SYNOPSIS: As the world searches for a cure to a disastrous virus, a scientist and park scout venture deep in the forest for a routine equipment run. Through the night, their journey becomes a terrifying voyage through the heart of darkness, the forest coming to life around them.
WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY Ben Wheatley STARRING
Joel Fry
Ellora Torchia
Hayley Squires
Reece Shearsmith
John Hollingworth
Mark Monero
Running Time: 107 Minutes
Ben Wheatley Director’s Interview
IN THE EARTH follows a scientist and a park scout into the forest as a disastrous virus grips the planet… without sounding naive, what inspired this story?
I wanted to make a film that was contextualized in the moment. Movies I was seeing that had been made but released during the pandemic felt very old-fashioned. No one is talking about what has just happened… Covid is going to mark a generation. It felt like making a film in 1946 and not referencing the fact that everyone had just gone through the second world war.
In that retrospect, I wanted to make something that would be immediate. To talk about this moment. I wanted to make something about the experience I was having right now. And I think that is what horror cinema should be. It takes the moment that we are living in and puts it into a genre.
At what stage of the pandemic did you decide this film needed to be made?
I started writing the screenplay about two weeks into the UK lockdown. It was around March, so right at the start. It’s been a weird experience making the movie because it projects into the future, but the future keeps catching up to the film. It’s not the first time that I’ve made a movie that had a really fast turn around and I find that quite interesting that you can almost go into that Sam Fuller space, where you’re ripping movies from the headlines and you’re making stuff that does feel like reportage… It’s kind of the antidote to the fact that Disney is already planning films for the next 10 years and announcing them. When they do that it can feel like nothing new is ever going to happen.
Given the setting of the film and the need to adhere to new safety precautions, was there any advantage to having a limited crew cast? Do you think it aided the process in any way?
A lot of the films I’ve made have always been pragmatic, and you look at what you have got, and you make the film with the things you have available to you. And certainly, this film was just like that.
You had to be outside because that was the safest environment for everyone to work. So, it was written to be outside.
That wasn’t a coincidence! And our budget was modest enough that if we were in a situation where, if one person got sick with covid, that would be the end of the movie. We would be finished. So, we were very careful, everything was very carefully thought out and planned.
How long was the shoot?
The shoot was for 15 days. One of the things I did before making this film was looking at the production schedule of HALLOWEEN (1978). I think that was 20 days… With inflation, the budget wasn’t much different either.
The genre dictates itself by budget, The movies they were making then are not much money and did not take much time.
Having more and more money, and more and more time doesn’t necessarily make things better and better. I think genre cinema should be shot fast with a lean crew and solving problems on the fly, really having to use your imagination… and that becomes a strength to the filmmaking process.
You yourself are an artist – do you create storyboards for your films? Are your scripts very descriptive?
No, the scripts I write are not very descriptive. They are more like haikus… There’s hardly anything in there but if you’re making and shooting your stuff with people around you that know what you’re doing and are on your side, then you can write thin scripts in that respect.
I do storyboard a lot, but not for this film because storyboarding goes hand in hand with how much you can control the environment you’re shooting in.
So, if you draw something and go ‘I want this room to be this shape to make this shot work’ that’s brilliant, but if you can’t control that room, then you can’t achieve the drawing and then you’re thinking about two things at once rather than being in the current space and time, trying to actually make it work.
Was there a rehearsal process? Is there any improvising on the set?
There is some improvising when it comes to practical effects and working out the choreography of the actor and what needs to be done in the scene.
The film is shot in the forest with very few people but a lot of life. Many of the film’s pivotal moments are seen in close up and in wide-angle shots – how did you and cinematographer Nick Gillespie build this distinct visual language?
With films like Down Terrace (2010), Sightseers (2012), and Kill List (2011), the one’s before larger budgets, the plan is usually that the DOP and Director and actors are performing a dance within the space.
So you’re trying to make space for the actors to perform and for you to see how the script is working.
As a director, it’s a discussion between me and Nick about what I want to see but there aren’t tons of details in it.
