There couldn’t be a better choice than Bulk for a Midnight Madness slot at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. ‘I mean, it’s a midnight movie,’ reasons its writer-director Ben Wheatley, when we speak over Zoom. ‘It’s a midnight cinema experience. It’s a kind of late-night, Channel 4-in-the-80s experience, when you possibly miss the titles and don’t know what it is, and you’ve accidentally tuned into it.’

British-born Wheatley is no stranger to cult moviemaking. His second film Kill List, about two hitmen, broke him out as a filmmaker of distinction. Since then, he’s adapted JG Ballard (High-Rise), crafted a hallucinogenic period piece (A Field In England) and equally trippy folk horror (In The Earth), and made a zombie comedy series for Channel 4 (Generation Z); all unique in their own way. ‘I’m always chasing the experience of seeing that gonzo movie for the first time,’ he says, ‘and going “oh my god, what was that? I haven’t seen this before.”’

That’s certainly the case with Bulk, a cunning black-and-white sci-fi that harks back to French New Wave works such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. Sam Riley, who has worked with Wheatley three times before (most recently in his 2020 Daphne du Maurier adaptation Rebecca) stars as Harlan, a freelance journalist kidnapped and caught up in a bizarre inter-dimensional hunt for a scientist. Co-starring Riley’s real-life wife Alexandra Maria Lara, alongside Noah Taylor and Mark Monero, Wheatley wrote it with that cast in mind. 

In the case of Riley, who launched his career with Control, the Joy Division film that screened at the 2007 Film Festival, it’s a rare lead. ‘In the films I’ve done,’ notes Wheatley, ‘he’s played rougher characters; they’re kind of sneaky and evil. But this is the first time I’ve got to have him as a hero, which is great.’ Certainly, he’s perfect as the world-weary lead in the Bogart mould, I suggest. ‘I think he’s more like Alain Delon,’ Wheatley counters. ‘We always joke about him looking like Delon in Le Samouraï.’

Bulk’s homespun flavour comes from Wheatley’s deployment of old-school filmmaking techniques, from rear projection to false perspectives and model-making. For one scene, as helicopters streak across the sky, Wheatley used Airfix kits bought from eBay. ‘I’d gone back and watched a lot of the Harryhausen films and Švankmajer, and lots of stuff that use stop-motion animation and models. And I thought “I want to investigate this.”’ The effect is a woozy, unreal quality. ‘The whole film is like that,’ he insists. ‘I mean, all the guns they have are all cardboard. And when they go into that control room that they’re in, there’s no props in there. That’s all photocopies. Stuff photocopied onto bits of paper. But it looks right. It’s also set up as a fantasy as well. So it’s not real, any of it. It allows itself to be that. I think if you did that and you were trying to say to the audience “everything was real”, it would be a harder trick to pull off.’

Wheatley has always been an avid fan of a certain type of sci-fi from his childhood. ‘Doctor Who cast a long shadow for me, certainly the 70s Doctor Who,’ he admits (he even shot two Peter Capaldi-starring episodes of the landmark BBC series). Similarly influenced by writer Nigel Kneale (creator of The Quatermass Experiment) and the influential comic 2000 AD, Wheatley wrote his own graphic novel, Utility, a few years back. With its cosmic tale of superheroes and clockwork knights, Utility proved highly influential. ‘That way of writing, which is completely like freeform jazz, really affected how I wrote Bulk which is more like my comic work than my film work in a way. It’s lighter on its feet and it deals with much bigger ideas and concepts, but then just is happy to throw them away and jump onto the next one as fast as possible.’

With its handful of locations recalling the small-scale nature of his 2009 debut Down Terrace, a claustrophobic tale about a criminal family, Wheatley says ‘the cottage industry and the craft of this film was interesting to me. To have it so handmade was really good and enjoyable. People think that the more money you have, the more that you get to do. But the reality is the reverse. The less money in the budget, the more creative you can be and the more control you have.’

His last film was his first mega-budget movie, Meg 2: The Trench, sequel to 2018’s Jason Statham shark movie. Tackling a Hollywood blockbuster inevitably meant ceding control. So it’s no surprise Wheatley has returned with something small. ‘I wanted to make something that I felt free making, which I got to do,’ he says. ‘It’s not gone through any kind of mediation or testing or conversations or re-editing, particularly. This is kind of a pure statement.’ When we speak, Wheatley is finishing his next film, Normal, which looks like it fits somewhere between Bulk and The Meg 2 in scale terms. Starring Better Call Saul’s brilliant Bob Odenkirk, ‘it’s like the more commercial cousin of Free Fire; it has the gonzo action of Free Fire,’ Wheatley reveals, alluding to his own warehouse-set, gun-crazy thriller from 2016, ‘but then it has a more considered Bob Odenkirkian dramatic structure and pace.’

Although clearly at his most comfortable and creative making a film like Bulk, Wheatley has no regrets about dipping his toe in the studio waters. ‘It’s hard when you’re spending that much money. It’s got to work everywhere. It was interesting with Meg. They had audiences all over the globe that they were excited about. If you want it to work in that way, you have to appreciate all these different audiences. And it starts to rub the edges off stuff a bit. I like those films, though, as well. It doesn’t bother me. As long as it’s like a balanced diet of other types of movies. As long as that’s not exclusively what you have to watch.’

Bulk, Cameo, 14 August, 11.55pm; Hawthornden, 15 August, 4pm; Vue, 15 August, 9.30pm; Ben Wheatley and producer Andy Starke In Conversation event, Central Hall, 15 August, 1.30pm.