‘Relay’: The Late-Summer Gem You Absolutely Shouldn’t Overlook
My conversation with director David Mackenzie about his thrilling throwback. Plus: Our big plans for Telluride as fall festivals begin
I am neither riding a ski gondola over the mountains of Telluride nor cruising in a water gondola through the canals of Venice this weekend, but believe me, I’m plenty jealous of those of you who are — my Telluride-bound colleague Christopher Rosen very much included. My film festival travel doesn’t start until I head to Toronto next week — Team Ankler has so much planned! — and I’ll spend the next few days checking and re-checking my passport, obsessively managing my TIFFR schedule and figuring out just how many sweaters and jackets I can fit in my suitcase.
I’ll also keep a close eye on all the film festival action this weekend, starting with our first-ever call-in show for Prestige Junkie After Party paid subscribers, happening on Friday, Aug. 29, at 9 a.m. PT. Join for just $5 a month and get all the latest from Telluride from Chris, then pepper us with any questions you like — from who will really win the Emmys to the past Oscar wins that still infuriate us. It will be a fun experiment, and we’d love to see you there at the beginning!
Throughout the weekend, Chris and I will be checking in together on Substack Live — those will be free to everyone, and we’ll send out a recap of everything we discussed in a newsletter to After Party subscribers on Monday. I’m particularly eager to hear from him about the Bruce Springsteen biopic, 20th Century Studios’ Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, a rare studio movie making its way to Telluride, presumably because director Scott Cooper has been part of the lineup before (Hostiles). The Telluride audience also will get a look at Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly from Netflix (which has its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival tonight), as well as the world premieres of major titles including Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet (Focus) and Edward Berger’s The Ballad of a Small Player (Netflix).
And though they won’t be world premieres, Telluride can often be a significant proving ground for Cannes holdovers — Neon’s Anora was the hot ticket there last year, and Neon’s Anatomy of a Fall truly proved its awards season power there the year before. This year, I’d expect the hot Cannes ticket to be yet another Neon title: Sentimental Value, which lost the Palme d’Or to It Was Just An Accident (another Neon movie at Telluride this weekend) but is a well-crafted family drama ideally suited to the Boomerish Telluride crowd.
Anyway, we’ll get to all of that later — make sure you’re subscribed to Prestige Junkie After Party to get a notification when those Substack Live check-ins happen this weekend!
For today, I’ve got a conversation with director David Mackenzie, who is also heading to Toronto — his new film Fuze, a London-set thriller, will premiere at the festival on Sept. 5. In a run of productivity he swears is not a habit, Mackenzie also just released his film Relay, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last September and is distributed by Bleecker Street. I caught it there and was mesmerized by its throwback feel and the restrained lead performance from Riz Ahmed, and was eager to ask Mackenzie how he’s built a career almost entirely made up of films “they don’t make anymore.” Clearly, at least, Mackenzie does.
Hell, High Water & New York City
After his 2016 neo-Western Hell or High Water became a surprise box office hit and eventual best picture nominee, half of Hollywood seemed to think David Mackenzie fit neatly into just one box. “I got a lot of Westerns and a lot of tough guy soldier-type films,” the 59-year-old native of northern England admits. “It’s interesting how you quite often get typecast from whatever your last film was.”
It’s true that Relay, though set in New York City and centered on all kinds of corporate malfeasance, shares some of Hell or High Water’s thriller DNA. But Mackenzie is also the guy who made 2003’s erotic thriller Young Adam, the 2007 coming-of-age romance Hallam Foe and the 2013 prison-set family drama Starred Up, to name a few. If there’s any consistent theme in his work, Mackenzie says, it’s picking scripts from young writers, “because there’s something that’s coming out that’s a little more personal, a little bit more straight out of the gate.”
Relay is the first produced feature script from Justin Piasecki, though Mackenzie says he contributed some uncredited writing as well. The ingenious concept introduces Ahmed as Ash, a fixer with a particular focus — helping would-be whistleblowers return incriminating documents to their corporations and then get away without facing reprisal. To communicate with his clients, Ash utilizes the very real New York Relay Service, which enables deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals to complete phone calls, allowing him to maintain a carefully guarded anonymity.
“I’m always looking for something that feels like it’s got some originality, and doesn’t end where it started,” Mackenzie told me in our phone call a few weeks ago. Relay packs plenty of twists into its story after Ash starts working with possible whistleblower Sarah, played by Lily James, who is being targeted by a pack of hired thugs led by Sam Worthington and Willa Fitzgerald. There are cat-and-mouse chases, ingenious uses of old-school technology and a handful of shootouts, many filmed in stunning real-life New York locations like Grand Central Station. It’s a slick thriller that somehow feels very human and analog, which is precisely what lured Mackenzie to it in the first place.
“I tuned into the noir elements of the ’70s paranoid thriller films, and the script had a very strong flavor of New York, which I thought was also really appealing,” he continues. “That all added up to something that I thought was worth doing.”
Relay first came to him in 2019, and the production went through many of the familiar hiccups of the last few years — delayed due to Covid, and wrapped just a few weeks before the actors’ strike began in 2023. While waiting for Relay to get started, Mackenzie signed on to direct two episodes of the FX miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven, a process he says pales in comparison to directing movies. Still, it did introduce him to someone who’s now a repeat collaborator, Avatar star Worthington.
“It really was a beautiful relationship, with Sam and the way I work,” Mackenzie says. “I always find I avoid continuity. We do every take fresh each time, and you can explore and try it in different ways. Sam particularly responded to that, and has just been a wonderful kind of partner over the last three films. He comes in, often taking parts which are not massive and giving them a real kind of character.”
Worthington is also part of the ensemble for Fuze, which also stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Theo James, and is the first film Mackenzie has ever made in London. Shooting on the streets of that city immediately after making Relay in New York brought up some similar challenges, from a short production schedule to the usual chaos of filming on a real city street, which you can’t ever completely control. “The madness of it is definitely part of the flavor,” says Mackenzie. “If it’s very calm, then I guess it would get kind of boring.”
Mackenzie is trying to invite a little bit of boredom into his life, with a break planned after debuting Fuze in Toronto. But you can’t expect anyone with this diverse a filmography to stay idle for long. He’s got creative ideas he wants to pursue, he says, but even more practically, “I get unemployment anxiety pretty quickly.”