Anyone else remember that old Maxell commercial? Check out this new photo of David Mackenzie :D :D :D
That photo is contained with a
new interview with David in today's Sunday Herald where the director discusses his newest film You Instead. Set to premiere later this week at the Glasgow Film Festival, the piece focuses on the You Instead filming during the T in the Park festival last summer as well as the decision to take on such a daunting task (shooting over 5 days, during a live event with 100,000 errmm highly festive folks) Excerpts:
"Over four days during the 2010 festival, Mackenzie and a skeleton crew filmed almost round the clock to make dark rom-com You Instead, which has its world premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival this week. “It was knackering but amazingly invigorating at the same time,” says the 44-year-old when we meet in the Govan headquarters of production company Sigma. “When you’ve got 100,000 drunk people wandering around, there’s no way you can stop them from doing things or wanting to enjoy themselves or have fun, which is what they’re there for. So you have to flow with that human tide – and sometimes that’s quite scary.
But other times it’s an adrenalin rush.”When they weren’t working, cast and crew grabbed a few hours’ sleep in an enormous tent erected for them in a backstage enclosure. Besides food, the only other thing they stopped filming for was Jay-Z. “There was a moment when we had to drop everything for 10 minutes because we couldn’t get to where we wanted to go because he and his entourage was arriving,” Mackenzie laughs."
....
"Though the cast did a full run-through of Leveritt’s script in Sigma’s Glasgow headquarters before decamping to Perthshire, Mackenzie found himself paring away the dialogue when he started shooting. Words seemed increasingly unnecessary as the ragtaggle splendour of the festival unfolded in front of his camera. “What we got was more magical than I was expecting,” he says. “On the last day, for instance, as we were filming the dawn coming up there were thousands of seagulls all massing around in the rubbish with our characters walking through it. It was apocalyptic and incredibly beautiful – very magical and trippy.”
...
"But Mackenzie had another reason to make You Instead, beyond simply liking the script. After shooting seven features in 10 years – among them Young Adam, Hallam Foe, the Ashton Kutcher vehicle Spread and the upcoming Perfect Sense, starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green – he was bored of what he calls “schedule bashing”. He wanted a change and a challenge, an escape from the “drudge” of by-the-numbers filmmaking. Shooting a free-wheeling story guerilla-style over four days at T in the Park seemed like just the thing.
“As we warmed up and became a cohesive group, we got better and better at it so that, by the end, we were firing so effectively that it was incredibly invigorating,” he says.“The actors loved it too. The whole thing became an immensely creative experience because you’re thinking on your feet and not being held back by anything, which is wonderful.”
Related update: One of the You Instead cast members, actor Gavin Mitchell has given a
fun interview to the Daily Record, where he discusses his band manager character named Boaby :)
"No part, however, has come close to mullet-sporting Boaby, custodian of The Clansman. He was grateful to Boaby's enduring appeal while filming You Instead among unsuspecting T in the Park revellers.
He said: "I was pretending to be blind drunk and off my face. I got a slap in the face at one point and somebody threw a pint but people were generally great. I had to collapse and there was a whole group who looked after me. They picked me up, gave me water, tried to rouse me.
"When the camera crew said cut, I stood up and people were a bit shocked - but one of them went 'Boaby?' and it was fine."
