Interview: The Mackenzie Brothers

Older brother David arrives soon after. The film director is stockier and bearded. An occasional stutter betrays his wariness of this journalist who insists on asking personal questions, rather than cineaste-style queries about Perfect Sense. The film, directed by David, stars Ewan McGregor and Eva Green, with support from Alastair, along with Ewen Bremner, Denis Lawson, and Stephen Dillane. It was produced by Sigma Films, the company the brothers run with Gillian Berrie, so it’s very much a homerown project, despite having a screenplay by Danish writer Kim Fupz Aakeson.

As they relax into our conversation and the familiarity of one another’s company, Mackenzie I and Mackenzie II, as they were known at prep school, grow more and more alike. At times I feel as though I’m eavesdropping and later, listening to my tape, it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish who’s talking. They finish each other’s sentences, tease, and digress into anecdotes that have nothing to do with promoting Perfect Sense.

Thanks to a body of work that not only includes Monarch, but David’s films Young Adam and Hallam Foe, the Mackenzie brothers are unofficial poster boys for Scotland although neither of them was born here, and they were largely raised in Sussex.

“My father was very much a Perth boy who joined the navy when he was 13. My mother was born in Dundee,” offers David, who tells me he was born just outside Newcastle, in 1966. “And I was born in Dorset,” says Alastair, three years younger.

David continues: “We had an itinerant childhood and when people ask exactly where you’re from, it’s often difficult to answer. When you don’t have a specific place – even if you’ve chosen to reject that place – it does leave you with a slightly odd sense of identity. That’s a question I’m continuing to evolve and answer.”

Alastair has lived in London for 19 years, it’s the longest he’s called anywhere home, and says: “We grew up knowing we were Scottish, but spent our first years four miles from the English Channel. Our grandmother lived here, so we were always drawn up here. We were living here [for a while], and we were told where we were from. They say that the first ten years are when you create your identity, so my kids, who are 11 and six, are Londoners, but it’s the same thing: their grandparents are living in Scotland and I’m taking them on these long f***ing journeys and saying ‘You’re Scottish!’”

“At least I still live here,” jokes David, who’s based in Glasgow. “What is interesting for me is that it was a very comfortable thing for my father to be Scottish in the navy, with a very plummy English accent, and for everyone to completely accept it. We have gone through an identity-shifting scenario. Scotland has tried to define its sense of nationhood in all sorts of ways in the time that we’ve been growing up, and that comfortable place, the open border with Scotland and England, has become more jangled in lots of ways. I think it’s really important that people don’t suddenly forget the enormous positives of not having a border between two countries.

“I’m not sure where I stand on things, politically, but don’t forget that for 300 years these countries have lived together and people from the south have moved to the north, and the north moved to the south and across the world. The diaspora from both countries has been massive. The British Empire was formed and the whole world changed.”

Questions of identity and belonging lay at the heart of David’s attempt to join the Black Watch. “I took it quite seriously, but I’m quite hard of hearing in one ear: I had a motorbike accident when I was 16 and damaged my ear, so I was failed for the army. I wanted to join because it was in the family tradition. My grandfather was apparently with Lawrence of Arabia, in the Black Watch and in the First World War.

“There were the examples of the people I saw while growing up, who seemed like interesting people. I looked at it like teetering between that and being a rebel, and I guess my hearing pushed me towards rebel.

“I’m not suggesting there was any real urge beyond a team thing, and I have no idea whether if I’d passed, I’d have gone through with it, but I did embark upon a short step along that path, and then … I went to art school.”

By contrast, after graduating from Glenalmond, Alastair did a course in theatre studies, but instead of going on to university, followed a girl to a bedsit in Balham, in London.

“So my destiny was shifted,” he laughs. “I knew I wanted to be an actor, and I was quite impatient and impetuous. When that relationship fizzled out, I went to live in Glasgow with my best friend, and we forged entry through the back door into the theatre. I became an actor/stage manager with a company called Borderline to get my Equity card, and started working as a runner on films.”

This prompts the brothers to recall a summer when they were both runners on a chaotic film shoot in Inverary, with a predominantly French crew and a bevy of young actresses. “I was 19,” recalls Alastair. “These were heady days, in spite of the fact that we were literally forced to pick up cigarette ends.”

Both agree they became very good at picking up fag ends. And judging by their giggles, experts at chatting up the talent. “We got on so well with the actresses that we got a memo from the production office saying that runners may not associate with the actresses,” laughs Alastair.

