News / Sightseers to Premiere at Cannes 2012's in Directors' Fortnight Special Screening

News / Sightseers to Premiere at Cannes 2012 in Directors’ Fortnight Special Screening

News / Sightseers to Premiere at Cannes 2012 in Directors’ Fortnight Special Screening
News / Empire Online has the first still from Sightseers

News / Empire Online has the first still from Sightseers

News / Empire Online has the first still from Sightseers
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Interview / TimeOut’s Tom Huddleston meets the British director of Cannes contender ‘Sightseers’

May 16, 2012

in Articles & Reviews

Ben Wheatley, 40, is a British writer-director who combines genre thrills with arthouse boldness. While his earlier films ‘Down Terrace’ (2009) and ‘Kill List’ (2011) impressed audiences at the Rotterdam and Toronto film festivals, the appearance of his new film ‘Sightseers’ in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes marks Wheatley’s first visit to the Croisette.

How did you feel when you found out you’d been selected for Cannes?

‘Really happy, as you can imagine. I’ve been going to Cannes for years and never thought I’d show a film there. It seemed so unobtainable. So we were just blown away. It’s been a dramatic process. With other festivals, it was always casual – we’d send the movie off, find out a few weeks later we were invited, and we’d go, “Oh, great!”. But this went on for weeks. “When are we going to hear?” “What’s going on?” We found out at the last minute, after they’d announced everything else. It was quite a ride.

[Continue reading at TimeOut.com]

(Via TimeOut.com)

News / Sightseers to Premiere at Cannes 2012 in Directors’ Fortnight Special Screening

April 24, 2012

in Featured, News

Directors’ Fortnight features Ben Wheatley, Michel Gondry, Jaime Rosales and Anurag Kashyap

Michel Gondry will open Directors’ Fortnight this year with The We And The I, his New York-shot film about a group of high-school children who travel into the future. The selection will close with Noémie Lvovsky’s Camille Rewinds (Camille Redouble), about a 40-year-old mother, recently abandoned by her partner, who travels back in time to her teenage years when they first met.

The non-competitive and independent-minded sidebar, founded in 1969 in the wake of the student protests of 1968, will showcase 21 features and 10 shorts in total. This year marks the first Directors’ Fortnight with Edouard Waintrop at the helm. A former critic at Libération and director of Switzerland’s International Film Festival of Fribourg, Waintrop was appointed artistic director last summer after the controversial exit of Frédéric Boyer.

British director Ben Wheatley’s dark comedy Sightseers – about a couple who go on a killing spree while on a caravan holiday — will be given a Special Screening, as will The Night In Front (La Noche de Efrente), the final film shot by Raul Ruiz in his native Chile shortly before this death last August.

There are six first films in the line-up including US filmmaker Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237, examining the theories revolving around the meaning of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year.

Via Screen International (http://tinyurl.com/c76svx6)

For further coverage please visit:

Variety.com / Directors’ Fortnight unveils diverse lineup (http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118053030)

HollywoodReporter.com / Cannes 2012: Michel Gondry’s ‘The We & The I’ to Open Director’s Fortnight (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/michel-gondry-cannes-film-festival-directors-fortnight-314985)

The Killing Fields / A Sightseers feature in Screen International with Ben Wheatley, Steve Oram & Alice Lowe

April 3, 2012

in Articles & Reviews

Originally posted on 3rd April, 2012 at ScreenDaily.com | By Ian Sandwell

Ben Wheatley follows the acclaimed Kill List with a ‘lighter’ story about serial killers on a caravan holiday. Ian Sandwell visited the set of Sightseers.

How do you follow a film like Kill List, the low-budget hit that was one of the best reviewed UK films in recent memory? If you are Ben Wheatley, you try not to think about it.

“There was a bit of pressure after [debut feature] Down Terrace. I thought that would be the high-water mark and then we’d get slaughtered on the second film. Then we didn’t expect anything from Kill List at all. We thought, ‘Well this could go either way, people could really like it or they could just hate it.’

