Scottish film director David Mackenzie is perhaps best known for his intense and poetic novel adaptations of Alexandra Trocchi’s ‘Young Adam’ (2003) and Peter Jinks ‘Hallam Foe’ (2007). He arrives at this year's Galway Film Fleadh as the Director in Focus where both ‘Young Adam’ and ‘Hallum Foe’ will be screened alongside his newer ventures ‘Perfect Sense’ and ‘You Instead’ to tie in with the FÁS Screen Training Ireland Director’s Masterclass he will be giving on Sunday 10th July. IFTN caught up with the award winning master filmmaker to discuss his latest work.
‘You Instead’ follows the story of two feuding rock stars (Luke Treadaway, Natalia Tena) who are handcuffed together for 24 hours at a music festival where they are both due to perform. Filmed entirely over four and a half days at Scotland’s leading music festival ‘T in the Park’, it marks a departure from some of the darker tones of Mackenzie’s previous work. When I mention this movement towards more hopeful films, Mackenzie laughs acknowledging “Definitely 'You Instead' is the lightest one I’ve done and I have to say I’m quite happy about that because it doesn’t feel like it is dishonestly light. It’s just because it happened over a very short time frame so it doesn’t need to get into the heavy stuff.” Mackenzie goes on to say that “it’s a fun, feel-good movie and it’s very atmospheric. I’m looking forward to seeing how the audience in Galway respond to it.”
You Instead |
So what drew Mackenzie to make a full feature film over the space of just four days? “Essentially we wanted to make a film in a music festival and we wanted to capture the atmosphere of a festival so we had to be there. 100,000 people having wild times is not something you can really recreate. We had no real choice; the festival is only there for four or five days. Then they pack up and go on so if we wanted to capture the atmosphere, we had no choice but to find a way of doing it really really quickly,” explains Mackenzie. The tight schedule meant that the style of filmmaking had to change. “We just embraced that idea and evolved a method of filmmaking that was just much more spontaneous. The actors were able to sort of adjust what they were doing to fit the circumstances. If something wasn’t available to us in one angle, we’d just change. We thought on our feet all the time.” He describes the process as being “incredibly liberating” saying “I really enjoyed it. Normally film making can be sort of slow and painstaking and we just didn’t have a chance to do that.” And as for the result? Mackenzie describes it as a “romantic comedy. It doesn’t look like a documentary or anything. It looks pretty smart and it has some great production values. But it has a fantastic energy to it and it somehow captures the atmosphere of a festival in a way that probably doing it any other way wouldn’t have captured.”
Mackenzie describes filming at the festival was a trade off of sorts. While on the one hand there were difficult circumstances which forced them to be fairly loose with the script, this also gave the feature an energy that made it come alive: “
I think the essence of the script is very much there but we filled in gaps and adjusted things and improvised things. I quite like that little bit of improv with my work anyway. You’re not doing things by rote; you are making them come alive. You just have to accept that you are probably only going to get one take of it like that. So that’s how it is. The idea of endless repetition in filmmaking just goes out the window. And then obviously the edit becomes more complicated as well because you have material that is coming from all sorts of different aesthetics and you are trying to stick it together.”
Mackenzie’s other new feature is also a departure of sorts for the Scottish director as it marks his first attempt at a sort of apocalyptic Science Fiction. Describing ‘You Instead’ and ‘Perfect Sense’ as the “yin and yang to each other,” Mackenzie says it is “fun that they are out at almost the same time but are such different films.” Starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green, ‘Perfect Sense’ tells the story of a chef and a scientist who fall in love as an epidemic begins to rob people of their sensory perceptions. Mackenzie explains why the script appealed to him: “I’m not a sci-fi buff or anything like that. Part of the reason why I am attracted to the movie in the first place is that I felt it was a poetic and quite a contained way of dealing with some of themes that the story was about. I liked that it wasn’t a big sort of effects laden, bombastic type approach to the material. It’s downbeat sci-fi, un sci-fi…I thought it was a really interesting proposition as a story and I really loved the potential poetic ways that it was expressing itself and I was really drawn to that side of it.” In ‘Perfect Sense’ Mackenzie worked with Ewan MacGregor for the second time (previously on ‘Young Adam’) and a lot of the same crew which he says helps because “you develop a shorthand with people. But at the same time it’s a different journey so you almost have to start again. You’re finding a new character; you’re going through a different process. For me the process of making a movie every day is a voyage of discovery. You are taking a piece of paper and some ideas and every day you inhabit whatever scene you happen to be doing.”
Mackenzie is currently working on another “space movie” script at the moment, an adaptation of Toby Litt’s novel ‘Journey Into Space’. Mackenzie describes it as a “generational sci-fi about people who have to live, die and breath on a space ship because it takes about 300 years to get where it is going to. Each generation rebels against the last one. It’s a very high concept, a trip sci-fi rather than adventure sci-fi.”
This new script is one of the many novel adaptations that Mackenzie has brought from the page to screen. When asked how he approached the adaptation of the book, Mackenzie referred to the ideas of German director Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum, The Voyager). “He said that the easiest books to adapt were the ones that were least cinematic because somehow or other you had to take the material and convert it. Whereas books that feel very cinematic you actually tend to stay so close to the original material that you are almost fighting against the book all the time. If you just have to take the best bits or the things that you need from the book and they restructure or adjust for the translation to the new medium, then it somehow makes it easier. I think that is probably true. When I adapted the book ‘Young Adam’ I did that very faithfully although there was an obvious narration in it and we abandoned the narration. But I kept a lot of the structural things and I kept as much as I could of the book.
“I adapted ‘Hallam Foe’ and there were certain areas where we had to restructure it and there was a different kind of a freedom there. It’s an interesting process and I have found it easier to adapt books than originate new material. Probably because I’m not talented enough to do that. But the advantage it gives you is that it is something to kick against. And it exists in its own right before you’ve even started it. You are trying to find solutions to the problem rather than trying to find problems in the first place. In terms of producing films it’s easier to be able to say, ‘well here’s a book read it, what do you think?’ Before you’ve even started it.”
Tilda Swinton and Ewan McGregor in Young Adam |
Mackenzie’s adaptation of ‘Young Adam’ received four BAFTA Scotland awards for Best Director, Best Film and Best Actress for Tilda Swinton and Best Actor for Ewan McGregor. The project was a labour of love for Mackenzie, but it took ten years of planning to get it made. Mackenzie knows all too well how hard it can be for young filmmakers saying “It’s a long game. Very few directors get to make their first feature below the age of 35. I don’t quite understand why that is but obviously things are changing now with new technology and people can make films much more out of their bedroom than they used to be. But you know it’s a long game and its not just about one film, it’s about body of work. Keep on plodding. I know that sounds like boring advice. I hear these stories about how directors only get to make one feature because either they are exhausted or because it went wrong or whatever…but I would say that it is not just about one film.” Looking back on his own early feature ‘Young Adam’, Mackenzie still feels attached to it. “I am fond of it. If nothing else it was a brave attempt to try…I’m not sure if I succeeded or not. Ewan feels very fond of that film as well. In a weird kind of a way the film is about lost innocence. There was a kind of innocence to the process of making it. It was my second feature but the first one was made in a kind of archaic way and this was my real first feature.”
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‘You Instead’ will be released in Ireland by Icon on September 9th and ‘Perfect Sense’ will be released on October 7th 2011 by Arrow.
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Mackenzie will also be at the Galway Film Fleadh to give Director’s Masterclass on Sunday July 10th.
