Fresh wheat
Generation Z writer-director Ben Wheatley tells DQ about the journey to make his first original television series, his unique approach to filming the six-parter and why the story is more than a zombie horror.
Generation Z, the new Channel 4 series from writer-director Ben Wheatley, can be described as a topical social satire that taps into the modern-day clash between baby boomers and Gen Z.
Yet the six-part series is also a darkly comic, sometimes shocking, blood- and gore-filled horror comedy in which, quite simply, the old eat the young.
In fact, that was the line Wheatley was pitched when he was invited by producer The Forge to consider making his first original television series after becoming a standout British director known for a rich run of horror movies such as Kill List, Sightseers and A Field in England.
“I really enjoyed it,” he tells DQ about making the series, which debuted yesterday. “It’s just good to do so much work, to get to write something that was four-and-a-half hours and to see it all through to the end. To write and direct is a big treat and it was interesting doing something of such a big scale. I really loved it.”
In the show, set in the unremarkable fictional town of Dambury, a chemical leak starts to have an adverse effect on the residents of a nearby care home, and the OAPs, led by Cecily and Frank, escape the clutches of the army and seek to satisfy their sudden angry, violent and insatiable hunger for raw flesh.
On the same night, teenagers Charlie, Kelly, Steff and Finn are living their normal lives dealing with messy feelings and complex relationships while ignoring their exam prep. But they soon find themselves at the centre of the virus outbreak when Kelly’s nan Janine becomes infected and starts to attack her. As the zombie rampage begins to spread, questions abound over what was behind the chemical spill and just what was being transported.
The initial idea of ‘the old eat the young’ was brought to Wheatley by producer George Faber of The Forge, who asked if he would be interested telling a story like that. “And I was like, ‘Oh, right. Is that it? OK, I think I could work with that.’ So it kind of sprung out of that,” the filmmaker says.
That pitch came in 2019, at the same time Wheatley was meant to be helming a new movie adaptation of the Tomb Raider video game. Generation Z was then set to go into production in 2020, before the Covid pandemic shut everything down. Tomb Raider went away, and so too did Generation Z.
“It was weird because the scripts themselves had predicted a lot of the Covid stuff,” Wheatley recalls. “We were looking at it and going, ‘Oh God, this is actually happening now. We can’t make this at this point.’ But then I made [supernatural horror] In the Earth during Covid and then got the job to do [shark thriller] Meg 2.”
Then in 2022, he caught up with Faber, who had recently re-read Wheatley’s first two Generation Z scripts and thought there was still something to the story. The director was “slightly sceptical,” but when he looked over them again himself, he found what had originally been a predictive sci-fi series provided a different viewpoint post-pandemic.
“So I started writing the other episodes from the perspective of having lived through the Covid thing and also having done In the Earth, which helped,” he says. “It probably had been influenced by the original Gen Z scripts, to be honest. So it was a continuation of that kind of thought process. It wasn’t really that thing of, ‘Oh, it took ages to develop.’ It just stopped, and then it started again and it got made.”
When it came to the story, Wheatley didn’t simply want to make good on the “reductive” premise that old people are villains, and instead sought to turn the ‘old eat the young’ idea on its head by making both sides equally sympathetic. “They both have agendas, lives and loves, and what happens then?” he says. “That’s where I kind of approached it [from]. You don’t to get into a situation where you’re setting up villains and bashing them. In the current world, everything’s shades of grey anyway.”
Like science fiction, horror is a genre that can be used to discuss topical issues beneath the blood-covered surface. Indeed, Generation Z confronts subjects such as abusive relationships, social media and toxic masculinity as well as the clash of the generations.
“That’s important,” Wheatley says. “One of the strengths of genre is that you can pack it with stories that are contemporary, but at the same time it’s a welcoming experience for people who like genre stuff. If you made a straight version of it, which was just a show about a town which had all those elements in it, it might feel hectoring or a bit more difficult to digest, but then something like this – which is why I keep going back to genre stuff – gives you a framework of things that people understand and enjoy. Then you can talk about things within that framework.
“It’s like a bargain, isn’t it? You say, ‘I’m going to give you this, but I’m also going to give you a bit of this as well.’ So you like this stuff and you can look at this stuff and think about it as well, rather than going ‘here’s the meal’ and it’s just about how terrible everything is.”
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The way those subjects are addressed makes Generation Z unmistakably a ‘Ben Wheatley series’ – though quite what that means, he isn’t sure. “I just do stuff and that’s that,” he says, remembering a story from the band New Order who, when asked what made their sound unique, replied that it was they only way they knew how to play.
