Ben Wheatley reflects on shooting Meg 2: 'It was like a wild fever dream!'

Ben Wheatley feels as if shooting 'Meg 2' was a "wild-fever" dream.

The 51-year-old director is at the helm of the action film that follows the research team on an exploratory dive into the deepest depths of the ocean and admitted it has been nice to have some "distance" from it in the run-up to the release.

He told Empire Magazine: "I feel like it's nice to have some distance from it, but it also feels like a wild fever dream now. It was a big chunk of time. It was two-and-a-half years, or something, I was on it for, all in all."

In terms of shooting the underwater scenes, Ben went on to explain that it was a really bizarre" world to try to bring to the screen, even though there was no actual filming that took place underwater.

He said: "Huge swathes of the movie are set in and around the Mariana Trench, and you have this really bizarre, pulpy, sci-fi world. But you didn't actually go underwater, so that must have been an interesting challenge. There was some underwater shooting, inside of air locks and stuff filling with water, and then a lot of Statham swimming about underwater. You couldn't do that in CG because the body reacts in a different way. But the dry for wet along the trench, no-one thought for a single second of doing it for real. There's no Nolan-ing about on The Meg, you know. To film down that depth would have been suicide, and we would still be filming it now, having replaced half of our cast through several difficult legal battles.

Before transitioning into directing cinmatic films, Ben had a career in directing advertisments and recalled that scheduling was one of the biggest challenges of the whole thing and struggled to "keep his nerve" throughout the process.

He added: "I had another life as an ads director. And I'd worked on shows with a lot of effects, so that side of it wasn't too daunting. But the challenge of it is the weird scheduling. You have to make decisions that are impossible to change six months beforehand. So you're making decisions on things and it's getting delivered back to you and you look at it and go, 'Oh, that's what I was thinking back then'. and if you want to change your mind it's a lot of frowning faces because it's very expensive. So keeping your nerve doing that is quite difficult.

via Killeen Daily Herald