Sightseers

NOVEMBER 2012 VOLUME 22 ISSUE 11

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THE INTERNATIONAL FILM MAGAZINEOOOO

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The Dark Side of Ealing from ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’ to ‘The Ladykillers’

CRUEL BRITANNIA: BEN WHEATLEY’S

The BFI London Film

FestivalSpecial

SIGHTSEERS

30 | Sight&Sound | November 2012

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

A black comedy about a caravanning trip through northern England that turns murderous, ‘Sightseers’ – from ‘Kill List’ director Ben Wheatley – taps into a tradition of urban couples coming horribly unstuck in the English countrysideBy Ben Walters

FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE‘Sightseers’ transplants the homicidal runaway couple of US pulp tradition into a distinctively English setting

November 2012 | Sight&Sound | 31

I want to get away, she said, I want to get away.

I’ll take you on a trip, he said, we’ll have a holiday.

We’ll be with Mother Nature and we’ll laugh and

sing and play.

I want to get away, she said, I want to get away.

Candice-Marie and Keith Pratt, ‘Nuts in May’

There’s a strain of television and fi lmmaking that might be called British bathetic bucolic – a semi-absurdist mode in which sublime natural landscapes form the backdrop for neurotic urban odd couples getting holidays wrong. The archetypal instance is Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May, a 1976 edition of the BBC’s Play for Today in which holier-than-thou quarry-botherer Keith Pratt (Roger Sloman) and his wife Candice-Marie (Alison Steadman) take in Dorset’s natural beauty and historical treasures – when they aren’t squabbling about schedules or carping on fel-low campers’ diets. Other examples would include the histrionic farmhouse farting about of Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1986) and, more recently, The Trip (Michael Winterbottom, 2010), in which mobile teleph-ony provides some notably rude awakenings from delu-sions of Romanticism.

These itineraries have often been punctured by inti-mations of the dark or grotesque – think of Withnail’s

run-in with the poacher or Candice-Marie’s dungeon fi x-ation – but none has been as bloody as that of Sightseers. Written by and starring Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, and directed by Ben Wheatley, the fi lm follows lovers Chris and Tina on a caravanning trip from Redditch in the Mid-lands to Settle in Yorkshire, via a tram museum here and a viaduct there. The couple are socially maladjusted but, we soon realise, not merely that: Chris nurses a variety of generalised resentments that he isn’t afraid to express homicidally, and in Tina he has found an eager – perhaps too eager – apprentice. The resulting feature constitutes a unique and provocative confl uence of genres, infusing the bathetic-bucolic mode with a grand-guignol vision of murder as social critique, all mapped onto the quintes-sentially American frame of a runaway couple’s homi-cidal roadtrip. Equal parts Nuts in May and Bonnie and Clyde, then, with spritzes of Kind Hearts and Coronets and The League of Gentlemen thrown in.

Lowe and Oram’s backgrounds are in live and televi-sion comedy of the outré kind: her small-screen credits include Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and Little Britain, his The Mighty Boosh and Tittybangbang; both supported Ste-ve Coogan on his last live tour. The pair developed Chris and Tina while performing live, making deadpan reference to unseen killings, then put them on

32 | Sight&Sound | November 2012

SIGHTSEERS

tape in the hope of developing a TV series. “We wanted to do it as a sitcom, a bit like Terry

and June, but with killing,” Oram says. The idea, he re-ports, was judged “too dark” for TV, but it was seen as hav-ing feature potential. Edgar Wright, in whose Hot Fuzz Lowe had appeared, forwarded the short to producer Nira Park, whose Big Talk had backed Black Books and Spaced on TV and Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Attack the Block in cinemas. Park also knew Wheatley, who – though now best known for the combination of character-based social realism, unadorned violence and black comedy he brought to the low-budget features Down Terrace (2009) and Kill List (2011) – also has a TV comedy pedigree, hav-ing directed episodes of Modern Toss and Ideal and, earlier, written for Armando Iannucci’s Time Trumpet.

