Top 42 Quotes & Sayings by David MacKenzie
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Scottish director David MacKenzie.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
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.
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.
'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.
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.
Edinburgh is a sort of gothic fairytale city, and it can be a gothic horror city as well.
A lot of cinema is about the game of authenticity - do you feel it's real?
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.
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.
I like the idea of the audience absorbing the language and getting to understand it as they journey through the film. It starts off being more obscure, but you get used to it. A 'Clockwork Orange' thing. I read 'Clockwork Orange' without any vocabulary, and I got to understand the words as I went through it. I like that process. It immerses you.
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.
Movies tend to be dislocated and non-linear in their process.
'Perfect Sense' is an extremely serious film, and I am an extremely serious film-maker who is trying to explore the medium in original and interesting ways.
I always feel like a script is a recipe, and then you bring the elements into the recipe, and you cook with it.
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 like the energy of doing things fast. We shot 'Starred Up' in just four weeks, and we edited it in four weeks.
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 spent the first part of my career trying to avoid genre because I felt like genre, in some way, was cliche.
I really don't want to make the same film twice, so I am conscious of going after material that is significantly different to anything I've done before.
Signature film-making seems rather dull to me; it's about finding something you can do something with and running with the ball.
As a director, when you embrace a project, you try to understand as much as you can about its world, and you do that by embracing and engaging with people who are in that world. Then it's down to your best instincts, which is what most directing is about anyway.
As I get older, I'm looking more and more for films that are actually about something rather than just narrative vehicles.
Food scenes in movies are traditionally nightmares to shoot - you just can't fake eating, and you usually have to repeat it a lot of times to get the angles you need. It's actually quite a lot to ask of actors, and there's really nowhere to hide.
I think we go to our graves being a bit weird.
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.
I very rarely read a script that I don't feel I want to change a lot.
I travel light as a director. I don't have monitors on my set.
I don't have any interest in doing superhero franchise movies. I don't connect to the fantastic, and I'm not a comic person - it's just not my thing, so I'm not looking in that direction - but ambitious films on a big scale I'm very interested in looking at.
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.
All my films are, in some way, romances. But I've always felt that the best romances are somehow doomed.
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.
I'm an international director.
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.
The problem with the British film industry is that it's really the American film industry, or a small branch of in lots of ways because of the common language. But it's great to see some individual voices still there. I think I probably gravitate towards a slightly more European, auteur model rather than the studio thing. I think it would be great if British films were a little bit more auteur driven.
I find most American films annoy me because their third act tends to be tying up loose ends and returning to moral values and killing the monster. I think most of the scripts I read to tend to go in that direction and I find that very, very unsatisfying. I want the stories to have loose ends and to pose some questions - or even say things that aren't too comfortable.
I'm really glad Westerns have had a revival. Hopefully our little resurgence will last a while.
The way I generally work is that I do try to leave as many decisions as I possibly can to the day of, because it feels like that's where you're most in tune to what's going on. 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.
I think that's my approach: If it feels right for a scene to be whole, to hold on without cutting for a long time, then that's great. But other scenes, they don't want it.
America is a country of comparatively recent immigrants, so I'm part of a line there and the old Americans were thrown off their land by the new Americans, and now the new Americans are being thrown off their land by the corporations.
People start realising that I'm a responsible filmmaker and I'm not going to run away with the budget or do anything stupid. I think it probably depends on the subject matter and it depends on who's producing and all those things. My hope is that I'll be allowed to carry on making films.
The problem with American cinema is that because you're making films with huge amounts of money you need to hit the lowest common denominator in order to make it back and so therefore you're not allowed to play with moral ambiguities or ask questions.
I don't have any interest in doing superhero franchise movies. I don't connect to the fantastic and I'm not a comic person, it's just not my thing, so I'm not looking in that direction - but ambitious films on a big scale I'm very interested in looking at. I'm interested in reality, I'm interested in people, so it's just about finding a project I'm interested in.
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