David Mackenzie interview: ‘Hell or High Water shines a light on the raw nerves of contemporary America’

As the hit neo-Western is released on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK, The Independent talks to the film’s British director about star Jeff Bridges and learning to stop worrying and love the genre

David Mackenzie’s films have long won critical praise but only recently has that translated into box-office success (Rob Latour/Variety/Rex/Shutterstock)

Since the release of his debut feature The Last Great Wilderness in 2002, David Mackenzie has amassed a distinctive body of work without ever quite nailing the formula for box-office success.

Despite winning admiring notices and boasting actors of the calibre of Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Peter Mullan, Jamie Bell and Eva Green, films like Young Adam (2003), Hallam Foe (2007) and Perfect Sense (2011) failed to translate promise into ticket sales. That all changed in 2014, however, when Mackenzie’s prison drama Starred Up crossed the crucial £1m mark in the UK, inspired in part by festival buzz surrounding the ferocious central performance of young lead Jack O’Connell.

Last summer saw Mackenzie follow up that hard-won triumph with another unapologetic genre piece, Hell or High Water, a neo-Western about bank robbers in contemporary Texas starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine and Ben Foster. The film was scripted by Taylor Sheridan, currently the hottest writer in Hollywood after penning Sicario (2015), and proved to be Mackenzie’s most commercially successful to date, taking $27m (£22m) at the US box office on a budget of just $12m.

Speaking to The Independent just after Hell or High Water had secured three Golden Globe nominations – including a nod for Best Motion Picture – Mackenze is in jubilant mood. “I’ve never had a film which has had so many people coming to me and saying how much they like it. It’s incredibly gratifying that it’s been touching people in interesting ways.”

Ben Foster and Chris Pine as brothers Tanner and Toby Howard in ‘Hell or High Water’

As for his awards season prospects, the director is more reticent: “I’ve no idea how to take those kinds of things. I’m very pleased the film is getting recognised so it’s all good. I’m not a particularly competitive guy but it’s nice to know the film has been appreciated and people are responding to it.”

Mackenzie says he chose Hell or High Water as his next project after Starred Up on the strength of Sheridan’s screenplay. “I immediately fell in love with the opportunities the script had. I’d spent a bit of time in west Texas before and so was familiar with the vibe and knew I wanted to make a film in that world,” he says.

A tale of two brothers resorting to desperate measures in the aftermath of the Great Recession, Mackenzie quickly realised the work’s broader potential: “Underneath all that was an opportunity to shine a light on the raw nerves of contemporary America.”

The finished film could be compared to the great Warner Brothers crime dramas that emerged “torn from the headlines” in the 1930s at the height of the Depression. Morally ambivalent pictures like The Public Enemy and Little Caesar (both 1931) based their gangster protagonists on Al Capone and romanticised bad men as self-determining role models. At the same time, real-life daredevil hoodlums like John Dillinger and “Pretty Boy” Floyd became folk heroes in the eyes of an American public brought low by the spectres of mass unemployment, bread lines and Hoovervilles.

Mackenzie agrees with the parallel in an age when bank foreclosures have become all too commonplace and cites Woody Guthrie’s ode to Floyd written in 1939:

“Some will rob you with a six-gun, 
And some with a fountain pen… 
You won't never see an outlaw 
Drive a family from their home.” 

“There’s that theme in American and British culture of the identification with the outlaw hero going back to Robin Hood. These people are doing bad things but we can’t help rooting for them at the same time because you can see why they’re doing it.”

Naming Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah among his influences for Hell or High Water, Mackenzie says: “I have a big soft spot for American male cinema from the late Sixties and Seventies. The great thing about that period in time is, although they were often quite tough movies or about tough situations, there was a lot of sensitivity and a lot of humanity embedded within those things. They were putting a bit of the human touch into what was previously a very hard-boiled genre.

“For a while at least we’ve not been exposed to that kind of material very much. I think cinema has been trying to aim at a slightly younger, softer market so it’s nice to have a film playing to a decent audience and connecting with people that is a little bit harder and more grown-up.”

One man who came to prominence in precisely that period was Mackenzie’s star, Jeff Bridges, here playing grizzled lawman Marcus Hamilton: “The process of getting him to find his groove was a fascinating thing and would involve research into genuine Texas Rangers. There were a couple we followed along and who would advise. You’re trying to understand the rhythms and nature of being that kind of person. I think that’s definitely part of what Jeff is keen on doing,” he says of the actor’s methods.

Key to the film’s appeal was creating a believable rapport between Hamilton and his long-suffering partner, Alberto Parker, played by Native American actor Gil Birmingham, best known for his work on television in shows like House of Cards and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on Netflix.

The two men bonded during Hell or High Water’s location shoot in New Mexico, playing guitar by night and allowing their friendship to feed through into their improvisations. During long takes shooting arduous, cross-country driving scenes behind the wheel of a patrol car, the actors would grow tired, Mackenzie recalls: “And as they started running out of juice as Texas Rangers, they started introducing more of themselves into it. They bounced off each other in a really nice way. The chemistry between them is one of the things I’m really happy with in the film”.

Pine and Foster were similarly cast as brothers because they already knew each other: “The odd couple element of them was something we wanted as part of the flavour.”

A tense bank robbery scene from ‘Hell or High Water’

Despite the dream cast at his disposal, Mackenzie says Hell or High Water’s shoot in the sweltering sun of the southern states was tough: “We were living it, in many ways. For me, as a Brit trying to make an American film, it was essential to assimilate as much as possible and get as much of that flavour as possible. We were listening to outlaw country music and inhabiting those real spaces. Really important to me was to try and find real locations that expressed that world.”

Mackenzie’s cinematographer, Giles Nuttgens, “went for that hard midday light that most directors of photography try and avoid to make sense of the heat of it. The almost oppressive sunshine and shadows”.

At a time when HBO’s Westworld is attracting huge audiences, Mackenzie offers an insight into the enduring popularity of neo-Westerns, his own film following in the snakeskin boots of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) and No Country for Old Men (2007).

“The thing about the West, to some extent, it’s about a tabula rasa. It’s about people trying to start again in some way. Obviously it’s complicated because you’ve got Native Americans occupying a landscape and there’s the whole colonisation thing on the way. But the colonisers are trying to get a fresh start themselves. There’s something eternally appealing about that idea.

“I think each generation rewrites these versions of things to suit their own sense of the world. I’m a big fan of Jim Jarmusch’s Nineties Western Dead Man and also Seventies revisionist Westerns. Trying to express the themes of the day with these genre things is a logical game and I’m starting to feel that it’s OK to do that. Not a bad cinematic strategy.”

Having started out specialising in modest indie cinema with a social-realist bent, Mackenzie seems to have finally found a way to feel good about producing unabashed thrillers.

“I’ve just started becoming more comfortable with the idea that it’s OK to be starting from a point that's categorisable. I am certainly getting more interested in the idea of trying to make movies that people go and see and are able to be put in front of an audience and marketed, hopefully without compromising any of the work. I’ve made nine films and not all of them have been hits although I’m proud of every one of them and I’ve put my heart and soul into every one of them.

“What one learns when one does a film that doesn’t hit is you don’t want to be too obtuse. You want to try and find ways of giving the audience an opportunity to discover it as opposed to alienating them.

“You find yourself doing these anti-genre films that get put in a genre box anyway and appallingly miscast, so if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

‘Hell or High Water’ is released in the UK on DVD and Blu-ray on 9 January