An aspect of his job included driving the film rushes back to Glasgow each night, which was a tiring slog. “Once, I pulled into a lay-by to go to sleep. I was done for speeding twice in one week, by the same officer at the same stretch of road. Another part of my job was to get the petty cash at the end of the week. I had to go to the bank with my passport as ID and then go back to Inverary via the airport, where I had to pick someone up. I was tired and unhappy because we hadn’t been well treated, and an announcement came on for the next flight to Chicago – and I had like £20,000 in the suitcase, and my passport.”

David laughs uproariously, as if he’s never heard this before.

“I really thought about it, but deduced that £20,000 wasn’t enough to get me far enough away. And the person I picked up was Julian Fellowes! Who I later worked with on Monarch, and who remains a buddy.”

He may be raising “Scottish Londoners”, but Alastair talks enthusiastically about the possibility of returning to Scotland. “I have a compulsion to feel rooted somewhere, and if I’m going to choose anywhere, it’s going to be Scotland. It’s how I was raised, and there’s also something profound about when I go into the Highlands. I feel more connected there than I do most other places in Britain. So I have one foot down south and one up here.”

“If I had a foot anywhere else it would probably be in America,” counters David, “but I’ve been based in Glasgow for 16 years, and before that, here in Edinburgh. I worked in this hotel, aged 17, and have been back, filming Hallam Foe.”

“And I shot New Town Killers in this room – and in the loos across the hall,” says Alastair.

Perfect Sense, largely shot in Glasgow, is a love story set against the backdrop of a global phenomenon – is it an epidemic? – in which people experience piercing moments of emotional intensity right before losing one of their senses, beginning with smell.

The movie bravely draws us into the characters’ experiences, so when they lose their sense of hearing, the sound track cuts out. We’re left with only the thump of pumping blood, and it reminded me of the sensation of swimming underwater. Early critical response was mixed.

“It’s about the loss of various senses, which is obviously a huge, human unifying experience,” explains David. “The fact that it’s accompanied by all these varied emotional symptoms is what makes the story strong. And it’s a fictional and poetic approach to the subject, which appeals to me, as well.

“It was originally set in Denmark but one of the major things I did was decide that it would be nice to transplant certain elements of the ways that society copes with its problems to a Scottish environment. The events force people to gather together and look after themselves and behave cooperatively. It’s painting Glasgow as a modern, cosmopolitan city and hopefully showing Glasgow in a fresher and possibly more aspirational way: let’s all gather ourselves together and try to make it a better place.”

The brothers are amazed that some critics labelled the film “pessimistic”. “It’s absolutely the opposite of pessimistic,” says Alastair. “I went to see a screening with a few execs and a few stony-faced, powerful people and the guy next to me wasn’t just wiping away tears at the end of the film, he was actually sobbing like a child.”

And that’s not pessimism?

“Pure joy,” chirps David.

“There’s somewhere between pessimism and joy, and it doesn’t have to be one or the other,” says Alastair. “It makes you review your approach to life. It made me want to run home and pick up my family and savour every last second. And that’s optimism.”

David says, “You could regard it as an apocalyptic movie, because in some ways that’s what it’s implying, but hopefully the combination of all the elements are more tingling and alive and swirling.”

Forced to choose, then, which sense would each man sacrifice? They begin negotiating.

Alastair says, “If I had to choose one it would have to be smell, so that I could retain hearing, sight and taste, though I expect you lose your sense of taste as well. Of all of them, it’s the one I’d give up first, very reluctantly.”

“I know people who can’t smell,” muses David. “I’m half-deaf in one ear, so I’m not sure I’d lose the other half of that. And I work in a visual medium, so I wouldn’t want to lose that. The idea of losing touch is the hardest to conceptualise, in a way, so I’d probably go for taste over smell, because I do love my smells.

“One of the difficulties about making the film was that as soon as you start opening the doors with these ideas, you could keep going on. I found it hard to finish a scene without thinking that I hadn’t explored all the avenues.

“In fact, one should just trust the script, but it was hard because it did open all these doors. It’s not just a film about ideas, I think it’s very particularly about emotions and I hope it’s a very emotional experience for the audience.”

You Instead, directed by David Mackenzie and shot over five days, at last year’s T in the Park festival, is in cinemas now. Perfect Sense will be in cinemas from 7 October.