By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: Scottish director David Mackenzie, who helmed Hell Or High Water, Starred Up, Young Adam, Hallam Foe, Asylum, Perfect Sense, Outlaw King, Relay, Fuze and more.
Like many UK-born directors currently working, David Mackenzie goes seemingly quietly about his business, earning individual praise for his various films, but not really receiving due credit for the consistent richness of his cinematic oeuvre. Perhaps because he works across a variety of genres, and frequently delivers films of a commercial bent, Mackenzie has not quite become a critical or festival darling, and isn’t discussed as a modern auteur. But although he’s made comedies, dramas, neo-westerns and even a musical, Mackenzie definitely has recurring themes and motifs in his canon, with two main columns emerging: sexual complexity and criminal activity, often derived from literary adaptations.
Born in 1966 in Corbridge, Northumberland, England, but raised in Scotland, David Mackenzie was born into a military family, and developed an interest in the arts in his late teens. He did, however, apply for the military services (“I think I wanted to impress my dad,” Mackenzie has said), but failed due to his poor hearing. Though principally interested in poetry and photography, Mackenzie had a “revelation” at age eighteen when he saw four films in one day: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio and Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise. “Those films blew my mind,” Mackenzie has said. “Those things sort of added up to make me want to become a filmmaker.”
Mackenzie studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, and began his directorial career with a series of award-winning shorts: Dirty Diamonds (1994), California Sunshine (1997), Somersault (1999) and Marcie’s Dowry (2000). Mackenzie made his feature debut in 2002 with the low budget drama thriller The Last Great Wilderness, a little seen effort made in tandem with his brother Alistair Mackenzie, who co-wrote and stars in the film. Shot on video and echoing the Brit classic The Wicker Man, the film follows two disparate men who find themselves at the mercy of a deranged psychiatrist at a Scottish Highlands retreat. Despite its rugged, shot-on-video visual aesthetic and affront to slick professionalism, The Last Great Wilderness scored a number of festival berths, and got Mackenzie duly noticed.
The emerging director got a wider release on his 2003 follow-up Young Adam, a sexually frank adaptation of Scots beat writer Alexander Trocchi’s cult novel in which Ewan McGregor’s young drifter interrupts the lives of Peter Mullan and Tilda Swinton’s married couple, while suspicion swirls about the recent murder of a young woman. Boasting an atmosphere redolent with grit and desperation, and bold, uninhibited performances from its excellent cast, Young Adam was Mackenzie’s real entry into mainstream cinema, and was also the first of the director’s films to tackle themes of sexual obsession and emotional disquiet. Young Adam also features a slew of confrontational sex scenes, including one unforgettable moment involving custard.
The intense drama Asylum (from a book by Patrick McGrath, adapted by no less than Patrick Marber) followed in 2005, in which Natasha Richardson’s psychiatrist’s wife engages in a torrid, feverishly sexual affair with one of her husband’s patients (Marton Csokas), who is incarcerated for the violent murder of his wife. “In America, the word ‘adult’ has come to indicate fairly strong pornography, whereas elsewhere in the world it means mature and grownup themes,” Mackenzie has said of his highly sexualised films. “I like to think I’m helping to reclaim the notion of being an adult. In both Asylum and Young Adam, sexuality is not really romantic; it comes from an inner place or a need that has to be fulfilled. It’s not motivated by romance or the traditional things. By Hollywood standards, that may be shocking, as if something used to sell beer can actually be a transformative experience.”
Mackenzie shifted gears somewhat with 2007’s Hallam Foe, a coming-of-age black comedy adapted from Peter Jinks’ book, though its tale of a peeping tom with serious mother issues once again puts unconventional sexuality at the forefront. Driven by perverse relationships, blackmail, near murder and all manner of dysfunction, it’s another dark tour through the sexual psyche from Mackenzie. The director still had sex on his mind with his raunchy 2009 US debut Spread, but in a far more comical form, with this satire about an LA gigolo (Ashton Kutcher) shacked up with an older woman (Anne Heche).
A detour into science fiction was next, but 2011’s Perfect Sense still had all of the things that were beginning to become trademarks of Mackenzie’s work. The film is deeply psychological in nature, and again tracks the human sexual impulse to something of an endpoint, as a chef (Ewan McGregor) and a scientist (Eva Green) fall in love amidst a bizarre epidemic which robs people of their sensory perceptions, one by grueling one. Per the condition, the loss of each sense is preceded by an intense feeling or action, allowing Mackenzie to stage a number of scenes characterised by staggering desperation and excess. The manner in which the world responds to its collective loss of sensory perception is another fascinating facet of this daring and compelling work.
Echoes of Michael Winterbottom reverberated through 2011’s You Instead (aka Tonight You’re Mine), in which two rival rock stars (Luke Treadaway, Natalia Tena) are handcuffed together at Scotland’s T In The Park music festival, and must endure each other for 24 hours before coming to a deeper understanding of their differences and ultimate sense of connection. Filmed at the festival in 2010, the film features performances from artists like Paloma Faith and Paolo Nutini, and is something of an anomaly on Mackenzie’s resume, though it’s certainly an enjoyable one. “It was made in a very speedy way with a punk rock vibe to it,” Mackenzie said of the film. “It’s a very light and fun romantic comedy.”
