Director David Mackenzie premieres new heist-thriller FUZE at Paradigm Cinema this Friday followed by Q&A
Acclaimed director David Mackenzie will be premiering his new British heist-thriller FUZE this Friday, April 24 at Paradigm Cinema in Yucca Valley at 7:00 p.m., followed by a Q&A with local film journalist Paul Cullum. Reporter Gabriel Hart chatted with Mackenzie (who lives part time in Joshua Tree) on the film’s origins, the relationship with the film’s heist and an unexploded WW2 bomb, and the audience’s attraction to the heist genre.
Set in contemporary London, David Mackenzie’s heist-thriller FUZE unfolds after an unexploded WW2 bomb is unearthed at a busy construction site, prompting a citywide evacuation. Amid the chaos, opportunists use the evacuation as a cover for an elaborately planned heist.
Most known for his 2016 neo-western Hell or High Water (starring Jeff Bridges), MacKanzie’s body of work spans a remarkable range: from the 2009 sex comedy Spread (starring Ashton Kutcher) to 2013’s prison drama Starred Up. On the heels of last fall’s technological thriller Relay comes FUZE arriving to theaters this weekend. Mackenzie said FUZE came from an idea that had been incubating in his mind for years.
“I kind of like the idea of tension in film and I wanted to see what happens when you combine the tension of an unexploded bomb movie, which is almost pure cinema already, and the tension of a heist movie, so it’s a sort of mashup of mine. I gave it to a friend of mine to write the script and we’ve just evolved it over time. Then getting close to production, we started involving experts, an Army bomb disposal team, and the cops, then the script evolved even further from there, and the tension built up even more.”
While a plot involving an unexploded WW2 bomb may seem far-fetched to a U.S. audience, Mackenzie says this is a common occurrence across Britain and Europe.
“I must say to the American audience that in the UK we get unexploded bombs discovered on construction sites all the time. Since I’ve started working on this film, there’s been probably about twenty of them, then just two days ago, central Paris was evacuated because of the discovery of one. There were bombs dropping all over Europe during the Second World War and some of them just didn’t go off. And some of them were deliberately set with time fuses, partly to instill more fear and to kill the bomb disposal people. And that’s kind of part of our film.”
I asked Mackenzie what he thinks draws audiences to the heist genre, whether Ocean’s Eleven made that kind of high risk “sexy” or whether it’s something more subtle when we live vicariously through a heist’s specific high stakes sequence.
“There’s something kind of hardboiled about the heist film. The stakes are very clear, and you have something very immediate with the tension: will they get away with it or not? It feels like it brings all the elements of cinema together in ways that are very appealing to an audience. And you get to have cool bad guys and root for them, you know––you don’t want anything bad happening to them. There’s a connection to the classic anti-hero that just seems perpetually interesting generation after generation.”
David Mackenzie’s FUZE premieres at 7:00 p.m. this Friday, April 24 at Paradigm Cinema, located at 56401 Twentynine Palms Highway in Yucca Valley.
Following the screening will be a Q&A with Mackenzie, open to the public with purchase of a ticket.
