Alex Leith talks film storyboarding with director Ben Wheatley.

“Creating storyboards enables you to watch the film before it’s been made. As a director, it gives you control of the film you’re making.”
So says Ben Wheatley, the Sussex-based film director known for his genre-shifting versatility, the mind behind such movies as the psychological thriller Kill List (2011), the experimental psychedelic folk-horror A Field in England, the dystopian sci-fi High-Rise (2015), the Gothic romance Rebecca (2020) and the blockbuster monster movie Meg 2: The Trench (2023). Surrealism and satire thread through all these works, as he explores the banality of evil with a distinctly British twist. Since 2015 – like Kurosawa, Scorsese and Ridley Scott before him – storyboarding has become a key part of his filmmaking process.

“As a kid, I really wanted to be a cartoonist,” he tells me, over a coffee in a Sussex country pub. “Comics influenced me massively… that was a time when there wa...