“People often ask me what I am afraid of,” Tom Hiddleston says. “And this is it. I am afraid of hysteria.”
We are talking about his new film High-Rise, adapted from J. G. Ballard’s dystopian novel, in which the debonair hero of The Night Manager sheds his fancy ways to go alarmingly feral.
The lives of group of people living in a tower block start to spin out of control.
In the opening scene, his character Laing – a doctor of
forensics – is seen cooking a dog in the basement of the luxury
apartment tower where he moved for peace and quiet only a couple of
months earlier.
As we shall soon see, his condo haven has become a
maelstrom of rape, murder and uncollected rubbish. Hysteria isn’t the
half of it.
Ballard wrote High-Rise in 1975, anticipating the property bubble by a good 40 years.
The
fortress of the title is divided along class lines, with the ordinary
middle-class families on the lower floors, the rich up in the sky and
the architect – played by an oleaginous Jeremy Irons – living in the
middle of a roof garden populated with white ponies. As the place
implodes, he just mixes more cocktails.
“I don’t know if Ballard ever uses this metaphor,” Hiddleston says,
“but we thought of it as a great ocean liner unlocked from the land and
therefore free to live by its own laws.”
For a few weeks,
shipboard fun-seekers could enjoy the temptations of all the food, drink
and sexual opportunity a ticket could buy. “What High-Rise
does is takes that temptation and doesn’t let go, so they realise what
it feels like to have this perpetual hangover from lack of inhibition.”
High-Rise is directed by Ben Wheatley, whose low-budget chillers Kill List, Sightseers and A Field in England are funny in a bleak, black way that usually divides audiences.
High-Rise steps up that tension; it chops its audiences into pieces.
When
the film is shown at the San Sebastian festival, one incensed
Venezuelan journalist starts berating Hiddleston for making a film that
forced her to walk out.
It takes all his formidable charm to
placate her, admitting that when he spent a day with a pathologist doing
autopsies to prepare for his role, he had to leave the room to vomit.
But
it is the central idea of both book and film, he goes on, that is so
challenging. “Which is that if we are left to our own devices, very much
like Lord of the Flies, without the civilising influence of society, we are animals. Or we might be.”
Actually,
all Wheatley’s films involve apparently ordinary people who suddenly
set about murdering each other; it’s his running gag. He laughs
convivially when I ask why. Isn’t life more or less like that? That is
how Ballard, whose life was overturned by the Second World War, seems to
have seen it.
“Not to put words into his mouth,” he says, “but I
think the fact Ballard was in that internment camp in Shanghai – that he
saw a society that looked at permanent meltdown in a matter of days –
informed all his work.
“I certainly felt it during the banking
crisis recently. When you go to the cashpoint and your card doesn’t work
any more, what happens then? And we came very close, didn’t we?
"You
know, I think we are all kind of complicit in this forced narrative
that it’s all going to be fine all of the time, but when you actually
take a split second to look at context and history you see it isn’t
fine, that we lurch from crisis to crisis. And I think that is what
Ballard is getting at in High-Rise. That there is a very thin crust on top of the madness.”
Madness has its own allure, of course. Take Wheatley’s fans: they are absolutely vehement in their support for High-Rise. And within the story, the building’s residents could leave if they wanted.
“That
was the important thing to me in writing the adaptation,” he says.
“It’s not that they get trapped in the building or that they can’t
escape, that they can’t call for help or that the phones get taken away.
They don’t want help. There is a moment when Tom [sic] is walking out and
just goes ‘hmm, no…’ and walks back in. They enjoy it.”
I received a lot of messages for links to videos and downloads recently so why not just combine everything together so everyone can have some hiddles in one post?
I will make this as a page on my blog for people who want to refer back to it just in case they lose it in their likes or on their blogs themselves.
If you guys have any links you would like to share as well feel free to message me and i’ll add it to my page.
Here are links to the interviews with Tom in Comic Con 2015.
Update on July 28, 2015: Nerdist.com full podcast added. This completes the interview list. I will no longer update this list actively BUT if you find an interview that should be on the list, please send the link to me on fan mail.
Slutty Yorick 