“As soon as the voice of Tom Hiddleston‘s Dr. Robert Laing was heard speaking narration above his weathered and crazed visage manically moving from cluttered, dirty room to darkened feverish corner, my mind started racing. Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas popped into my consciousness and then his Brazil, after a quick title card shoves us back in time to watch as Laing enters his new concrete behemoth of a housing structure, oppressively standing above a vast and still parking lot. Add the clinical precision of Stanley Kubrick dolly shots and the chaotic, linear social ladder climb of Snowpiercer with a bitingly satirical wit replacing the high-octane action and you come close to describing the masterpiece that is Ben Wheatley‘s High-Rise,” we said in our glowing review.
Following the premiere, the cast of sat down at the Toronto Film Festival to discuss the project based on J.G. Ballard‘s 1975 dystopian novel in which a doctor, played by Hiddleston, moves into a luxury apartment complex that is cut off from the rest of society. Within the building, the eccentric tenants have a very complex world of their own.
The director believes that the Ballard’s novel predicted a lot of issues that our society currently faces. Hiddleston also chimed in on this, “He predicted all of the things that are now part of our world. He predicted social media. He predicted YouTube and the industrialization of the moving image. He said that the way we related to technology would create shifts in our psychological patterns.”
Hiddleston prepared for his role by spending a day with a pathologist and observing autopsies for research. “It was pretty intense,” he said. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done, to see a human body cut open.” Also starring Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss, Sienna Miller, and Jeremy Irons as the building’s architect and owner, check out the full press conference below, which kicks off around the 16-minute mark.
High-Rise premiered at TIFF.
