David Mackenzie On Directing 'Starred Up,' Rupert Friend, Jack O'Connell, Ben Mendelsohn

David Mackenzie recently directed Starred Up, which provides a dramatic depiction of prison life. This project is different from past films that Mackenzie has helmed in that he took a grittier, more realistic approach to directing it. “I think the material lent itself to realism in a way that other films that I’ve done haven’t,” Mackenzie told uInterview exclusively. “It’s a piece of fiction of course but it’s tuning into as much authenticity as it possibly can. All the way through, asking questions of authenticity and trying to make it connect to the reality was the intention, and that’s what we did.”

This notion demonstrates the stylistic differences between Mackenzie’s early films – most notably the dreamyYoung Adam starring Ewan McGregor – and his recent work. Mackenzie says that he really enjoys this style though. “I’ve never really gone that far down that realist process before, but I liked it so much that I think I’d like to carry on working in that way.”

Starred Up is based on experiences written about by Jonathan Asser when he volunteered as a therapist at the HM Prison Wandsworth in London. Continuing his explorations of the themes of rawness and realism, Mackenzie was attracted to Asser’s stories because he found that they dealt with these subjects. “I felt that there was something very personal, something very angry in the sense that it was very authentic and detailed, that was obviously there,” Mackenzie shared with uInterview exclusively. “So to take something that was very tough and sort of genre and really give it some heart and soul, that was something that we definitely worked to expand, but it was definitely in that raw form in the initial script.”

A large part of depicting this world accurately was the challenge of incorporating the slang used by the inmates in a natural way. “[The slang] was one of the initial challenges. The initial script had even more slang but in order to make the financers happy and have the audience understand what’s going on without having to revert to subtitling we had to soften the language a little bit.” Mackenzie told uInterview. However, Mackenzie and Asser knew that they would not be doing the film justice if they did not make an effort to depict the real language used by the film’s prisoners. “But it was very important to me and to Jonathan to keep as much of it as possible. It was a balancing act between understanding what people were saying and allowing that real language to come alive, which is really part of the pleasure of the dialogue.”