I’ll watch on the monitors and if something is wrong or something is being overly done, I’ll tell him ‘don’t do that’. Because I come from an editing background, I watch the footage and see and cut it in my head so I know what’s going on and what I need and I don’t need. It’s more like a harvesting kind of process, where you go ‘that performance is very high’ or ‘that’s very low’ and you make little adjustment until you get to the right position.
You’ve edited most of your own films, with an emphasis on your finales. What was your approach to this ending? How did it differ from previous films?
For me editing during the shoot is a confidence thing. You can look at what you’ve done and know it’s working so you don’t have to have sleepless nights as you’re making it.
As much as it’s important for the actors to be relaxed, it’s important that the director is relaxed as well. Otherwise, you start double guessing yourself or become put off.
And this way I became more confident as I shoot it. I was like ‘This is going to work’ and ‘these performances are right’ and ‘I like these people’. That;s one of the things that came out of it. I really started enjoying Joel’s performance and Elora’s performance in the first half and I felt ‘alright I like these people’ and that’s really important in order to make the movie work.
One of the things we had that was very useful is Clint Mansell’s score. Because of the lockdown and talking early on and he had seen the script early on, he started writing. As we turned up in the location, this massive email turned up with all the music on it for the whole movie. So, every night, I’d be able to put bits of music into the film and it really helped me understand what the film would be.
Can you talk about the soundscape of the film? We come to learn that the forest has a voice of its own… How did you and sound mixer Rob Entwistle develop this unique dialect?
At the beginning of the process, it was thinking about the film as a medium of light and sound and is there a way of writing something where light and sound are a feature of it.
Also, bringing forward the lighting like strobe lights and music into the movie so they were actually legitimately there. It’s something that was written into the actual fabric of the movie so I could have those sequences.
The fact that the “Dr. Wendle” character is actually playing music for half the movie and that kind of released Clint so that he can know his music is going to be at the forefront. Not like the score is going to be an underscore, underneath a load of dialogue just to make things tenser, it’s actually going to be its own character. At the front. Leading the film.
Rob Entwistle and Martin [Pavey, sound designer] had quite a lot of conversations about how we wanted it to work. There’s a certain amount of experimentation where all the sound design and even the full score was played back in the woods and then re-recorded off the trees.
Then there was the imagery, which was shot through tanks of water with fruit dye and projections… That kind of formal experimentation is allowed within the structure of the script itself and I wanted to have that right from the beginning.
Lighting, production design, composition, sound mixing – what was practical? What was included in the post?
The speakers were all real so the music and the sounds played into the woods on camera. There was not much ADR so most of the sound in the film is from the day it was recorded, right there and then.
This was surprising because a lot of the environment was very loud… The ground was crunchy and crackly but that’s been one of the things that have been quite important in the world of Martin Pavey.
On all the films I’ve mixed with him, there has been barely any dialogue replacing and he can fix anything. It’s dangerous. We had a thing on HIGH RISE (2015) where there was a scrapyard near one of the locations and some was backing up a truck. They made that high-pitched beeping noise which is designed to be a frequency of dialogue and it was all over the rushes and he got rid of that. So after that, it was very dangerous for him because I knew he could probably fix most problems with sound.
In terms of CG effects, there are bits and bobs of augmentation Mainly due to having to move quickly, but there is a lot of practical effects as well.
And with practical prosthetic effects, I was thinking just how far can you take the audience? How far can you push them and confound them with comedy and horror at the same time? They are not gags, but “should I be laughing” is more of the question…
It’s part of the anxiety of the design of those things. I just wanted those moments where the characters think about what is happening to them – you see in Jackie Chan movies sometimes, when they hurt each other and then they stop and recover and then they start fighting again…and you think “they are hurt really bad!”
At the end Zach, going from being a villain and a threat to being really vulnerable really quick. This is also what happens when you hurt yourself, your gravity changes and you become a child. It’s part of the humanness in storytelling… to put you in a situation of understanding where there is humor in these things and you can laugh, but you’re also afraid of it.