“Bulk” and “The Meg 2” director Ben Wheatley believes “it’s a great time to be a young filmmaker,” pointing to blockbuster box office phenomenons like “Backrooms” and “Obsession” as evidence that up-and-coming directors are carving out new paths to success and finding ways to reach new audiences.
Appearing at Transylvania International Airport. Speaking at a film festival where British filmmakers are promoting their 2025 psychological thriller Bulk, Wheatley reflected on his relatively late start as a director – he was 37 when he released his feature debut Down Terrace – and joked that his success in the film industry was “really bad advertising”.
“‘Backroom’ and ‘Obsession’ and all these movies prove that my journey in this industry wasn’t great,” Wheatley said, remembering that he had vowed to make his first feature director before he turned 40. “It took me that long to gather my thoughts. But I wouldn’t have had it any other way. It took me a long time to have the confidence to create something.”
Director Wheatley was known for being quick and making the most of microbudgets, filming Down Terrace in eight days for just £6,000. Wheatley praised the “democratization” of the filmmaking process, thanks to 21st century technology like YouTube, which has allowed young directors such as 21-year-old Kane Parsons (“Backroom”) and 26-year-old Curry Barker (“Obsession”]to break away from the online phenomenon. To get real box office success.
Still, the veteran director cautioned, “While technology has advanced, distribution has not.”
“We’re still dealing with a 20-year-old distribution system,” he said. “As technology has advanced, it has destroyed smaller revenue streams like DVDs and BluRays, which is a shame. There are fewer grassroots ways to make money from technology than there used to be. But you can still make movies, and it’s a lot easier now.”
Wheatley’s latest film, Bulk, which premiered in the Midnight Madness section of the Edinburgh Film Festival last year, was described by Variety magazine’s chief film critic Guy Lodge as a “hybrid of conspiracy thriller, time-bending sci-fi, and goofy genre parody.” In a glowing review from Edinburgh, Lodge said Wheatley is “mischievously back to basics” with a “paranoid lo-fi thriller” that marks the director’s return to the genre-bending DIY roots that cemented his cult status with films such as the 2011 psychological thriller The Kill List and the 2012 dark comedy Sightseers.
The film, secretly shot on a shoestring budget and released weeks before the Toronto premiere of another of Wheatley’s films, the Bob Odenkirk-starring thriller Normal, is a sequel to Wheatley’s surprise directorial stint on the 2023 Warner Bros. blockbuster The Meg 2: The Trench.
Following a string of low-budget hits, director Wheatley was handed the reins for a sequel to the blockbuster action movie starring Jason Statham about a prehistoric shark rampaging through the modern world. (Although the film was widely panned by critics, including Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, who called it “a big-budget, semi-ludicrous piece of crap (if not unwatchable),” it still grossed nearly $400 million at the worldwide box office.)
However, Wheatley pushed back when asked by a Transylvanian audience member if he could enjoy more creative freedom with the studio’s budget.
“Just because you have more money doesn’t mean you can do everything you want. It means you can do a lot less than you want to do,” he says. “When you make a movie for less money, you end up with a lot less money to give back before everyone makes it back, which means you need a much smaller audience and you can make weirder movies.
“If you’re going to make a big movie and spend a lot of money, you need a lot of people to see it. They don’t want weird things, they want to see something simpler, like a guy punching a shark,” he added. “Your responsibility as a filmmaker is to get your money back.”
Wheatley and Warner may not have seemed like an ideal pair on paper, but the director, who admitted he’d heard horror stories about “indie filmmakers being crushed by studios,” insisted he “had a really good time” embracing The Meg 2’s goofy kitsch.
“It’s very brightly colored, it’s funny, it has big action, and it speaks to a global audience,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you do it on a low budget or a big budget. I like making movies, but when you do it you have to understand what audience you’re talking to. You don’t want to do a shark movie and then try to make some kind of tone poem about your relationship with your father. That’s not going to sit well with the studio or the audience.”
Wheatley, who is widely credited with helping revive the “folk horror” genre established by cult films of the 60s and 70s like The Wicker Man, has confessed that he would like to go back to an even earlier era of filmmaking.
“I’m a big fan of Hollywood movies and a big fan of the studio system, obviously from the ’40s and ’50s,” he said. “If I had a genie and could do anything, I like the idea of being a Hollywood director in the ’40s, where I’d make cowboy movies, then musicals, then film adaptations of books. It wasn’t about money nonsense,” he continued. “You were just making stuff. I think that’s great.”
The Transylvania International Airport Film Festival will be held from June 12th to 21st.