After his lightest film, Mackenzie made his darkest and most powerful up to that point with the bruising 2013 prison drama Starred Up. A bold take on the often bloody banged-up genre, Mackenzie applies his incisive psychological approach to the material, creating something truly different and ultimately unforgettable. In a powerful turn, Jack O’Connell plays Eric, a young and violent juvenile offender who “graduates” to adult prison, where he is thrown into the path of his convict father Neville (Ben Mendelsohn in a staggering performance), a career criminal and big house hardman who casts a very long shadow. To call the relationship between the two volatile would be an understatement, and it plays out with savage fury in this cruelly under-appreciated father-son drama that should have been hailed as one of the best of the year.
“I was looking for an opportunity to do something that was much more realistic, that was grounded in a kind of reality or a truth and that was playing a slightly more hardboiled straight game,” Mackenzie told The Skinny. “Up until now I’ve never really made a proper genre movie. I’ve been trying to kind of fit between genres or mix genres or whatever, and I was also uncomfortable with pure realism. But this felt like it was a real opportunity to do something kind of…straight. That was really exciting for me.”
If Starred Up was arguably Mackenzie’s best film at that point in his career, he topped it with his next. A wonderful exercise in émigré filmmaking, Mackenzie next took on the western genre, and cast a fresh eye on both the American landscape and the nature of its myths and storytelling. Restaging the most American of genres in the modern era, 2016’s masterful Hell Or High Water tracks the tragic journey of two brothers (career bests from Chris Pine and Ben Foster) who go on a bank robbery spree to save their family farm. In pursuit is a veteran Texas Ranger (a magisterial Jeff Bridges) and his Native American partner (Gill Birmingham). Though simple on the page, this is a towering work (the script is from Yellowstone main man and Unsung Auteur Taylor Sheridan) that digs deep into the concept of Americana itself, and should have been hailed as a major work. It was certainly acclaimed, but not nearly enough.
“The script had a great sense of place, of character, of the world it belonged to,” Mackenzie told Den Of Geek. “I loved the way the story unfolded. This was exactly the type of American film I want to make. It seemed to tap into the DNA of a lot of great 70’s American movies. It had my name on it, put it that way. I felt very connected to it. I’m always looking for something that surprises me in some way and hopefully something that isn’t the same film that you thought it was when you started reading it, so that your expectations are being confounded and this is one of those. I didn’t think we needed to change a word. It was beautifully formed. It was a spec script, so it didn’t ever go to a development process. We didn’t take it through a development process, which is great. We just took the material and ran with it.”
Emboldened by what was his largest film yet in terms of scope, Mackenzie went even bigger with 2018’s historical drama Outlaw King, which follows the brutal life and times of Scottish king Robert The Bruce, played by Chris Pine. Though different from much of his work, Outlaw King certainly boasts Mackenzie’s characteristic earthiness, and he never shies away from the brutality of this very Scottish story, which had fascinated the director for many years. “Robert The Bruce is quite a complex hero,” Mackenzie told The Courier. “It’s about unpicking the mythology, getting under the skin, and trying to be as historically accurate as we can for a medieval drama. It’s been a challenge to make an entertaining film while hanging onto the historical reality of an iconic figure. I wanted to make an epic realist film that in its own way stood against the tide of fantasy filmmaking. It’s been fascinating to explore historical information that I myself was unaware of and hopefully people will learn things they too may not have known about.”
Mackenzie returned to the world of criminal activity with the slick 2024 thriller Relay (starring Sam Worthington, Riz Ahmed and Lily James), before going into full action mode with the recent release Fuze, which tracks the chaos that ensues when an unexploded bomb is discovered in the middle of London. Boasting solid turns from Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Theo James, Sam Worthington and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, this is a big, ambitious step forward for Mackenzie, and proves him to be a filmmaker capable of capturing major on-screen tension and excitement while never letting go of his characters and their personal motivations.
With a highly impressive body of work – often intense, frequently profound, and sometimes sexually charged – David Mackenzie deserves far greater recognition, both for his uncompromising artistry and for the regularity with which he creates bold, highly original cinema. “Every time you finish a film, you’re essentially unemployed,” David Mackenzie once said. “So you need to keep moving.”
Fuze is in cinemas now. Click here for our review.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Alan Rudolph, James Lee Barrett, Edwin “Bud” Shrake, Joan Tewkesbury, Jamaa Fanaka, Jack Starrett, Joseph Sargent, Jeffrey Schwarz, George Sidney, Philip Dunne, Zak Hilditch, Luke Sparke, Cyrus Nowrasteh, Morgan Matthews, Tom Laughlin, Diane Keaton, Ed Hunt, Nancy Savoca, Robert Vincent O’Neil, Marvin J. Chomsky, Sam Firstenberg, Jack Sholder, Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
