David MacKenzie

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

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 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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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 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. ”