Tuesday, 30 September 2025

BTS: Bulk

 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.

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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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