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“I always think my films are incredibly commercial and incredibly straightforward.” - Ben Wheatley, director of High-Rise

The novels of J.G. Ballard have been the source of some of the most diverse and extreme movies of all time. Empire of the Sun was one of Spielberg’s best, a historical epic about the Japanese occupation in WWII. Crash, not the Paul Haggis one, was about people who fetishize automobile accidents.

High-Risefalls closer to Crash than Empire of the Sun. A group of residents in a posh tower apartment complex devolve into savages when the power goes out. Tom Hiddleston leads an ensemble that includes Sienna Miller, Elisabeth Moss, Luke Evans, James Purefoy, Sienna Guillory and Jeremy Irons.

Ben Wheatley directed High-Rise, from an adaptation by his wife and frequent collaborator, Amy Jump. The director has also run an extreme gamut of different genres, from the hitman mystery Kill List, the dark comedy Sightseers and the black and white art movie A Field in England. He will next tackle a remake of the classic The Wages of Fear, about truckers transporting volatile nitroglycerine across dangerous terrain.

You can see High-Rise on VOD and digital platforms beginning April 28. It opens in theaters May 13. When Wheatley was in Los Angeles, we spoke about adapting High-Rise and got into a deep discussion about the state of savagery going unchecked in the world at large.

SuicideGirls: I imagine this comes from the book too, but the big question is: Why don’t they leave? They’re not trapped there.

BenWheatley: Yeah, that’s the question, isn’t it? That’s the question for the audience. It’s because they kind of enjoy it I guess.

SG: I get that some of them benefit from dominating the situation, but certainly the people on the lower floors would have more reason to abandon ship.

BW: Yeah, but then also they’ve got their own project which is kind of moving up the building.

SG: Is the book ambiguous about it too?

BW: Yeah, it’s a given. It’s not explained.

SG: In the movie, you make a point of how close and accessible the parking lot is. Was that important to show that this is a choice they’re making?

BW: Totally, because otherwise, you’re right, they just drift away. It’s the question that you have when you read the book as well, but you start to have this conclusion that it’s offering them something more than their lives or the lives that they’ve tried to escape from the first place to go and move out of this town. They start to revel in the anarchy of it and the release from the structures of society.

SG: Ballard doesn’t shy away from anything in his books. Rape in movies is a conundrum, so how do you portray the act without exploiting it?

BW: That was very specific to us when we were putting it together. I can’t stand seeing graphic rape in cinema and I find that when you see it, it very quickly steps over into being something else. It’s not storytelling anymore. I don’t know if it’s even pornography but it’s something that immediately a certain segment of the audience could turn into something else. In the film we were very specific about not graphically showing it, but it’s a moment in the book so we couldn’t just not do it. I think you can treat it in a way that it doesn’t become gratuitous.

SG: Even if it’s not graphic, you’re right that a rape scene in a movie triggers something beyond the narrative. What do you think that is?

BW: In the film itself, it’s the idea that you’ve gone on a journey with a character that you kind of like and you are behind. Then suddenly they do something that is so abhorrent you can’t follow, and yet you’ve followed them up until that point. So then it puts into contrast everything else that they’ve done. It puts it back on the audience going, “Well, you liked this guy so are you going to defend this action? Because it’s indefensible.” You like Charlotte as well so you feel terrible for what’s happened to her but you feel terrible, almost like it’s a death of the character that you liked. You’re kind of in mourning for that moment. Also the whole narrative is on a pivot over into another part of the story.

SG: There’s obviously an allegory with the rich on top and the poor below, but is there more to it than that?

BW: I guess so. [Laughs] And they’re not that poor either, that’s the thing. It’s not like Metropolis. It’s not the working class, the middle class and the upper class. Wilder works for the BBC. He’s a documentary filmmaker. If that’s what the working class is in the ‘70s then we’re kind of fucked. They’re all aspiring and they’ve all spent money to get away from the poor effectively. The poor are back in the dirty city that they’ve all escaped from. So they’re all a bit trapped in their own hell. It’s not necessarily about the overthrow of the 1% by the great unwashed. It’s more about the scrabbling of degrees of wealth for more wealth.

