“HALLAM FOE” DIRECTOR DAVID MACKENZIE

Sexual highs to be taken slowly: There was hardly need for a closed set when Jamie Bell’s Hallam Foe had a hot encounter ...

... with his wicked stepmother, played by Claire Forlani, while she inducted him into the Fifty Feet High Club. The only way was up for the film crew, but when a liaison is that heady, in a swaying tree house with precious little elbowroom, most feet had to remain firmly on the ground.

In contrast, it has been a rapid climb in reputation for director David Mackenzie since his debut feature, The Last Great Wilderness. His psychological Highland thriller was halted in its tracks by the 2002 foot-and-mouth outbreak in Scotland. Undaunted by movement bans, Mackenzie worked around them, found a farm that could take a film crew and started shooting locations on first sight. Is that a confident director or what?

He’s usually a director who likes developing his material, like his adaptation of the Alexander Trocchi novel, Young Adam—a fifties period piece that starred Ewan McGregor as a bargee and Tilda Swinton as the boss’s wife, alongside whom he docks regularly.

Mackenzie went on to investigate the darker side of life in a high security hospital with Asylum, headed up by Natasha Richardson and Ian McKellen, where a bored doctor’s wife creates some excitement for herself with one of the patients—a wife killer incarcerated for life.

Raised now to the dizzying rooftops of Edinburgh’s Old Town, Mackenzie was awarded a Silver Bear for Best Music (featuring Glasgow band Franz Ferdinand) as well as a Berlin Jury Prize for his coming-of-age piece starring another rising British screen talent, Jamie Bell. Hallam Foe is a boy haunted by the enigma of his mother’s death. His talent for spying on people reveals dark fears and peculiar desires. Driven to expose the true cause of his mother’s death, he finds himself instead searching the rooftops of Edinburgh for love.

DAVID MACKENZIE Q&A WITH JOURNALIST JAMES MACGREGOR

JM: You once wrote, “Hallam Foe is a strange gem of a film, but inevitably it won’t work for everybody.” So who will it work for?

DM: Anyone with soul. Anyone with experience of the sort of confusions and multiple forces that push and pull you when you are growing up. It’s really a coming-of-age thing, and I suppose all of us, when we were growing up, experienced some sort of fucked-up element.

JM: You shared an Edinburgh flat with Peter Jinks at one time and Hallam Foe was his debut novel—did you discover the book later on, or were you waiting for it to come out?

DM: I knew what he was doing and I knew about the progress of it. When the book was published, I read it very quickly. I knew there was an Edinburgh rooftop scene which already attracted me, so we were ready and waiting.

JM: How easy, or difficult, was it to create the screenplay from the Hallam Foe novel?

DM: In the book there’s a four-year time jump. We thought that might cause some disengagement with the character and we thought it missed a beat dramatically. We changed the middle section, cut that out and shunted the whole time frame into a much shorter space. We also gave Hallam a different job and shifted focus to what happens when he arrives in Edinburgh. Those kind of adaptations are not part of the book, but the spirit of the book is pretty much there and the characters of the book are very much there.

JM: You’re very attracted to dark stories for your filmmaking—what’s their appeal for you?

DM: They are the way I see life, I guess. I’m always looking for emotional truth in a story and that pulls me to something darker. I don’t need to do realism, but I do need to do truth. Hallam is like a kind of magic realism, but I must always tell some kind of truth.

JM: In all your films you seem to seek out the light and dark sides of your characters—are you conscious of doing that?

DM: I’m really trying to make as broad a representation of a human being as I can. I don’t believe in the lies of heroism for example. I’m always looking for characters that have multi-facets.

JM: You have gone on record saying all your shoots have funny moments—not intended—but moments that encourage actors to be more organic with the material. Were there some funny spontaneous moments when shooting Hallam Foe?

