David Mackenzie on Fuze: 'It hits you like a sledgehammer and doesn’t let go'
With his latest movie, director David Mackenzie is going all in for thrills with an unexploded bomb/bank heist mash-up. Amid explosions and gunfire while mingling with mystery military experts, James Mottram caught up with the Scottish filmmaker on the set of Fuze
‘Welcome to Afghanistan… in Kent.’ So says Callum Grant, producer of new thriller Fuze by Scottish director David Mackenzie, as we stand in a huge quarry which has been converted into a Middle Eastern battleground. Close by, Aaron Taylor-Johnson is dressed in green fatigues, shooting a scene where he’s stranded in a minefield during a firefight with the Taliban. The air is filled with loud bangs and swearing, as dummy rounds are rattled off.
Mackenzie, his face obscured by a big grey beard, is not known for shooting action. ‘I’ve got a whole six-film career, which was not really playing genre games at all,’ he later explains, alluding to early work such as Young Adam and Hallam Foe. Then, in 2016, he made Hell Or High Water, the brilliant Oscar-nominated American crime/western hybrid with Chris Pine and Ben Foster about bank-robbing brothers. ‘As someone who doesn’t like to make the same film twice, this is my second heist movie so I should feel a little bit ashamed for repeating myself,’ he chuckles.
He needn’t admonish himself too much. As demonstrated by this Afghanistan sequence (a flashback to ten years before the main action starts), Fuze is far removed from Hell Or High Water. Primarily set around Edgware Road in London, the pitch is Heat meets The Hurt Locker, as Taylor-Johnson’s Major Tranter is called in to defuse a World War II bomb, discovered on a building site just yards from where a professional gang of thieves (The Gentlemen’s Theo James and Avatar star Sam Worthington among them) is busting into a bank vault.
‘The story had a relatively long genesis because it started with an idea of mine many, many years ago about trying to mash up the tension of an unexploded bomb movie with the tension of a bank robbery movie,’ explains Mackenzie. He deferred screenwriting duties to Ben Hopkins, the writer-director best known for arthouse efforts Simon Magus and The Nine Lives Of Tomas Katz. ‘I asked Ben if he’d have a go and he produced something that was not necessarily what I initially had in mind, but it was very much his.’
Influenced by Touchez Pas Au Grisbi and Rififi, lean French thrillers from the 1950s, Mackenzie was delighted by Hopkins’ choice to set events near Edgware Road, a part of central London not often featured on film. ‘It’s a very special area,’ he says. ‘I spent time there staying in cheap hotels when I was a young filmmaker. That was where you got a decent deal… I found myself very welcomed in some of the area’s Lebanese restaurants on my own, as a young person, just killing time, eating out, between jobs.’
Cast-wise, Mackenzie was able to call upon some old friends, including Worthington (this is their third collaboration, following TV miniseries Under The Banner Of Heaven and 2025’s Relay) and Taylor-Johnson, who featured in Mackenzie’s 2018 Robert The Bruce drama Outlaw King. ‘I really, really loved what he did in Outlaw King and knew that he is a special actor who can take chances and make bold choices, and throw himself right in there.’
Taylor-Johnson is patrolling the dusty set, explaining that the explosions are so loud it’s almost impossible to hear himself deliver his lines. Keeping a watchful eye on events is military advisor Freddie Kemp and ‘Will’, an explosive ordnance disposal advisor who won’t give his real name. Together with Nick Orr, a former member of the British Army and bomb disposal expert, they’ve been coaching Taylor-Johnson. ‘Those guys are pretty special people,’ says Mackenzie. ‘Their version of courage is a version many, many notches above most people’s version of courage.’
While the director naturally prefers to coax performances from his actors rather than watch stuntmen kicking ass, he acknowledges that Fuze must put the tick-tock tension first. ‘There’s not a lot of time for development of character. You’re just in the raw survival of it. That was very much my intention… and I’m happy with the way that the film’s energy works. It’s 90 minutes long. It comes in there and hits you like a sledgehammer and doesn’t really let go.’
Fuze is in cinemas from Friday 3 April.