David Macken­zie: ​‘My film asks some impor­tant ques­tions about America’

David Macken­zie has been mak­ing fea­ture films since the ear­ly 2000s, work­ing with every­one from Ash­ton Kutch­er to Til­da Swin­ton. But it wasn’t until 2011’s Starred Up that the British direc­tor arguably found his groove. Like that acclaimed prison dra­ma, Mackenzie’s lat­est, Hell or High Water, is a grit­ty, vio­lent and at times dis­arm­ing­ly light-heart­ed dra­ma in which law-break­ing cit­i­zens lash out at the sys­tem. It also fea­tures a late career-best per­for­mance from Jeff Bridges as a vet­er­an Texas Ranger tasked with tak­ing down a cou­ple of bank-rob­bing broth­ers (played with guile and gus­to by Ben Fos­ter and Chris Pine). We spoke to Macken­zie about his love of ​’70s revi­sion­ist west­erns and why he feels so dis­af­fect­ed with con­tem­po­rary main­stream cinema.

LWLies: Hell or High Water is being called an anti-west­ern. What’s your take on that?

Macken­zie: It’s part­ly a west­ern and there are some west­ern themes, but it’s also a road movie, a bud­dy movie and a crime sto­ry. Peo­ple seem to be quite com­fort­able call­ing it a west­ern though, so I’m hap­py to embrace that.

What are some of your favourite movie westerns?

I’m big on the revi­sion­ist west­erns from the ​’70s. You know, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Pat Gar­rett and Bil­ly the Kid, the Ser­gio Leone visions of the west. There was some­thing about the way they were rein­ter­pret­ing the west­ern. Each gen­er­a­tion rein­ter­prets the west­ern and the sen­si­bil­i­ties of each age sort of bends the west­ern, which is inter­est­ing. Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man had that flavour in the mid ​’90s, I guess myself and oth­er peo­ple are doing the same thing now. We’re try­ing to make things con­nect to the now of it all. It’s obvi­ous­ly not cow­boys and hors­es. There’s one scene with a cow­boy on a horse say­ing, ​“Who would ever do this shit for a liv­ing?” It’s a good­bye to the Old West. So that’s the excite­ment of being able to do it from a con­tem­po­rary perspective.

It does feel like there’s a renewed inter­est things like McCabe and Mrs Miller and oth­er films from that period.

They’re great and I think we miss them. I think mod­ern cin­e­ma has moved into enter­tain­ment, and some­times peo­ple realise films can be more than just enter­tain­ment. Of course there are many art­house films that are play­ing that game, but I mean films that have a kind of com­mer­cial pos­si­bil­i­ty. There’s a movie called Charley Var­rick by Don Siegel that real­ly res­onat­ed with me when I read the script of this film. It’s about get­ting one up on the sys­tem in some way and the idea of tak­ing char­ac­ters who are on the fringes but mak­ing the audi­ence warm to them. I’m into lov­ing my char­ac­ters even if they’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly lov­able. There’s some­thing inter­est­ing about the out­law thing going back to Robin Hood and Roby Roy and ​“Pret­ty Boy” Floyd. It’s the idea of good peo­ple doing bad things for arguably good reasons.

In Hell or High Water the two main char­ac­ters per­pe­trate bad deeds, but it always feels like the greater evil is ​‘the system’.

I think we’re swim­ming in those waters and it’s part of what the film is about. That part of West Texas has been rav­aged, and the effects of the finan­cial cri­sis are still being felt. But then there is a sense of things begin­ning to recov­er now. It does feel time­ly though. It’s being released in US cin­e­mas and it seems to be play­ing to both sides of the polit­i­cal fence. The film asks some impor­tant ques­tions about Amer­i­ca with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly answer­ing them.

As in Starred Up, a cloud of vio­lence hangs over this film. But there’s humour here too…

I sort of have an odd rela­tion­ship with comedic moments. There is humour in Starred Up and all my oth­er films – often in odd sit­u­a­tions. I real­ly like that. I like to be able to put some shades of light­ness and dark­ness togeth­er, and some­times that can be awk­ward. There’s actu­al­ly quite a lot of stuff that Jeff did that’s just impro­vised. It’s one of the things I’m most hap­py about. There’s some laugh out loud bits. It slight­ly goes back to that ​’70s thing. You can deal with heavy shit but also have a laugh a bit as well.

There’s opti­mism to it.

That’s a nice way of putting it. Giv­en how the­mat­i­cal­ly depress­ing it is, it is inter­est­ing that there’s some opti­mism there. But the way that I work as a direc­tor is I’m quite jazz about things. There’s always a lot of flex­i­bil­i­ty on the day and I try and under-pre­pare and try and not fix my vision of what’s going on until it’s there. I want a free and loose set that allows mag­ic moments to come out and allows us to be flex­i­ble and bend­ing with the mate­r­i­al. Because that’s what it’s all about, It’s all about when the cam­eras are turn­ing. All the pre-ratio­nal­i­sa­tion of every­thing is all just prep; it’s slight­ly irrel­e­vant. It’s all about what’s hap­pen­ing when you’re rolling.

It wouldn’t real­ly make sense to cast Jeff Bridges if you’re not pre­pared to be a bit loose.

Jeff is great. As I said, there’s a lot of improv there. There’s a lot of mag­ic that just came out, and it’s a great joy to work with all my cast, but there’s the icon of Jeff. To find that he’s loose and cre­ative and embrac­ing what he’s doing is great. And he’s a real­ly fuck­ing great guy. It was a very pos­i­tive experience.

It’s actu­al­ly one of the bet­ter per­for­mances we’ve seen from him in recent years.

I’m delight­ed by that. It was just a mat­ter of Jeff and me click­ing. We worked well togeth­er. All the way through the film I felt like we were doing great stuff. I’m pleased I wasn’t wrong.

What do you love about movies?

Movies are so much part of my life. I love the evo­ca­tion and watch­ing things unfold. It’s an impos­si­ble ques­tion. It’s so much the fab­ric of my life, from a kid onwards. Odd­ly enough, I don’t actu­al­ly see as many movies as I used to now that I’m doing it for a liv­ing. The expe­ri­ence of sit­ting down and watch­ing an hour-and-a-half of a nar­ra­tive unfold, all of the dif­fer­ent tex­tures and strate­gies of engage­ment that cin­e­ma is; it’s great.

When you do get a chance to sit down and watch a movie, what do you tend to watch?

All sorts, althoughI pret­ty much hate the big fran­chise fan­ta­sy movies. I have no con­nec­tion to any of them, so I don’t see them. I guess I’m inter­est­ed in ​‘grown up’ cin­e­ma rather than cin­e­ma for kids.

Have you been offered any­thing of that ilk?

There are always sug­ges­tions float­ing around but I have no inten­tion of doing that. Obvi­ous­ly, all films are fan­ta­sy, but I don’t real­ly like that fan­tas­tic stuff. I’m not a com­ic fan­boy or any of that shit. I sort of hate the fact that it’s so preva­lent. It sort of seems to be push­ing oth­er things out of the way. I hope that soon enough those days will go, but it seems like there’s an unstop­pable appetite to these things.