“Ben had made Down Terrace at that point, though not Kill List, and it seemed like an obvious fi t thematically,” Lowe says. “He’s very interested in showing violence and how that implicates the audience. That took the film to the next level – made it more cinematic. We started thinking of the characters as being more serious: they had to feel like real people with a real history and a real psychology and real reasons.”

Wheatley still took inspiration from TV techniques, however. “A lot of the process that I have now has come from looking at how Iannucci worked on The Thick of It,” the director says. “That improv style, jumping backwards and forwards between takes, doing takes on the script and takes off the script. It’s also in Cassavetes and Leigh.”

Not that he’s keen to invite comparisons with Mike Leigh. Despite numerous connections between Nuts in May and Sightseers – extensive exterior shooting; an overbearing man wrong-footed by his initially infantile partner’s growing confi dence; subtexts engaging with class, economics and authority; the use of branches as weaponry – Wheatley maintains he only saw Leigh’s fi lm two weeks before shooting started on Sightseers: “I went, ‘Ooh, OK. Oh, fuck.’ We changed a lot of stuff to make sure it wasn’t too much like it. There was a bit more of them looking at timetables and stuff like that that gen-tly disappeared.”

The splendour of our countryside is often overlooked. “It’s totally mind-blowing how expansive and beautiful England is, and no one realises it because we’re English and closed off,” says Oram. “When we start the fi lm, Chris and Tina are in a very stifling suburban environment, and just 20 miles down the M1 they’re in this epic land-scape.” Chris and Tina’s initial motivation is to escape the disappointing strictures of everyday life. “It seemed to suit their characters,” Oram says. “It’s an American idea: ‘We’re in control of our own destiny, going out there in our covered wagon, pushing the boundaries.’ But it’s a caravan, really, isn’t it?” Gonks, hen parties and National Trust bores are never far away.

Such deflation comes as standard in the bathetic-bucolic mode, in which characters often have preten-sions to post-Romantic notions of fruitfully communing with nature. Chris fancies himself as something of a lat-ter-day Wordsworth, needing only time in the country and the attentions of his muse to create his “oeuvre”, but we swiftly realise he is incompetent to express himself in any way other than murder – and ludicrously petty-minded murder at that, failing even to live up to the Hol-lywood template of the revenge-killing spree. “It’s an

American idea, but done in an English way,” Oram says, “i.e. shit. Tarantino does it and it’s really cool – and then we come along and we’re wearing cagoules and being Brummies.”

The steady accretion of low-level practical irritants and hazards is another familiar tack. “When you’re out there,” notes Wheatley, “you realise that 200 years ago it would have been misery being in any of these places and you would have just died. If you’re having to live in these environments, it’s tough, it’s harsh, it’s not fun at all. It’s only recently we can blithely bomb about the place and go, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s great,’ and then go back to the city.”

ULTIMATE HOLIDAY

As a romance with a body count, Sightseers follows the likes of Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, The Honeymoon Killers and Natural Born Killers. Distinguished from such Amer-ican forebears by its very English privileging of irony over iconoclasm and blunt-force trauma over gunfire, the fi lm nevertheless shares with them an appreciation of the liberating cocktail of naivety and sociopathy with which such sprees are fuelled – a sense of murder as the ultimate holiday. “It’s coming out of that contract with society,” Wheatley suggests, “that idea that everything we’ve been sold is a lie – which is where Chris is coming from. And Tina’s got nothing: her world is just a house she’s trying to get out from. If he’d had another hobby, she’d probably have gone along with that.”

Both Down Terrace and Kill List also juxtapose the Eng-lish countryside with human brutality in stories focused on couples for whom murder is a shared pursuit – mod-ern Macbeths with less troubled consciences. These are not, Wheatley says, motifs that he consciously repeats. And, while acknowledging that “it does paint quite a dark picture of me”, he suspects they are rooted in his own happy domestic life with partner Amy Jump, who had a writing credit on Kill List and takes writing and edit-ing credits here.

