(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
The rapid evolution of technology has given filmmakers more methods than ever to develop, enhance, visualise, and create their latest projects, but Ben Wheatley must be among the few who decided Minecraft was the ideal conduit to streamline the pre-production process.
He’s nothing if not unpredictable, though, with Wheatley having spent his career pinballing from genre to genre and trying his hand at everything from micro-budget independent features to CGI-fuelled shark attack sequels via star-studded crime capers that leave a trail of blood and bullets in their wake.
Did anybody who watched Kill List following its initial release have an inkling that a scant ten years later, the same director would be marshalling a Jason Statham blockbuster where he battles the threat of a gigantic prehistoric beast? Absolutely not, and anyone who’s seen Meg 2: The Trench would be left wishing he hadn’t bothered.
Wheatley’s career has always been about incremental progression, which brought him from the lo-fi crime stylings of Down Terrace to the aforementioned psychological horror Kill List before he moved onto the jet-black comedy of Sightseers, the singular A Field in England and dystopian literary adaptation High-Rise.
In terms of broad appeal and name value, his sixth feature, Free Fire, was his biggest yet. Executive produced by Martin Scorsese, the 1970s-set flick was a pulpy throwback that boasted Academy Award winner Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, Sharlto Copley, and a pre-scandal Armie Hammer among its ensemble. It was largely set in a single location in Brighton, and to ensure he knew his way around the set, Wheatley turned to one of the bestselling video games of all time.
“I built the environment in Minecraft so I could walk around inside it,” he told Movies. “It is about that space, and if you get the space wrong, then you’re screwed. We wrote it first and I had a kind of 3D idea about how it would work, so I built it and had a look inside it. Then we had to look for a space that would fit that, and we found it.”
Thanks to the blueprints he’d cooked up in Minecraft, Wheatley had a fair idea of the dimensions he required to house Free Fire, which ended up being the disused print hall of the local newspaper, The Argus. He needed a “big, clean, empty room” that matched up with his game-honed environment, safe in the knowledge that he had enough space to shoot Free Fire exactly the way he wanted.
Whether or not Scorsese was privy to this information remains unknown, but it would be fascinating to see the legendary director’s reaction had Wheatley informed him that the movie he was backing partly originated in a video game.
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