SG: We do see allegories about the wealthy trying to stay on top and get more wealthy. After all these allegories, how can we really change things?

BW: I don’t know, that’s the difficult one, isn’t it? I’m not a politician so I can’t really say. I think the engagement in general politics is pretty important. It seems that as time goes on, that we’re in a post-political moment where politics has become so bizarre and truth is so far from what anybody’s talking about. In the past, maybe I’m naive about this, there used to be debate between different political sides of the spectrum and facts were used. They were batted backwards and forwards, and if there was a scandal, then people would have to leave power. None of that seems to work anymore. From my perspective from the UK, it all became broken when there was a million people march during the Iraq war. They marched in London and said, “We are against this” and it didn’t do anything, and it was dismissed. A million people is a scandal. If a million people turn up anywhere and say they’re cross about something in a democracy, that’s a disaster. And yet they were able just to [go], “It’s all right. Slow news day.” That is the problem.

SG: It’s almost like the politicians saw how people have protested them or changed things in the past, and developed new strategies to combat that.

BW: It’s true but it almost gives them too much credit for stuff, that they’re clever enough to work out. I think it’s just people are bored by it. I think the general day to day work of politicians is so dreary and people’s lives are so tough that they don’t have time to engage in it. To actually make a difference, you have to actually throw your life at it to do it. No one wants to do that. It’s hard enough just earning enough money to pay for your rent and what not. While that’s happened, the whole financial structure has changed. It’s terrifying when you look at the ‘70s and what the split between the difference in wages were between the top end of the system and the bottom end of the system. The rich people could be rich but they weren’t a million times richer. They were like 80 time richer than the poorest person, but now it’s split between rich and poor which basically kills any kind of idea that you can rise up through hard work. Once that’s gone, there’s a real problem with the social contract.

SG: You would think after the banking and mortgage crisis, people would rebel, maybe even take our money out of their system entirely. Nothing has changed.

BW: Which you think, “What do they have to do?” That line is being pushed and pushed and pushed. What is the scandal? Cameron was saying that he put his cock in a pig’s mouth as part of a ritual thing that he did at Cambridge. That’s not enough for the elite of the country to stand down. That blows my mind. I don’t know what else you have to do.

SG: Is that part of desensitization, that we’re not even shocked there’s a scandal of that magnitude? Do we have to be shocked to do something about it?

BW: I guess so but the thing I’ve been thinking about recently is about conspiracy theories. Around the time of The X-Files, it was a TV show that was all about crazy conspiracies. That was quite endearing and you’d watch it and go, “Oh well, it’s great, interesting drama.” Now the conspiracy’s come home to roost and there are literal conspiracies in front of us. There’s real ones and there’s absolutely incredible bogus ones. There’s lots of them and you can’t tell the difference between the real ones and the fake ones. It’s almost like a plan where if you put out enough of these nutsy stories, that no one will actually believe it when it’s come true. It’s also when you look back into the past and look at the scandals that brought people down. If you look at Watergate and what that scandal was, and look at it proportionately to the scandals that are happening now, it seems really quite naive and small scale. I think people are tired. After the financial collapse, life is hard enough without having to fight against the system.

SG: That is interesting. Technology has given us access to so many more theories, you’d think that would expose more but maybe it just makes it harder to sift through them.

BW: Yeah, because the noise ratio becomes larger and larger. That’s what I’m saying, like a post-political world where as long as you say something with enough heft, everything is true. So every viewpoint is real and you see it online with everyone just screaming at each other about every point. They’re not all right. Some of them are wrong but it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s just about volume.

SG: You’re right about sheer exhaustion too. I feel it.

BW: It takes a lot to do the research to dig into these stories. Even when you start, it’s a rabbit hole you’re never going to come out the other end of. You have to almost be unreasonable at some point, don’t you, and go, “This is what I believe.” Even when everything is contradictory to that point from both sides of the argument.