His last film, High Rise, was about societal meltdown. His latest is an absurdist action flick about a gun deal gone wrong. To bring order to the chaos, he mapped it out in 3D first ...

Ben Wheatley is on top of the world in the penthouse suite, where the only way to go is down. He is lolling, shoeless, on the sofa, perfectly at ease amid the room’s swagged black curtains and gold-embossed wallpaper, like Tony Montana in act two of Scarface. The glass doors open on to a capacious roof terrace. It’s just a short, hard drop from the summit to the street.

Some directors like to soar. Wheatley, by contrast, enjoys the plunge. In High Rise – his 2015 adaptation of the JG Ballard book – a literal fall from the terrace provides the cue for a full-blown societal meltdown. Kill List lost itself in the woods, daubing itself with occult runes. A Field in England took a left turn into a tent on the heath and then promptly lost its marbles. These are films that pitch towards chaos, dragging the audience along for the ride. “I’m very influenced by Tom and Jerry,” he says with such frowning seriousness that I have no reason to doubt him. “I like the structure of those cartoons, the rise and the fall. The little run of steps up and then whoosh, down you go.”

In person, thank heavens, Wheatley is reassuringly down-to-earth; a film nerd made good, on the cusp of middle age, stroking at his beard and planting his feet on the table. He is nothing like his films, which is surely for the best. Imagine if he were: the whole interview would implode. The publicist would find us both dead on the floor, doors smashed, curtains aflame.

Instead we talk about Free Fire, his latest picture, which gathers its characters for an illicit gun deal. One minute, they’re bickering over payment and ballistics. The next, whoosh, down they go in a hail of bullets that unfolds in real time for upwards of an hour. The film is at once immaculately conceived and utterly silly; an action flick spun into absurdist theatre. We watch these sweaty, desperate idiots crawl on their bellies for cover, or dance like dervishes on wounded legs. “I’ve forgotten whose side I’m on!” wails one man from the shadows.

I’m very influenced by Tom & Jerry. I like the rise and the fall. The run of steps up then whoosh, down you go Ben Wheatley

Free Fire was prompted in part by an FBI report of a Miami shootout. It detailed the ineptitude and the carnage; the bozos who kept missing, even at point-blank range. Wheatley – in collaboration with his wife, Amy Jump – plotted the film along much the same lines. “Lots of maps, lots of building. First, I built the set in Minecraft in 3D, so as to be able to walk around the space and ensure that everyone was in the right position.”

In a more conventional picture, the shootout would last for maybe 10 minutes, tops. Here it gets pushed front and centre. This tests the narrative elastic, daring the audience to stick with the drama. “Well, it’s a conceptual conceit, isn’t it? It’s like saying: ‘You like cake? How much cake can you eat? OK, have all the cake. And then look, here’s some more.’”

Nominally set in late-70s Boston (and executive produced by Martin Scorsese), Free Fire was actually shot in Wheatley’s home town of Brighton. A cast of heavy hitters (Brie Larson, Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy) spent their days in a dark, dirty warehouse just 100 metres from the local supermarket. “People have said: ‘Oh, is this film an attempt to be more commercial?’” he scoffs. “But they’re all commercial, or are meant to be.”

I cast my mind back to A Field in England, a grungy civil war freakshow plagued with hallucinations and as cheap as chips. Was that one meant to be commercial too? “Well, it was commercial,” the director insists. “Self-evidently it was, because it didn’t cost any money. So within that framework, it made commercial sense. If I’d made it for £6m, it would have been a huge mistake.”

Wheatley’s wild stylings, then, come allied to a keen business acumen. He cut his teeth as an animator, specialising in online virals. The internet served as a nursery slope, or a kind of virtual open-mic circuit where he could hone his craft and see how it played with the public. He won a Cannes Lion award in 2006 and then branched into TV, directing episodes of Modern Toss and the The Wrong Door. He shot his debut feature – the 2009 Oedipal gangster yarn, Down Terrace – in eight days flat, employing a stopwatch to ensure it came in on schedule.

In terms of influences, he’s a gorger. He reveres Nic Roeg and Ken Russell, those two untameable renegades of 70s British cinema. But he also loves Ken Loach and John Carpenter, Jean-Luc Godard and Ridley Scott. His work is a series of jarring juxtapositions. The critics can’t help but cross-reference him to death. Reviewing Down Terrace in the Observer, for instance, Philip French described it as “Brighton Rock reworked in the style of The Royle Family”. Appraising 2012’s Sightseers in the same publication, Mark Kermode described it as “pitched somewhere between Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers”.

I’ve got a problem with the neatness of life. It’s never neat, is it? Cruelty and randomness feels more honest to me Ben Wheatley

I suspect that he enjoys wrongfooting the viewer. Wheatley’s films have a habit of splattering on impact and of dividing an audience. I thought High Rise was great; many others despised it. Maybe he regards that as a badge of honour. “Oh, no,” he says, looking abruptly deflated. “I mean, yeah, sometimes people are shocked or horrified. But I’m never happy about them not liking my work. This isn’t me saying: ‘Yah-boo-sucks.’ It’s me thinking: ‘I like this sort of stuff and I hope others do too.’ So I feel sad when people get cross about it. I think: ‘Oh, fuck. Must try harder.’”

On completing a film, Wheatley likes to take it on tour and engage with the audience. Jump is not like that at all. She is happier at home in Brighton, away from the limelight, even though he feels that the films are as much hers as his. “She’s just private,” he explains. “She thinks that the work is the work and it should speak for itself. The problem is that, on the face of it, I wind up taking all the credit. Which is wrong. It’s distorted.”

Next up, he thinks they will make a sci-fi film, Freak Shift. Looking further afield, there is talk of a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, and then maybe a big studio picture: an adaptation of the graphic novel Hard Boiled by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow. He chuckles. “One day, Amy and I would like to make stuff that’s a bit more optimistic and happy. We’re not getting there yet – and I hardly think we’re likely to get there in the next few films either. But our goal is to make something like What’s Up, Doc?. Something funny and happy, where nobody dies. But we’re just a bit dark. It’s hard to get to the sunshine.”

Free Fire explodes and High Rise plunges. A Field in England staggers out of the tent in a state of mad-eyed disarray. So what, exactly, is Wheatley’s beef with the traditional three-act structure? What has he got against a straightforward happy ending? “I don’t think I have a problem with happy endings,” he says. “I’ve got a problem with the neatness of life. Because it’s never neat, is it? Cruelty and randomness just feels more honest to me. When I see stuff which has a really good resolution and everything is all right, I think: ‘What the fuck?’ Because a happy ending is only the point at which you choose to end the film. I mean, if you ended the story a few years later, it probably wouldn’t be so happy. They’d only have got themselves into still more trouble.”

He stares out at the roof terrace with its vertical drop on to the London street. “Also, there’s no such thing, because we all die, and what’s so happy about that? Unless you die while knocking one out on top of an atomic bomb.” He barks a brief laugh: “And even then there’s a downside.”

Free Fire is out on 31 March