About David Mackenzie

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August 29, 2014
David Mackenzie’s brutal sucker punch of a prison drama, Starred Up, stars Ben Mendelsohn and Jack O’Connell as a battered father-and-son pair who find themselves sharing a prison block after years of estrangement. In the following account of the film’s production, Mackenzie, who directed seven previous features before Starred Up, describes his determination to not let the “system” bully him into compromising his aesthetic integrity—a fitting sentiment for a film whose primary language is machismo-soaked aggression and violence.