Top 22 David MacKenzie Quotes

I spent the first part of my career trying to avoid genre because I felt like genre, in some way, was cliche.

Filmmaking is hard. I mean, it’s not that hard, but it is hard to find your way through a system because there’s a lot of people, there’s money, there’s a big machine to kind of make it – and how to find methods and processes that allow it to continue to be a lively process and a creative process.

I have a memory of this experience when I was young, watching ‘Stop Making Sense,’ the Talking Heads concert movie, which is one of the best concert movies ever, and I saw it in a full house in New Zealand, and everyone was cheering between songs, and you really felt like you were part of the audience at the gig.

I used to regard genres as being embedded in cliches, and I always felt funny about the need we have to label things. But I’m happy to think of ‘Starred Up’ as a prison drama, although we tried to smuggle in some elements of family drama in there.

As I get more confident as a filmmaker, I don’t need to prepare so much in advance. I can trust that I and my team can come up with a solution.

Being open to what’s happening in front of you is the most important thing about being a director. To allow the magic to exist and to be light enough on your feet to harness it as it’s happening. That’s what makes cinema interesting.

A lot of cinema is about the game of authenticity – do you feel it’s real?

I don’t have continuity people. I don’t have clapper boards. I don’t have monitors. I shoot very fast, I shoot a lot, and we just keep on going.

I’m definitely going to continue to make films in Scotland, but that doesn’t mean it will be exclusively there, and I don’t have any particular need to wave a flag.

‘Perfect Sense’ is a film about love and catastrophe, which I hope is a powerfully romantic and emotional take on the apocalyptic sub-genre. Its aim is to be a minimalist concept movie – where seismic events occur in simple ways that ask the audience to use their imagination.

Most of the films I’ve tried to make I’ve ended up making. And they don’t necessarily go in the order you want to do. So I haven’t got a huge list of undone films or stuff that’s just been abandoned forever.

Movies tend to be dislocated and non-linear in their process.

I sort of feel like my job is to be a conduit to opportunities, to maximize the creativity of the day itself – because that’s when the cameras are running. That’s the important thing to me. Some of these shots you need to think about in advance; you need to have some ideas for them.

I very rarely read a script that I don’t feel I want to change a lot.

When I started making films, all the theaters, the screen would slide open the widest possible point, and that would be widescreen. But now, theaters are geared up for around 16:9, so scope is now ‘letterboxed.’ In a way, if you want the big picture, you shoot 16:9.

As I get older, I’m looking more and more for films that are actually about something rather than just narrative vehicles.

When you make a movie, you don’t know how it’ll turn out. You can only guess.

Event cinema is what it is, and I understand why it’s successful. It started with things like ‘Jaws,’ which are extraordinary movies. But what we’ve lost are great character films which are beautifully directed and had great movie stars in them. Films that were about something rather than about spectacle.

Somehow, the process of making movies conventionally can dampen creativity because you’ve got to wait in line to do everything the way it’s supposed to be, particularly with actors who are just hanging out waiting for the call.

I like the energy of doing things fast. We shot ‘Starred Up’ in just four weeks, and we edited it in four weeks.

All my films are, in some way, romances. But I’ve always felt that the best romances are somehow doomed.

I think we go to our graves being a bit weird.