DIRECTOR EXCLUSIVE
The Root Cause
Humanity faces a fungal threat in In The Earth, Ben Wheatley’s folk-horror response to the pandemic
SCI-FACT!
Clint Mansell’s In The Earth score is available now as a digital album (invada.bandcamp.com).
WHAT DID YOU accomplish during lockdown? Learn conversational Spanish? Reorganise the shed? Just change out of pyjamas before tea-time? Congratulations – but your achievement pales beside that of Ben Wheatley, who wrote and filmed a movie.
The director began writing the script for In The Earth in the second week of the first lockdown, then shot it during the UK’s brief summer respite from Covid-19, across 15 days in August. “It was partially processing what was happening and trying to stay calm,” Wheatley tells Red Alert, “and to have more of a purpose than dog-walking and baking banana bread.”