The architecture of High Rise
Turning the works of JG Ballard into film has been a surprisingly rare occurrence, especially so when you consider in what high regard his output is held. Now filmmaker Ben Wheatley has taken on 1975’s High-Rise
Words by Will Wiles
JG Ballard has never found a comfortable place in the cinema. Since his death in 2009, Ballard's critical and popular reputation has never looked more secure: his complete works have recently been handsomely republished with shining new introductions by the two generations of British authors who bear the stamp of his influence. But where are the films from those 19 novels and scores of short stories? Steven Spielberg adapted Empire of the Sun (1984), but in the process an outlying novel became more Spielberg than Ballard. David Cronenberg did sturdy, faithful work adapting the controversial Crash (1973) in 1996, to the sound of one hand clapping. (Let's not ponder where the other hand was.) Beyond these, little but arthouse excursions. The idea has arisen that Ballard is somehow unfilmable.
The period-style High Rise home owner's manual. Photo: Michael Eaton
It's nonsense - Ballard's work is steeped in the moving image - but myths like this arise when even a novel like High-Rise can't make it into celluloid. Arguably Ballard's most famous book, High-Rise concerns a new London tower block with 2,000 residents, an expression of brute architectural idealism and social engineering. The block almost immediately declines into savagery and tribal warfare, but the transgressive twist Ballard gives to the story is that the residents appear to prefer it that way. Published in 1975, High-Rise perfectly captured the moment utopian modernism ran aground, and it's long been regarded as the lead candidate for feature-film treatment. But the rights have trickled through the hands of a number of directors over the decades - Nicholas Roeg, Bruce Robinson, Vicenzo Natali - and nothing came to pass.
Scenes from the film starring Tom Hiddlestone and Jeremy Irons. Photo: (Images With Actors) Aidan Monaghan, (Other Images) Studiocanal
When it was announced that the latest in that unhappy succession was the British filmmaker Ben Wheatley, Ballard's fans were cautiously optimistic. Wheatley's back-catalogue had a good mix of Ballardian characteristics: sinister, streaked with violence, home to a dissenting strain of Englishness, over-arched by midnight humour. And he knew Ballard.
Scenes from the film starring Tom Hiddlestone and Jeremy Irons. Photo: (Images With Actors) Aidan Monaghan, (Other Images) Studiocanal
'I first read High-Rise as a kid, when I was about 16, 17,' Wheatley says. We meet on the top floor of Studio Canal's poky Soho office - the stern angles of William Blake House peer over his shoulder throughout the interview. 'The feeling from Ballard was that there was this kind of radiation coming off him, like he was dangerous, scary, quite the thing to read. Initially his phrasing is so cold and so odd that he can take anything and make it feel alien. Where other science-fiction writers are shooting off in space ships, he's looking at car crashes.'
Storyboards convey the tower block declining into savagery. Photo: Ben Wheatley
Wheatley's High-Rise - written by Amy Jump, and starring Tom Hiddlestone, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller and Elisabeth Moss - should finally put to rest the notion that Ballard can't be filmed. It's a exquisite, mesmerising film with the better qualities of a nightmare. And it's one of the most consummately architectural films of recent years. Its setting, an immense tower block in London's Docklands, first of a planned group of five around an ornamental lake, has a malign charisma that defies easy description, but which reaches into every unsettling scene.
Storyboards convey the tower block declining into savagery. Photo: Ben Wheatley
Part of this power is its blunt anachronism. It's a 2016 film of a 1975 book, but set in a time that is neither. 'From Ballard's point of view, the late-Seventies didn't exist, so we had kind of a free rein to make it like a bubble that the film exists in, but didn't happen,' Wheatley says - 1980 as if the Seventies went on being the Seventies, and didn't get steered into a ditch by postmodernism and Margaret Thatcher, the same bubble of post- Seventies that contains A Clockwork Orange. As a result there's a kind of glowing hyper-reality to it - a period faithfulness that rejects easy pop-cultural reference. 'We didn't want to get stuck in fetishising Seventies' design - we were always trying to pick stuff slightly to the left of it. There are classic bits in it, but there's no bubble TV [or] Watney's party barrel... To go to the past like that should put you into an alien space, not into a comfortable childhood space.'
Graphic design by Michael Eaton for the film ranges from record sleeves, through cigarette packets to the home owner pamphlets. Photo: Michael Eaton
For the architecture of the tower itself, Wheatley and production designer Mark Tildesley toured Britain's dwindling stock of brutalist buildings - the South Bank, Barbican, Trellick Tower and Alexandra Road in London, as well as John Madin's (now demolished) Central Library in Birmingham. 'The problem I've had with stuff in the past,' Wheatley says, 'is that when you let an art department loose on a period reconstruction, they go a bit crazy, and they lose the proportions of things. And the Seventies is quite small. When you go around the Barbican... it's like the Fifties when you go inside. Everything's really tiny. The same with the Trellick as well.'
