David Mackenzie Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm really glad Westerns have had a revival. Hopefully our little resurgence will last a while.

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.