“You just have to push it right to the edge and make the best film you can that you’re doing at the moment. But if you start thinking in terms of what critics think, you’re fucked basically.”

Wheatley uses that mindset to approach his third feature Sightseers — in keeping with his previous films, it defies categorisation. There are eye-catching stills of a chicken sacrifice and a blood-spattered wheel, but then there is also a snap of an adorable dog who could give Uggie a run for his money. [Continue Reading]

[Via Screen Daily]

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News / Empire Online has the first still from Sightseers

January 24, 2012

in Featured, News

Sightseers First Still

The latest issue of Empire, as you might expect, is jampacked with all kinds of exclusive movie goodness, from The Avengers to American Pie: The Reunion to The Hunger Games.

But one of the things we’re most excited about doesn’t have a budget in the trillions, or capes, or a Hollywood background. Instead, it’s homegrown, low-key and very, very British. It is, of course, the first still from Sightseers, Ben Wheatley’s eagerly-awaited follow-up to Kill List.

Moody and evocative, it gives us our first glimpse of stars/co-writers Alice Lowe and Steve Oram as Tina and Chris, a caravanning couple who get mixed up in murder and mayhem (and more murder) as they embark on their first holiday together. There will be kills, and there may even be a list of some kind, but Wheatley insists that this is lighter fare than his last two outings, Down Terrace and the film that birthed the Kill List Stare. [Continue Reading]

(Via Empire Online)

Article / Ben Wheatley talks Freakshift – Hill Street Blues meets Doom, anyone?

January 19, 2012

in Articles & Reviews

When we heard Total Film favourite Ben Wheatley was in the early stages of prepping a film called Freakshift, describing it as “Hill Street Blues with monsters,” we simply had to pay him a visit to get more information.

So, after helping Ben out on a test footage shoot, we asked him to expand on that Hill Street Blues comparison…

“It’s got that interplay and banter and emotional stuff that’s done so brilliantly in Hill Street Blues. And it involves the teams of people and the professionalism and all those things that are great about cop shows, but with monsters and lots of genre-action.” [Continue Reading]

(Via Total Film)

Interview / Dialogue: ‘Kill List’ Director Ben Wheatley Talks Hammers, Sound Design and the Shark You Didn’t Even Know Was in the Movie

January 10, 2012

in Articles & Reviews

One of the movies people simply would not stop talking about at SXSW was Ben Wheatley’s British hitman movie, Kill List. Time and time again I found myself standing in line making idle chat and hearing that The Innkeepers was pretty great or that Insidious was creepy or that Attack the Block was a ton of fun, but when people started talking about Kill List, they took on an ominous tone. People wouldn’t even tell me what it’s about, they just demanded that I see it and promised even if I didn’t like the film, I’d still want to talk about it.

Well, they were absolutely right. I not only ended up loving the movie, but I haven’t been able to shake it since. I’ve been patiently waiting for it to come out here in the US so I could see it again, and now, thanks to IFC Films, we all can do just that: Kill List is currently available on most VOD services (check its availability here) and will be getting a limited theatrical release starting February 3rd.

In a perfect world, everyone would see Kill List knowing as little about it as possible. However, that’s not always enough, so if you need more to go on than my assurance it is an impeccably crafted, atypical horror movie. [Continue Reading]

(Via Movies.com)

Article / ‘Kill List’ Director Ben Wheatley Reveals Plot Details For ‘Freak Shift,’ Has Director’s Cut Of ‘Sightseers’ Ready To Show Edgar Wright

January 5, 2012

in Articles & Reviews

EXCLUSIVE: One genre movie that electrified almost all of us at The Playlist last year was “Kill List,” from writer/director Ben Wheatley. A kind of domestic drama/hitman thriller/suburban comedy/horror movie, it wowed us when we first got a gander of it at SXSW, and then tickled even more of us at the Empire Big Screen Festival in its native U.K. Well, it’s finally about to be released in the United States, and while we’ll have more from our interview with Wheatley before “Kill List” hits theaters, we first wanted to offer some updates on various projects the filmmaker has in the works, including the Edgar Wright-produced “Sightseers,” his Nick Frost vehicle “I, Macrobane,” and the very cool-sounding monsters versus cops movie called “Freak Shift.”

