“Three days of getting drunk, watching movies, and talking about movies”

Silos"My God, the guy who's made all these films must be a maniac," said director Ben Wheatley about the montage of scenes from his filmography that was screened this Tuesday at the Sitges Film Festival before presenting him with the Màquina del Temps award. A very special award for the Briton, because Sitges was "the first film festival" he attended, before directing films. "You'd go to the bar and there'd be George Romero, and you'd think: 'Are all festivals like this?' I spent three days getting drunk, watching films and talking about cinema, it was incredible."

It must be said that, seen as a whole, his filmography does have a manic side: it jumps from folk horror visceral of Kill list in the pitch-black comedy of Tourists; you find adaptations of JG Ballard (High-rise), but also of Hitchcock's Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca, no less) and even contains a surprising blockbuster giant sharks, Megalodon 2, with action star Jason Statham. "I like to make a lot of different films and not repeat myself, but I don't think about it either, in my filmography," he explains in conversation with ARA. "It's not as calculated as Tarantino: 'I'll make these ten films and only these.' It's just that I like making films; shooting is when I'm happiest. That's how a studio director could be. 4. more auteurist things."

The film he presented at this edition of Sitges, Bulk, is of the second kind and, without a doubt, the most experimental and radical. "It's about my love of fantasy cinema and storytelling, and it's weird as hell, so good luck," Wheatley warned the audience before the screening. Filmed on two iPhones and mostly in black and white, it has a disconcerting plot of parallel dimensions in which four actors play various versions of the same characters in a kind of jigsaw puzzle script that only fits together in the final stretch. During the first long hour, the viewer may feel a bit like the protagonist, a journalist (or investigator) who doesn't quite know who he is or if he's being kidnapped, but is convinced that someone has drugged (or poisoned) him.

From David Lynch to 'Metal Hurlant'

Demanding on the viewer, it's worth making a small effort to enjoy this fascinating homage to cinema and the art of fiction. Bulk It is an exercise in narrative expressionism full of small animations with models and touches of self-awareness and metacinema, as if Michel Gondry were drunk on the most playful Godard and the experiments of Guy Maddin. But the referential thing that Wheatley recognizes is Eraserhead David Lynch's: "It's a film made like ours, essentially in a single room that transforms itself."

The rest of the influences come from the director's other discipline: comics. "The film is a reaction to the fact that I've been writing comics for the last few years, first the graphic novel." Kosmic music [with cartoonist Joe Currie] and then in the magazine 2000 AD "—he explains—"All of this has opened my mind to the kind of flexible narrative in comics and made me write in a different way, very influenced by European science fiction comics." Needless to say: Hurlante Metal [title of the iconic French comic magazine] is the name of the poison injected into the protagonist.

Wheatley denies that the modesty and radicalism of Bulk be a consequence of his time in a major production like Megalodon 2, where he designed all the action sequences himself, but as far as the script was concerned, "it was a matter between Jason Statham and the studio." In fact, the most direct influence of that film on Bulk is the decision to use small models to create all the special effects. The idea came to him when he saw all the models of submarines and craft that the art department of Megalodon 2 printed in 3D. "I would have loved to use them in the film, but they didn't let me, they only made them so I could see how they would look," he explains. "So I used models in Bulk, a bit like the way they used them in Star Wars, with wires and background projections." All the camera tricks and special effects, by the way, are explained in the film's end credits, with diagrams for reproducing them. "I was inspired by punk-rock singles, which had instructions on the back for recording and distributing them yourself," says Wheatley.