“You just go forward and you make stuff and you react to the material and the performances, and then you react to the footage you’ve got when you cut it and that’s it,” he says of his own methodology. “What people say about it afterwards is the business of critics. I don’t think about it too much in that respect. For art, you’re a filter and things filter through you and come back out, and that’s your statement. Some of it is conscious and some of it is unconscious.”
What Wheatley did want from Generation Z – made in association with Germany’s ZDFNeo and distributor All3Media International – was a pacy, surprising show that keeps viewers on their edge of their seat, whether that is achieved through shocks, emotional moments or a combination of both. Episode one certainly sets the tempo, with one standout scene involving a cockapoo that is nothing if not memorable.
“It’s something I’ve been thinking about since Kill List – what gives you tension when you’re watching something is when there’s suddenly a really hard left or right turn and you’re shocked and you think, ‘I don’t trust the filmmaker anymore. I don’t know what I’m going to get shown next.’ Then after that, it’s much easier to manage tension,” he says. “You don’t really have to show anything again after that. So you do a couple of extreme things and then you just keep managing the tension after that. But if you don’t do that, people just kind of nod off.”
For the series, Wheatley and casting director Ruth O’Dowd assembled a cast of familiar British actors and a roster of up-and-coming screen stars. Sue Johnston (The Royle Family) and Paul Bentall (The World’s End) play Cecily and Frank, with Anita Dobson (EastEnders) as Janine and Robert Lindsay (Sherwood) as Finn’s grandad-figure Morgan. Jay Lycurgo (The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself), Buket Komur (Our House), Lewis Gribben (Somewhere Boy) and Viola Prettejohn (The Nevers) as Charlie, Kelly, Steff and Finn.
Building the cast was “a treat,” Wheatley says. “Sue, Anita and Robert are basically heroes and being in the same room as them was incredible. They were total professionals, nothing fazed them, and they were pitch-perfect every time.
“For the other side of it, we basically had to have quite a deep casting of younger performers. We saw that whole generation of people, pretty much, and that was then broken down into improvised auditions and then into workshops. It was pretty intensive. But once you get over the horror of hearing your own dialogue back from auditions, it was incredibly useful because the confidence started to rise as we saw these people come through. Then you start to think, ‘This is going to be good.’”
On set, Wheatley then brought his filmmaking process to television as he asked his actors to do one take as scripted, before encouraging them to improvise or paraphrase dialogue for the next. It’s an approach he has used for years, and one he believes helps keep everyone on their toes.
“It’s really useful because it rubs the edges off stuff, and you get all the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ that you wouldn’t necessarily get once people are too on their lines,” he says. “We did a readthrough and then we did little workshops with everybody. Then there was a bit of rewriting after that, so it was great to get everyone’s input. Sometimes you can write stuff, but when it’s hard to say, you can identify that stuff up front and get rid of it.
“The thing for me is repeated words as well. My own scripts have loads of them; I can’t stand it and you know they’re all coming out in the edit, so why don’t you just get them on the floor and go, ‘OK, that has to go.’ So it’s reasonably loose.”
As well as being Wheatley’s first original series – he began making Modern Toss for Channel 4 and has helmed episodes of Peter Capaldi-era Doctor Who – Generation Z also marked the first time he had operated the camera on one of his sets, sharing duties with DOP Nick Gillespie (In the Earth, The Virtues).
Gillespie would work on the main parts of the series, before Wheatley would pick up some close-ups. They also used a technique where if there were numerous scenes being recorded in one location, they would film them all at once, moving from scene to scene in quick succession. “It was bonkers, but it meant that, within an hour of the day, you had everything,” he says. “Then you just rinse and repeat and drill into that. We found that was probably the only way we were going to get through [everything] because we had so much to shoot. I’d never done it like that before, and it worked really well.”
With Generation Z now airing, Wheatley jokes that he’ll be “hiding under a rock somewhere” to escape the reaction as he films Bob Odenkirk-led feature Normal, while he is also hopeful Channel 4 will call him to confirm a second season. “That’s the dream,” he says. “Otherwise, you just move on and make something else.”
In fact, the director already has a plan in place for second and third seasons of Generation Z, and such is the nature of making television, he has already begun work on S2. “These days, you have to start writing it now whether they’re going to make it or not,” he adds. “Otherwise you’re putting yourself back six months, so we’ve been working on it and thinking about it. Fingers crossed.”
tagged in: All3Media International, Ben Wheatley, Channel 4, Generation Z, The Forge, ZDFneo