When Ben Wheatley got the call asking him to make a film starring Jason Statham and a giant shark (Meg 2: The Trench) he thought: ‘Why not?’
Wheatley, our 2025 Guest of Honour and the recipient of the festival’s Career Achievement Award, spoke with moderator Hedwig van Driel yesterday evening. It was a packed house. They discussed his films and his outspoken views on making them, occasionally interspersed with clips from his oeuvre.
The Brit isn’t bothered by labels and doesn’t think in genres, although he prefers to call his breakthrough film Kill List a ‘horrible’ film rather than a horror film. Why? Because the film didn’t meet expectations. Legend has it that one audience member yelled ‘Fuck Kill List!’ loudly afterwards. Wheatley does exactly what he likes, and that’s writing and directing films. Even on a shoestring budget, as was the case with the trippy folk horror A Field in England (screening 3 November at the Filmhallen) and his latest, experimental mindfuck movie Bulk (4 November at LAB111).
Meg 2 wasn’t Wheatley’s first big budget film, by the way. His version of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca thoroughly deviates from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1940 film adaptation. Not a gothic love story like Hitchcock’s, but a film about ‘murderous rich people.’
Wheatley: ‘All my films are director’s cuts.’
The director also let us know how he feels about common Hollywood screenwriting models such as the three-act structure. ‘If I see a how-to book like that, I always look up the writer on IMDb. Usually, what they’ve actually made is quite disappointing.’
Wheatley’s answer to the question of whether he would ever re-edit one of his films was also very clear: ‘All my films are director’s cuts.’ We wouldn’t have expected anything else, although he’s willing to make an exception: he owns all versions of his favourite film, Blade Runner.
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Ready for more Ben Wheatley? Say no more. Today at 12:15 at de Filmhallen, he’ll be giving an introduction to one of his other favourite films: Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989). And on Monday 3 November, he’ll be back for a second career conversation, this time under the auspices of VERS, the association for new film, TV, and XR creators.