Graphic design by Michael Eaton for the film ranges from record sleeves, through cigarette packets to the home owner pamphlets. Photo: Michael Eaton
Having been rebuffed from shooting in a number of locations - including the Birmingham library - Wheatley and Tildesley found a sports centre in the Northern Irish seaside town of Bangor. 'It was next to a police station, but in a poor area,' Wheatley says. 'So it had never been gussied up in the Eighties, but also it had never been vandalised.' This gave them one of the tower's most important locations, a swimming pool, and period-appropriate corridors and offices. Within the sports centre they built the rest of the sets, using it as a reference point.
Graphic design by Michael Eaton for the film ranges from record sleeves, through cigarette packets to the home owner pamphlets. Photo: Michael Eaton
They quickly encountered an architectural conundrum. The tower has all the facilities its residents might need under one roof, including pool, gym, supermarket, luxurious penthouses and cramped affordable flats. How could this all be made to feel like a single coherent place? The solution they devised is ingenious: an intrusive structural system of diagonal bracing. These macho slanting supports are visible in almost every shot within the tower, and they give rise to its single most obvious and memorable feature: a raked top that gives the uppermost storeys a nerve-wracking overhang.
'We had this idea that the building was very unsympathetic to the people in it,' Wheatley says. Even in the better flats, kitchens are uncomfortably squeezed in around the slanting columns and useless negative space is formed. Meanwhile the overhang serves the plot: on one side, balconies ascend like a ziggurat, disrupting residents' privacy; on the other, there's a drop waiting like a diving board for someone to take the plunge. The fate of the occupants of the building is ingrained in its form, an architectural ID. Structure as destiny. As the building's psychosis starts to take hold, the slant even expresses itself beyond the tower's walls - for instance in the tipped-over box files in the office of Laing, Tom Hiddlestone's character.
For the internal concrete surfaces, Tildesley developed 'a sort of rippled cross-breed' of the bush-hammered Barbican concrete and the South Bank's formwork. 'We did that in a sort of plaster sheet and applied it like wallpaper, says Tildesley. Similarly careful is Michael Eaton's graphic design, visible throughout the film - particularly in the cheerful dystopia of the supermarket, where every product, from cornflakes to paint, shares the same packaging language. Again, the fundamental effort was simplicity, unity and an eye for period - only a couple of typefaces, sourced in part from the Bangor sports centre, and used for everything.
High-Rise's tower block slants at an uncomfortable angle, giving a sense of foreboding. Photo: Michael Eaton
The structural unity of the high rise gave the crew scope for some clever tricks in set design. A regular problem in filmmaking is that films are often not shot in chronological or plot order and instead jump back and forward through the script. For a film like High-Rise, where the whole environment progressively goes to hell, this poses an acute challenge: sets must be trashed, then restored, possibly over and again.
'We didn't have a huge budget, so we had to think quite cleverly on our feet,' says Tildesley. 'So we actually made building blocks that could be moved quite quickly.' With these modular elements 'we could ruin flats and put them back together again, and expand flats and then make them into smaller flats'. One layout was made to serve as two flats by simply mirroring the film. 'We had to make sure all the numbers were reversed, anything like that, and then we literally flipped the film, so rather than being a left-handed flat it's a right-handed one.'
Above all these permutations and recombinations comes a splendid surrealist joke: the penthouse is occupied by Anthony Royal, the building's architect, played by Jeremy Irons. This is a roughly in-keeping assemblage of mirrored surfaces and shag-pile sofa pits, but set in a formal garden worthy of Versailles, the domain of Royal's wife (Keeley Hawes). This gives Wheatley scope for some characteristically dreamlike touches: a white horse wandering his halls, a minimalist studio in a half-timbered Marie Antoinette barn, conical concrete air-con vents amid the trim lawns steaming like B-movie craters. Royal has the penthouse in the book, but this garden is all Wheatley, and a wonderful addition to the mythology.
One last detail to the film's aesthetic - although it's one that does not appear in the film itself - is a witty trailer, written by Wheatley himself, structured as an advert for apartments in the building. It bears some resemblance to the opening sequence of David Cronenberg's first film, Shivers (1975), in which parasites in the water supply of a Canadian tower block turn its residents into orgiastic killers. Shivers has what Ballard expert Dr Simon Sellars calls an 'eerie symbiosis' with High-Rise: deeply similar in concept and mood, they were written at exactly the same time, completely separately.
The tower blocks in High-Rise, arranged around an ornamental lake and yet to complete, have a sinister charisma. Photo: Studiocanal
Was Wheatley tipping his hat to High-Rise's long-lost twin? Surprisingly, the answer turns out to be no. Though he knows Shivers well, the inspiration was closer to home: a real advert made by housebuilder Redrow for apartments in east London, which attracted a barrage of online mockery last year for its sinister tone and apparent acknowledgement that you have to be a moneyed City sociopath in order to afford a flat in London.
'We were thinking "God, this is hysterical, this is the trailer for High-Rise, pretty much", so we re-imagined that,' Wheatley says. But it's also a way to put across the basic premise of the film without simply stringing together plot points, in the manner of too many modern trailers.
What's more, it does a great job of selling the polished, seductive world that Wheatley, Tildesley and the rest of the team have created. 'I liked the Twitter comments, people saying "Oh my God, I was going to move in there, I like this Seventies themed tower block - but then it went weird..."' And he laughs
