David Mackenzie‘s made a career out of telling small, intense stories on small, economical budgets. With Perfect Sense he goes somewhere only a few filmmakers have dared to traverse: low-budget science fiction. For every Duncan Jones (Moon) success story are 10 Danny Boyle (Sunshine) way over budget cautionary tales.
Mackenzie talked with TFS about the ambitiously optimistic tone of his dire scientific fable, the benefit of working with familiar faces and two new projects he’s excited about, one of them another foray into science fiction.
TFS: What was it that interested you in this particular script?
Mackenzie: Well, I had just been in America making a movie and I went back home and I was working at my production company, Sigma Films, again and then it was pretty much like a week after I’d arrived back from L.A. and the script came to me from the Danish film company, named Tropa, who we’ve had a relationship with for some time, and I thought I’d give it a read. And the first ten pages I really didn’t understand and then suddenly it kind of gripped me. And it blew me away really by the time I finished it and I thought ‘well that could be an amazing, original, cinematic movie.’ So I jumped at the opportunity really. And the script that I read was, the film we made is quite different in lots of ways…
This is your first foray into science fiction. Was it a genre you’ve always wanted to explore?
Well, there’s only a small…the sci-fi element I guess is tied to the present. Do you know what I mean? There’s a sense that it could be a sort of plausible near future as opposed to something further away. I didn’t – actually I’m about to start writing another sci-fi script so I’m probably, by myself, drawn to that. But I think that there’s something about the way that are time is right now where we are aware of the finite resources of the earth and the technology is getting faster and faster. The near future and this future seem to be kind of merging with general narratives. And I think there’s something attractive about that at this point.
Was [screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson] on set, as you said there were some changes?
Well, we worked together on the script for quite a few months. I think he didn’t come on set at all. He was there a couple of weeks before we started. It coincided with his wife having a baby so he wasn’t available- he lives in Denmark and we shot in Scotland – so no. Not because we wanted to avoid him; he was busy dealing with the baby.
How was it working with Ewan McGregor again? Does it help that you’ve worked with him before?
Yeah, it was very interesting because a lot of the people on the film were people I’d worked with before: my production company (Sigma Films), DP (Giles Nuttgens), [Costume] Designer (Trisha Biggar), Ewan [McGregor], Ewen Bremner I’ve worked with him. You know it’s really great to be, if you can, making films with your mates and making films with people you have a short hand with. And the themes of the film, some of them, were quite sort of big, so it’s nice to deal with those things with people you know and trust. So it was very nice to back and work with Ewan again.
There’s never an explanation for how these senses are lost. Were you ever worried that this ambiguity would make it hard for viewers to suspend their sense of disbelief?
I mean I – it’s a fictional disease, isn’t it? None of it is that far away. When we were explaining the idea of disease to people in all of the various agencies that protect against epidemics and things like that they were saying ‘oh wow, that would be interesting.’ And science takes a long time to catch up. It’s not, you know, even if something like that happened and there were possibilities of cures and all of those kind of things then people would very, very – it would take a long time to process all of that information. We know what a Swine Flu is but that took a while.
And this thing happens quite quickly so the notion that scientists are somehow able to always be ahead of the curve rather than reacting and being behind it and sometimes not getting as far as they need to go to seeing what it is before its too late; it feels very plausible to me. If audiences need to be given bigger pointers then that’s for them. There isn’t any science to really add to it. I could have given the audience a lot more of people sitting around in white coats and it would not have got them any further. They say at the end that it is some kind of contagion but they didn’t realize it to begin with.
What makes the film risky in its own way is how optimistic it remains throughout –
When I read the script there was something very life-affirming about it. The idea that people can adapt…do you know some of those old World War II bombers that would have four engines and they’d lose one engine, they’d get it hit and then they’d sort of wobble a bit and then they’d carry on flying. And then they’d lose another engine and then they ‘d wobble a bit more and find their way and fly a bit slower, a bit lower and a bit more cumbersomely. Then they’d lose another engine and they would still be flying. Human beings deal with that. The idea that people of our grandpa’s generation, that was their science fiction. And I don’t know how much of that is true, but people are constantly confronted with adaptations and possibilities and deal with it without even thinking about it .The idea of taking that as a sort of optimistic, human positive thing seemed to be a really beautiful way of expressing the humanity and the magic of humanity.
What past films did you take from to create this world?
There are three films that I particularly liked in reference to the film. One was the movie La Jette by Chris Marker, French filmmaker, that then became 12 Monkeys. But La Jetee is told very minimally and very beautifully and it was sci-fi but in a very, very simple way. Another one is another film from a similar period called Alphaville, which is again a low-key sci-fi, although very dystopian. I thought the tone of that was really interesting. And then there’s a British film called Radio On. Ironically, all three of those movies are in black-and-white. I don’t quite know why. There’s something about the tone of Radio On, again the sort of minimalism and the effortlessness I thought was very interesting. Now you obviously wouldn’t take a reference from a movie and just – you’re not aping them you’re just catching vibes and saying ‘oh that’s interesting. How would they do that scene in that circumstance?’ It’s a way of thinking about the job you’ve got to do.
What’s next? I see you have You Instead in post?
You Instead is just about to finish. It gets its world premiere the 25th of February in Glasgow [Film Festival] and then it comes to SXSW where it’ll have its U.S. Premiere. And it’s great, fire-and-ice romance set in a music festival in Scotland and it’ll take place over about a day and a half. We shot in a live location at a music festival. We shot the film in four days which was an incredible experience; a very liberating and wild and crazy and exhausting experience. But the result is we’ve got a very intense, apt movie filled with lots of festival texture. I think it will find an audience. I think it will be good.
The other sci-fi film I’m doing is called Journey Into Space, a generational sci-fi about people leaving Earth. It’s going to take them 20 years to get to where there going so they have to breed on the ship and there’s no cryogenics or time travel. You realize how much of science fiction is based on cryogenics and time travel, which are not, in the near future, plausible. So it kind of grounded this too, which I think is kind of interesting. The first generation of professional astronauts and the second generation are not the same. The way they view the world is very different. And it’s always three different areas of human life. The first [generation]’s very professional, the second’s Bacchanalian and the third becomes very religious. That’s the point of the story where they decide to turn the ship back to Earth. But there’s something very philosophical about it and could make a very interesting space travel movie.
Are you a fan of Mackenzie’s work? Excited to check out Perfect Sense?