Ben Wheatley on Blockbuster Success of ‘Backrooms,’ ‘Obsession’

“Bulk” and “Meg 2” director Ben Wheatley thinks “it’s a great time to be a young filmmaker,” pointing to break-out, box-office phenomena like “Backrooms” and “Obsession” as proof that emerging directors are trailblazing new pathways to success — and finding ways to reach new audiences.

Appearing at the Transilvania Intl. Film Festival, where the U.K. filmmaker is on hand to promote his 2025 psychological thriller “Bulk,” Wheatley looked back at his comparatively late start as a director — he was 37 when he released his feature debut, “Down Terrace” — and joked that he’s “a really bad advert” for making it in the film industry.

“‘Backrooms’ and ‘Obsession’ and all these movies are proving my route through the industry was not great,” Wheatley said, recalling how he’d promised himself he’d direct his first feature before the age of 40. “It took me that long to get my shit together. But I couldn’t have done it any other way. It just took me a long time to have the confidence to make something.”

A director best known for moving fast and making the most of micro budgets — he shot “Down Terrace” in eight days for just £6,000 — Wheatley praised the “democratization” of the moviemaking process, thanks to the advent of 21st-century technologies like YouTube that have allowed young directors like 21-year-old Kane Parsons (“Backrooms”) and 26-year-old Curry Barker (“Obsession”) to go from viral online phenomena to bona fide box-office sensations. 

Still, the veteran director cautioned that “as much as the technology has advanced, the distribution has not.” 

“We’re still dealing with a distribution system from 20 years ago,” he said. “As technology has moved on, it’s destroyed great little money earners like DVD and BluRay, which is a shame. There’s less ways of earning money from it at the grassroots than there used to be. But you can make a film. That’s pretty straightforward now.” 

Wheatley’s latest, “Bulk,” which premiered in the Edinburgh Film Festival’s Midnight Madness strand last year, was described by Variety’s chief film critic Guy Lodge as a “hybrid of conspiracy thriller, time-bending sci-fi and goofy genre parody.” In his glowing review out of Edinburgh, Lodge noted that Wheatley was “mischievously [going] back to basics” with his “paranoid lo-fi thriller,” marking the director’s return to the genre-bending, DIY roots that solidified his cult status with films like the 2011 psychological thriller “Kill List” and the 2012 dark comedy “Sightseers.”

The movie — which was quietly shot on a shoestring budget and released just weeks before another Wheatley production, the Bob Odenkirk-starring thriller “Normal,” premiered at Toronto — marked the follow-up to Wheatley’s surprise turn in the director’s chair for the 2023 Warner Bros. blockbuster “The Meg 2: The Trench.”

Following a string of low-budget hits, Wheatley was handed the reins of the sequel to the smash Jason Statham-starring action film about a prehistoric shark run amok in the modern world. (The movie was widely panned by critics — including Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, who called it “a trivial (if not unwatchable) piece of semi-preposterous big-budget junk” — but still racked up nearly $400 million at the global box office.)

Asked by a Transilvania audience member if he enjoyed more creative freedom working with a studio budget, however, Wheatley pushed back.

“Having more money doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want. It means you get to do much less than you want,” he said. “When you make the movie for not much money, you’ve got much less money to get back before everyone gets their money back. And it means your audience can be a lot smaller, and you can make much weirder movies. 

“When you take the big money to do a big movie, you’ve got to get a lot of people to watch it, and they don’t like weird stuff and they want to see something more straightforward, like a man punching a shark,” he added. “Your responsibility as a filmmaker is to get the money back.”

Though Wheatley and Warners might not have seemed like the ideal match on paper, the director — who confessed he’d heard his share of horror stories of “indie filmmakers getting crushed by the studios” — insisted he “had a really good time” leaning into the goofy kitsch of the “Meg 2” production.

“It’s very bright colors and it’s funny and it’s got big action in it. And you get to talk to the global audience,” he said. “[Between] doing low-budget or big-budget, I don’t mind either side. I like making films. But you’ve just got to know what audience you’re talking to when you do it. You don’t want to take the shark movie and then try to make some kind of tone poem about your relationship with your father. That’s going to fall on deaf ears, both from the studio and the audience.”

Widely credited with helping to revive the “folk horror” genre established by cult ’60s and ’70s movies like “The Wicker Man,” Wheatley confessed that it’s an even earlier era of moviemaking that he would love to return to.

“I’m a big fan of Hollywood movies and I’m a big fan of the studio system — certainly of the ’40s and ’50s,” he said. “If I had a genie and I could do anything, [I like] the idea of being a Hollywood director in the ’40s, where you’d be doing a cowboy movie and then doing a musical and then doing an adaptation of a book. It was none of the money nonsense,” he continued. “You were just making stuff. It sounds great to me.”

The Transilvania Intl. Film Festival runs June 12 – 21.