IBC
Ben Wheatley’s experimental low budget ‘midnight movie’ was shot on a mix of formats, features DIY effects and used back projection techniques to evoke classic cinema, explains DoP Nick Gillespie.
After adapting psychological thriller Rebecca for
Netflix (2020) and steering the $130 million budget of CGI fish fest Meg 2:
The Trench into a $400m worldwide gross, cult director Ben Wheatley goes
back to his roots with a lo-fi experimental feature.
Bulk wears its DIY aesthetic and scattergun cinematic
references on its sleeve. You can see everything from Thunderbirds to Eraserhead
in a cold war conspiracy plot that mixes timelines and genres with rudimentary
special effects and a cutting style reminiscent of late night mid-eighties
youth TV.
“Don’t question the story out loud, it only undermines it,” says
a character at one point in a nod to the audience.
“Ben wanted to explore what can be achieved without the
restraints, if you like, of a massive budget,” says DP Nick Gillespie of
Wheatley. “He wanted something that was very rough around the edges. It didn’t
have to be perfect cinematically.”
Gillespie has worked on all Wheatley’s projects since Kill
List (The Meg 2 excepted), often for Laurie Rose BSC, gravitating
from assistant to focus puller and operator and then as cinematographer
beginning with the pandemic shot and themed tale In The Earth (2021).
They were finishing production on zombie comedy show Generation
Z for Channel 4 in Cardiff when the director began talking about the
microbudget project.
“On Gen Z we were shooting scale models of military
helicopters and he talked about wanting to do something using older techniques,
that was very stripped back and mostly taking place with actors talking in
rooms,” Gillespie reports. “We would shoot it with phones, handycams and DSLRs
rather than Alexas and use a lot of rear projection.”
Wheatley initiated the creative exchange by sending over stark
black and white images and low-resolution videos of buildings. “The shots were
reminiscent of High-Rise but in the window of some of the buildings was
a tiny person. They were moving but the building wasn't. He had added some kind
of effect and when I looked more closely I realised the building was a
cardboard cutout.”
Wheately had built dioramas in his kitchen explaining to
Gillespie that he was interested in exploring earlier forms of virtual
production, of the type employed by Powell and Pressburger on Black
Narcissus, which used projected backdrops.
In response, Gillespie decided to go back through his
catalogue of old location pictures to see if he could find the type of
off-kilter visuals he thought Wheatley was after. He also photographed fresh
images of buildings around London on various commutes, including parts of the
Underground. “The aim was to create this world that doesn't really exist but is
something that could be familiar,” Gillespie says.
Wheatley’s script was as “densely written as a science
fiction story and massively entertaining,” he says. It included a jungle scene,
a desert scene, and another featuring an ocean with desert surroundings. Yet
they had no budget for travel. “With any other director who came up with these
ideas I might have thought ‘that's not going to work’, but I believed in his
vision of it all.”
Gillespie dug out footage of a music video he’d once shot in Spain. He even
included shots of palm trees, a mountain and the sea culled from his own family
holiday videos and cut them together for Wheatley into a reel.
“When I saw the first cut [of the finished film] I realised
that he had used clips from my family holiday! It's just a personal
photographic memory that I never imagined anyone would see – let alone be
professionally graded by Rob Pizzey at Goldcrest.”
With typical perversity Wheatley had shot 2013 English Civil
War drama A Field in England in black and white and Gillespie, who
assisted Rose on that film, says the director always wanted to do another story
in monochrome.
“He talked about having flavours of colour in it. When we
were shooting Bulk he voiced ideas about how colour would be used to
illustrate a version of reality.”
Rather than go on conventional recces, Wheatley, producer
Andy Starke and Gillespie drove around various locations near where they lived
photographing vistas and skylines for material to use in the projections.
“We did some tests based on Ben's original cardboard cutout
models but then production designer Matty Mancey-Jones and her team built these
broken cityscapes of high-rise towers on larger table-tennis sized tables that
I could put lights through and project video behind. In the foreground [of the
models] you’ve got all this wasteland, representing the aftermath of a terrible
nuclear event. We photographed that and that footage and then, later, we
projected that with the actors in the foreground. Then that footage was
ingested and once again projected shoot additional elements in front to give the
image depth.”
Gillespie credits DIT Ed Mills and Pizzey for carrying the
grade consistently through this process. Pizzey created LUTs for all of the
different camera formats.
“We had to get the grade right throughout it all. For
instance, if the sky was overexposed in the first plate it was going to be
really bad by the time we got to shoot the final plate.”
By mixing and matching different recording formats, even
setting them up to cross shoot at points, they created an uneven texture.
Material was shot on iPhone 16 and a Sony FX3 with Cooke SP3 50mm and 100mm
primes with additional use of a 12mm for scenes in the house. Several GoPros were
used for gathering tracking footage fixed to Starke’s car driving around
various locations. Gillespie also had a Samsung VP-L300 8mm camcorder from the
late '90s.
“We'd used iPhone on In the Earth and knew that it
had a specific look to it, but Ben also knew - and I understood - that the film
we were making had a fragmented feel. There’s something about miniDV footage that
for me has a liminal kind of nostalgia.”
The VHS footage was recorded onto microSD cards via a ClearClick
HD recorder which Gillespie bought on Amazon for less than £200. This footage
was then uprezzed to approximate 4K using AI.
“One of the beautiful things about those old DV cameras is the jagged edges and
the problems that they create with exposure. These issues are all blown up by
the uprez and the AI then fills in a few gaps but it also makes it looks like
something's not quite right. It doesn't quite look like miniDV anymore. It's
its own thing. Ben was experimenting
with trying to find a visual that was new and different.”
Actors including Sam Riley, Alexandra Maria Lara and Noah
Taylor were hired for two weeks. The first week they shot in a house in
Brighton with one day of exteriors near Newhaven. The second week was shot at
Brighton’s MetFilm school and included use of the facility’s standing sets of a
police station and canteen.
“A touchstone for us were the movies like The Land That
Time Forgot and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad featuring
special effects by Ray Harryhausen. Ben wanted Bulk to look reminiscent
of those older studio films which used practical effects and were by no means
perfect in any way.
“James Cameron’s Aliens is another favourite. There
are a lot of models and projections used in that era of film and it still
stands up. We wanted to keep those rough imperfections which modern technology
has kinda erased.”
Working on up
Gillespie is also a regular collaborator with Shane Meadows
including on The Virtues. He has just shot the feature Chork for
Meadows about child runaways from a script by Jack Thorne.
“I grew up in a working class background wanting to be
Indiana Jones as a kid,” says Gillespie. His mother was a teaching assistant,
his father a mechanic. “I knew about the big films of Steven Spielberg
and George Lucas but I didn't really see that as a reality [for a career].”
That changed when, aged 12, he found the family camcorder.
“The whole process of putting a tape in the camera, recording it, pressing play
and watching it back, was the most fun I’d had.”
With a growing appreciation of how photographs and music
could work together he took a TV production course at Salford University and
began making short films. He gained further experience at local television
station Channel M, earned £30 for shooting his first corporate video and began
on the bottom rung of production as camera assistant on shows like BBC comedy Ideal,
starring Johnny Vegas, which is when he first met Wheatley.
A year later he got a call out of the blue from Starke
asking him if was free to assist on a film about to be shot in Sheffield. This
was Kill List.
“At the time I was struggling to get any kind of work. I
remember they were filming a big Marvel film in Manchester (Captain America:
The First Avenger). I tried to get onto it. No one cared. And then I just
got this call from Andy and I’ve not looked back.”
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