“The couples thing, I think, comes from Amy and I be-ing a couple: we have a couple’s perspective and we’ve been together since we were 16, so it’s always been that,” he says. “A lot of the drama in [our] fi lms comes from cou-ples being strong together rather than couples breaking apart. People said a lot about Kill List that the couple were in the process of breaking up, but it was never meant to

“ Tarantino does it and it’s really cool – and then we come along and we’re wearing cagoules and being Brummies”Steve Oram

November 2012 | Sight&Sound | 33

be like that. They were just shouty – an aggressive cou-ple who negotiated between themselves in a heightened way. [In cinema in general] you often see the drama of the betrayal and the split, but mostly [for us] it’s couples working towards a goal and achieving it.” The goal gener-ally being murder. “Yeah, but that’s just drama, isn’t it?”

Like his improvisational shooting style, Wheatley credits his gruesome but relatively naturalistic approach to violence to TV infl uences, notably dramas of the 1970s and 80s such as Threads and Scum. “It’s designed to make you upset rather than give you an excuse as a viewer to think it’s OK,” he insists. “It’s from the Alan Clarke school where you show it and you go, ‘This is horrible.’ Scum still scares me now in a way that modern stuff doesn’t.”

Sightseers sometimes suffers from a certain jarring of these comic and realist sensibilities: some of the broader comedy beats, using outlandish props or gag-based dia-logue, threaten to render gorier moments glib. “We tried to really fi ght against that,” Wheatley says. “The original short film was very broad and it was bringing it back from that towards a reality that’s more within the world of the fi lms I’ve made before. But if you steer the ship to-wards comedy, away from horror or drama, then these things happen – everything’s aiming towards a joke. And not everything is funny in life.”

While Sightseers focuses on Chris’s pseudo-Romantic yearnings, the fi lm does contain elements of the deeper English past, the rich, loamy hinterland that also seeps through the cracks in Down Terrace and Kill List, even if the cult elements of Kill List lack the thought-through plausibility of those found in, say, The Wicker Man or Rosemary’s Baby. As Sightseers progresses, a sense of unac-countability and wildness grows.

“We realised how beautiful the landscape could be, from little diddy houses and fi elds to larger, darker, more tragic scapes – viaducts and stone circles, monolithic and ominous,” says Lowe. “As the landscape gets wilder, you feel you’re going into the past, into a time before cities

and civilisation. The physical journey became the jour-ney of the fi lm, from sweet and harmless to the heart of British darkness. Before we learned all these manners and polite restraint, we were smashing each other over the head with stones.”

Wheatley introduces dashes of psychedelia and what he calls a “Roeg-y kind of parallel-action weirdness” – sequences in which rhythmic, associative editing meld elements of synchronicity, memory and dream in fanta-sias of lust and death aimed at linking Chris and Tina to a semi-mythical past. “I see that weird schism of modern and ancient at the same time,” he says of everyday life, “and that comes through in the work. As I get older I no-tice it more. When you’re a kid, everything seems certain and you believe the status quo is totally infl exible, but you only need to be cogent for ten years and you see that political systems repeat, history repeats, everything’s re-peating all the time. You think, ‘I’m probably the same as myself from 200 years ago or a thousand years ago.’”

It shouldn’t, therefore, come as a surprise to learn that Wheatley’s next project is a period piece that seems primed to offer a distillation of his concerns with history, landscape, magic, violence and restrictive circumstances: set during the Civil War, A Field in England sees a group of soldiers mysteriously trapped in a fi eld with apparently supernatural qualities. He calls it “a prequel to all the fi lms” he has made so far.

It wouldn’t be cricket to wrap up without touching on a perennial matter of interest when it comes to the English countryside. “People get put off by the weather,” Lowe says. “We tried to make a virtue of that. It could help you with your acting having sleet in your face. But it was made easy for us, in a sense, because if you’re wear-ing proper camping gear it’s actually quite comfortable.” When dealing death on ancient earth, a good cagoule goes a long way.

i ‘Sightseers’ is released in the UK on 30 November,

and will be reviewed in the next issue

MAKING A BREAKChris (Steve Oram) and Tina (Alice Lowe) in ‘Sightseers’, above, recall Candice-Marie (Alison Steadman) and Keith (Roger Sloman), below, fi lming ‘Nuts in May’ with director Mike Leigh, in woolly hat