director’s obsession with the magic of visual effects from early cinema pioneer Georges Méliès to the stop-motion creatures created by Ray Harryhausen.
“I’ve been interested for a long time in the history of effects, 2D effects, in camera, back projection, model works, the Schüfftan process and all these things,” says Wheatley.
Cognisant that it would be “a hard sell” to secure a meaningful budget for a project this offbeat, he simply decided to start work in his kitchen and see what happened.
The idea is that Bulk will be discovered on the festival circuit. Shortly after its Edinburgh debut, the film will screen as part of the Bradford 2025 “City of Culture” celebrations. Wheatley will then take it to as many festivals in Europe and the UK as he can.
“That is part of this conversation about how you distribute ‘art’ movies or films that are not mainstream. I feel you need to gently birth them rather than just throw them out onto 100 screens and then go straight to streaming within a week. This is going to be done in a much more old-school roadshow way.
“We always felt we need to build an audience first and then see what happens with the sales,” the director adds of a film which is screening in Edinburgh without its distribution plans in place.
It helps that his producer and partner in Rook Films, Andy Starke, also runs Mondo Macabro, the home video label that specialises in releases of cult titles like Perversion Story and Sins Of The Flesh.
“He is involved in the booking and putting out of movies anyway. We might just put it out ourselves. That might be the best bet,” Wheatley reflects, although it’s not clear what kind of UK theatrical exposure the film might receive beyond the festival circuit.
Whatever the case, he expects Bulk will turn up on Film4 at some stage next year.
The prolific writer-director is now planning another equally offbeat sci-fi movie which will use the technology available to George Lucas when he was making his original Star Wars feature in the mid-1970s. “I think that could be interesting – now all the equipment they used for it is very cheap. You can buy it on Amazon.”
He is currently shooting an episode of The Terminal List with actor Chris Pratt for Amazon, while Rook Films has a neo-noir film in the vein of his 2016 comedy thriller Free Fire titled Criminal Behaviour which Wheatley hopes to shoot in Spain next year.
Meanwhile, the intrepid director will be in Edinburgh to unpack Bulk for EIFF audiences. “It’s a love letter to film and creativity but also to technology and allusion,” he concludes of surely the most idiosyncratic project yet in his already highly idiosyncratic career.