Posted in: Movies, Warner Bros | Tagged: film, meg 2: the trench, the meg, Warner Bros

Meg 2: The Trench Director on Balancing Humor with High-Stakes Action

Meg 2: The Trench director Ben Wheatley is revealing how he managed to balance the film's high-stakes action with its zany, outlandish humor.

If you haven't experienced Meg 2: The Trench yet, you're arguably missing out. Yes, it's completely outlandish, and yes, it's a lot of campy, bloody action, but that's exactly the kind of popcorn movie the summer box office needs because an over-the-top big-budget summer release is as timeless as it gets in modern cinema. Now, the director of Meg 2: The Trench is offering insight into his ability to balance intense action with its indisputably zany humor.

Meg 2: The Trench Director Talks Tonal Challenges

When speaking to Collider about balancing both core genre elements, the film's director Ben Wheatley admits, "That one was tricky because it had been explained to me by the writers that it was maybe possible, partially possible, and the idea of pressure, there is no pressure that will squash you. As it says in the film, the fish don't get squashed, and they're like jellyfish and shit; otherwise, they'd all be flat, wouldn't they? But it was trying to work out a way of explaining because we had test screenings where people went, 'No, no, no, no, no, you can't. That's stupid.' And we had to work out a way of explaining it to them because everyone's been brought up on years of submarine movies where they implode flat. But that's not because of the pressure of the thing; it's because of the oxygen in the submarine…Anyway, it gets complicated."

Wheatley then elaborates, "But yeah, what happens is that when you test it, the film is always going for an extreme, and if it goes over the extreme, then it breaks the next sequence. It's a process of just gently kind of tuning all those bits of extremity so that they don't upset the next bit of the film. We mostly got it right, but occasionally it was like, 'Oh, that's not working.' Then we would edit it and find it. But it was great. I really enjoyed that process of [getting], like, 200 people in a room and then [putting] an infrared camera on them, and you could see what jokes were working and what action was working. It's a massive tool."

Meg 2: The Trench is currently available in theaters worldwide!

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