About whether or not “Sightseers” — his Edgar Wright-produced dark comedy that he described to us as “a bit like ‘The Honeymoon Killers,’ but based around camping” — will debut at SXSW this year, Wheatley wasn’t sure. “We are showing it to Edgar Wright tomorrow,” Wheatley said with a laugh. “So we’ll see. It might be SXSW 2013. We’re showing the director’s cut tomorrow so we’re showing to the Big Talk people and then we’re going to do a round of viewings for the financers next week. We’ll see what state it’s in. We’re pretty happy with it — it’s pretty much there; the music is all there so it’s go-go-gadget from our end. But you never can tell.” [Continue Reading]

(Via http://blogs.indiewire.com/)

Article / ‘Kill List’ Helmer Ben Wheatley Shares Details on ‘Sightseers,’ ‘I, Macrobane,’ and ‘Freak Shift

January 5, 2012

in Articles & Reviews

Just as his sophomore feature, Kill List, hits every VOD service known to man, writer and director Ben Wheatley chatted with ThePlaylist about his multiple, esoteric projects that are in widely varying states of development. The first of these is, appropriately, Sightseers, an Edgar Wright-produced dark comedy — written by and starring Alice Lowe & Steve Oram – that Wheatley previously said follows “a pair of psychotic caravaners.” It’s an appropriate jumping off point since, if all goes well, it’ll be premiering at this year’s South by Southwest.

The director expressed just a smidge of doubt about this, however; they’ll be “showing the director’s cut tomorrow [...] to the Big Talk people,” followed by “a round of viewings for the financers next week,” all in an attempt to see “what state it’s in.” Despite the fact that, if his words are to be taken as fact, the cut that’s being exhibited could arrive in theaters as is. But, let’s not put too much pressure on the guy to get it playing in Austin this coming March; we’d all be willing to sit an extra year for a great film than simply get a messy one in 2012.

No matter when that ends up making its first showings, he’s back to work in the middle of the year for I, Macrobane, a “slightly psychedelic” feature that has Nick Frost, Michael Smiley, MyAnna Buring, and Neil Maskell all pegged to lead. While dark, it still sounds like a deviation from Kill List; according to Wheatley, this “knock-about comedy” will follow “two guys who, when they were kids, burned their school down,” and then “meet up in their late thirties and go on a rampage.” (It should be pointed out that Smiley‘s character is named George Clooney.) Okay, not too different, but Macrobane will probably induce less nightmares, for what that’s worth. It’s in what he calls “an advanced stage,” where “the script is being redone at the moment and the storyboards are all done.” SXSW 2013? [Continue Reading]

(Via http://thefilmstage.com/)

Article / Ben Wheatley’s no-budget film school

August 30, 2011

in Articles & Reviews

Finding funding to make a film is a chicken-and-egg situation. If you haven’t ever made a film, why would anyone trust you to make one? Before I made my first feature, Down Terrace in 2009, I had directed loads of TV comedy and adverts and I wanted to do some drama. My agent explained that no one would let me until I’d made a short dramatic film. I sulked a bit and decided it would be easier to shoot a feature than a short. That was, of course, insane. But insane measures have to be taken when making your first feature. I got together with two friends and we pooled our cash: £2,000 each, £6,000 all told. We didn’t want to spend a penny more. So how did we do it?

Making a no-budget feature starts with the script. Traditionally, they get written with no thought of having to film them. Locations and performers are things to be considered after the script is finished.

Down Terrace was written from the starting point of view of “What do we have?” In our case we had Robin Hill, who turned out to be the linchpin of the project. He can act, write, edit and, importantly, he is the son of Bob Hill. Bob, apart from being a talented non-professional actor had an amazing house. So we had our core cast and location. The script was then written to exploit these elements. A father, a son and a house. It was going to be a crime film, albeit a laid-back one. [Continue Reading]

(Via The Evening Standard)