DM: (Laughs) I can’t right now think of any in particular but there are plenty in the end result—the film! We had a really good shoot. A lot of fun, although there wasn’t a lot of spare time for everything that we wanted to do; but we got through it. I like as free an atmosphere as possible. It’s still hard work, but I’m always happy to listen and take on board what other people bring to the table.

JM: What was the playing appeal of Jamie Bell for your main character?

JM: Given your ten years of living in Edinburgh—you must have known already many of the locations you wanted to use.

JM: Hallam Foe is practically feral—almost living on the rooftops—was there a lot of rooftop shooting?

DM: Quite a lot. There are a lot of health and safety elements to those rooftop locations—you have got to wire people up. Hallam is pretty feral. He spends a lot of time in tree houses. When he moves to the city, he swaps tree houses for Edinburgh’s Old Town rooftops. Some of them are pretty steep but we were able to make use of flat areas, as well as the more angled roofs.

JM: You have spoken out before on “the fakery of Hollywood sex.” Now here you are filming the teenage Hallam Foe having sex with an older woman, his stepmother, up a tree—plenty of fakery there, surely! What sort of fake sex were you getting at?

DM: It’s not like you use all your backlights to make it all look good and athletic, glamorous or sexy and it’s nothing to do with having sex with an older woman, or up a tree. If I film a sex scene, I’m trying to film what I understand real sex to be. Of course it’s still fake, because they’re not actually doing it. It’s more like I’m trying to get in on a close representation of sex rather than making it a big glossy number.

JM: It’s an important scene for the film, but it’s an awkward sort of location for a sexual encounter between Jamie Bell’s character and Claire Forlani’s. Did it need rehearsal? Was it up the tree or on the ground?

DM: These are pretty brave scenes for actors to get involved with, so you have to try and find a way of making the actors as comfortable as possible. So there’s a certain amount of physical rehearsal that one has to do, to make sure that everyone knows what they are doing, but I never want to do too much of that. You want to get some of that awkwardness onto the screen.

JM: It must have been a bit awkward up in a tree house, with a couple of your cast and yourself and the camera and operator—

DM: It wasn’t a very big space in that small little tree house!

JM: Tricky to shoot too, I would think!

DM: I’m not in a hurry to do a scene like that again. Not in a tree house fifty feet above the ground. It took a good few hours, definitely.

JM: Hallam Foe was five years in production—producer Gillian Berrie described it as “a hard slog.” What would you say was the hardest part of that whole process?

DM: Yes, Gillian said that, but then I was only involved for about two years before we did the shoot—getting the book and the first draft and all that sort of thing. For Gillian the hard slog was getting all the finance and getting the whole team together. For me it was a great deal more fun and I enjoyed the process.

JM: You seem firmly wedded to filmmaking in Scotland—would you feel happy to accept a Hollywood call?

DM: Sure, if the right project comes along. I don’t really mind where I make films. I’m planning one in Somalia, two in Europe, one in Glasgow, one in the U.S. It’s far more about the project, rather than the location. I prefer to be developing my own stuff, so I’m in a stronger position and have the power to make the kind of films I want.

JM: And if someone came along with a project they wanted you to develop?

DM: I guess so, rather than “Here’s the script, here’s the cast, go and make it,” which I’m not that keen to be doing. I like to have some choices left to me. Quite a lot of U.S. scripts that come my way tend to be already cast and I get to think, “I’m going to be out there just churning out the stuff—I want to create from scratch.”

JM: Shooting your debut feature The Last Great Wilderness, Scotland was suddenly hit by the cattle disease foot-and-mouth; a nightmare, surely—

DM: That hit us badly! The whole country was suddenly closed down for bio-security, but we eventually found a farm that would let us on. It meant we were turning up at locations we had never seen before and having to shoot. Strangely, it was a good experience. It allowed me to loosen up some of my ideas and learn to go with the flow quite a bit. I’ve been able to carry that with me to all of the films I’ve made since.

Hallam Foe opens in the UK on 31st August 2007.

Excerpt reprinted from the current issue of movieScope Magazine

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