Director David Mackenzie on His Paranoid Thriller ‘Relay’: ‘I’m Very Drawn to These Sort of Outsider Characters’

David Mackenzie delivers a tight thriller with “Relay,” premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film stars Riz Ahmed as Tom, who operates as sort of a middleman between corporate whistleblowers and the companies. The extremely clandestine Tom operates in a morally ambiguous area until Lily James’ Sarah engages his services. What follows becomes a cat and mouse game and a mix of high and low tech that climaxes in a tense twist, with some shade thrown at corporations, too. Black Bear Intl. reps international rights for the thriller, while CAA Media Finance and UTA Independent Film Group are handling the U.S.

The director behind “Hell and High Water” and “Under the Banner of Heaven” is currently close to wrapping his next film, “Fuze,” which is filming around London and stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson. “So it’s been pretty intense, sort of complex, kind of heisty type thing all around London. Yeah, it’s coming out quite nicely, I think. But it’s definitely been hard work,” he says

“I’ve done lots of arthouse films, and I love those films, but I’m trying to find a way of doing films that are still sophisticated, but are also slightly more kind of audience engaging and potentially commercial.”
“Relay” could have easily starred Warren Beatty and been a hit in 1973. Mackenzie grins a little at this, acknowledging that that was the type of thriller he was aiming to make. “And I thought that Riz would be a more interesting contemporary take on it than many other actors, and just sort of went in that direction. And he was brilliant to work with,” Mackenzie says.

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Ahmed’s all coiled intensity and given that his dialogue is limited, does most of his acting with his expressive eyes. “The casting process is always a funny old thing and I followed his career as a consumer, over the years, and I’ve always been like, oh, he’s a really interesting.”

The film’s title refers to the type of phone service Ahmed’s Ash uses in the film. The service employs operators to relay phone calls and messages verbally and through typed communication and is mostly used by people with speech impediments or hearing impairments. It’s also perfect for covert operations as no records of calls or numbers are kept, and users’ identities are kept secret.

Like a lot of his other films, “Relay” spotlights an outsider. “I’m very drawn to these sort of outsider characters. There’s a certain type of personality who just won’t accept, you know, go along to get along. So the type of people who do become whistleblowers — and at massive personal costs — are people who have a kind of very, very strong sense of right … of wrong, really, rather than right,” Mackenzie says.

The atmosphere of “Relay,” which was shot in New York City and New Jersey, is also quite oppressive, adding to the general tension. “I really wanted to shoot in November,” Mackenzie says, but that didn’t work out so they shot in spring and early summer. “We’ve graded it down a bit, given it a bit of mood.”
The script is by young writer Justin Piasecki. Mackenzie likens his experience to an earlier film he made. “It was rather like ‘Hell or High Water,’ which was by this unknown writer called Taylor Sheridan. I connected to it.”