By Travis Johnson
High-Rise sees the inhabitants of a high tech luxury apartment block fall into violent tribalism and bizarre fantasy actualisation when class rivalry threatens to tear apart their intended utopia. It’s a text that Wheatley first encountered as a teenager. “I guess it was probably through a bookshop called Compendium,” he recalls. “It was in Camden Town in London. In that bookshop, there would be loads of esoteric stuff. I would have become aware of Ballard around the same time that I became aware of Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson and The Freak Brothers and that kind of stuff. It was all connected with drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and hippie culture. That would have been, I dunno, mid ‘80s, late ‘80s. Ballard was weird, because he was British, but he didn’t feel part of the British scene. He felt other…he felt alien. His work was so outside everybody else’s; you read it and it was so odd and dangerous and subversive in a way. A lot of the British sci-fi stuff from that period seems to have become dated; Ballard’s stuff seems to hold its own.”
In the past, Ballard’s work has been adapted by everyone from Steven Spielberg (Empire Of The Sun) to David Cronenberg (Crash), but High-Rise has stymied a number of notable filmmakers in the years since its 1975 publication – Nicolas Roeg faltered in the ’70s, and more recently, Vincenzo Natali came close to realising an adaptation written by Richard Stanley. For Wheatley, though, the process was remarkably straight forward. “I was sitting at home and I was looking at the bookshelf and I saw it there and I wondered why it hadn’t been made.” he says matter-of-factly. “So I started making inquiries into who had it, who had the rights. Most books are totally wrapped up, you can’t get hold of them, because American studios have got them, and they usually don’t just have the book, they have all the work of one author, or even whole subgenres – they just buy them up voraciously. But I was very lucky that High-Rise was owned by Jeremy Thomas, who is a big independent producer in the UK. But also his son is an agent at the same place I’ve got an agent, so it was a very quick route through to him.”
Despite the novel’s difficult reputation, Wheatley and his screenwriter (and wife), Amy Jump were not daunted, appreciating the book’s style and its relevance to modern political events. “It’s a very visual book. A lot of people have said it’s an unfilmable book – I patently don’t believe that – it reads very much like a film. Re-reading it, I was struck by how prescient it was. At the time when we were making it, it felt like it was taken from the newspapers rather than something that had been a flight of fancy in the ‘70s, projecting ahead. There’s all this Brexit stuff that’s happened – this is probably the first High-Rise interview I’ve done post-Brexit, actually – but it’s very similar. It’s just incredible! You look at it and go, ‘oh right, it’s not much of a metaphor, really – it’s just what’s happened’.”
Still, he was determined to retain the novel’s period setting rather than trying to update it to the modern day. “If you’re gonna adapt a book why would you update it?” he asks rhetorically. “If you’re gonna update it, you’re gonna change major parts of it in order to make it fit. It’s like going, ‘Oh, we’re gonna do Lord of the Rings and setting that in the present day’. None of it makes any sense. Certainly it doesn’t make any sense for High-Rise; the technology has moved on so much. Ballard got a lot of it right, but with some things he couldn’t see how far they would go, particularly with social media. We’re in a world now where everything is broadcast and we’re all broadcasting everything we do and putting it online and that really does break the book. You have to make so many excuses narratively for those developments – it’s pointless.”
High-Rise is released in cinemas on August 18.
