Ben Wheatley Threw His Cast Into Free Fire
Filmmaker Ben Wheatley has made a series of critically acclaimed films with increasingly starry casts.
Ben Wheatley is happy that these are small-budget movies made on his own terms. After finishing High-Rise with Tom Hiddleston and Luke Evans, he turned to Free Fire. The idea came from reading transcripts of real police shootouts that are far messier than the movies ever portray them. "That was the beginning point for me," Wheatley says. "I thought maybe there's something in this, a procedural thing about people in a gun battle in real time. I'm not saying that Free Fire is a documentary or massively realistic, but it relies on some of that realism."
Ben Wheatley at the 2017 Empire Awards
Set in 1970s Boston, the film was shot in a warehouse in Brighton, England, over six weeks with an eclectic ensemble of actors led by Brie Larson, who arrived straight from filming her wrenching Oscar-winning role in Room.
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