Relay
Relay
Opening with stabbing shots, David Mackenzie’s “Relay”, which has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a tight thriller. Riz Ahmed plays Tom, who plays a sort of middleman between the corporations and the people exposing the corporations. Tom is an extremely secretive character operating in a morally grey area until he is approached by Lily James’ Sarah to see him.
This leads to a cat and mouse situation combining high and low tech resolutions and tensely building to a plausible twist and a few jabs at some corporations. The international sales for the thriller are with Black Bear, while the domestic market is handled by CAA Media Finance and UTA Independent Film Group.
The filmmaker of the series, “Hell and High Water” and “Under the Banner of Heaven”, is almost through the final leg of filming for his new project, “Fuze”, which films in and around London and features Aaron Taylor Johnson. “They are heists and other activities kind of in and around London. Yeah, it’s coming out quite nicely, I think. But it has definitely been a lot of work, yeah,” he says.
“That’s what I continue to explore. Quite a lot of arthouse films have been made by me, and I adore those films, but there seems to be an audience for other types of films – good quality films, yet maybe a little easier to sell and appealing to a wider audience.”
In 1973 Warren Beatty could have starred in the film “Relay” and it could have become a box office success. Mackenzie smiles a little bit because he knew that was the kind of thriller he wanted 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. He was brilliant to work with,” says Mackenzie.
Given that all of Ahmed’s energy is bottled up and his dialogue is limited, he plays most of his roles through his very 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 name of the film is based on the type of telephone service that Ahmed’s character Ash uses in the storyline. The service relies on an operator to convey messages and voicemails, primarily used by people with speech difficulties or hearing loss. It is also ideal for secret missions since there are no logs of calls or numbers issued and the users’ information is completely confidential.
As with many of his other movies, “Relay” is also centered on an outsider. “I’m very drawn to these sort of outsider characters. There is, I believe, a particular kind of personality who will simply not accept, as in continue to comply, for the sake of consequences. So the type of people who do become whistleblowers – and at great personal risk, it’s worth emphasizing – are those who have that kind of very very strong moral compass… moral compass in fact, as opposed to just a sense of what is right,” Mackenzie says.
Even the atmosphere of “Relay” filmed in NYC and New Jersey adds to this general tension which is quite oppressive. “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. But it’s basically more like its original version.”
The original script was done by young writer Justin Piasecki. Also, Mackenzie compares this work with one of his previous films. “It was rather like ‘Hell or High Water,’ which had been written by this unknown writer, Taylor Sheridan. I could relate with it.”
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- Genre: Mystery, Thriller
- Country: United States
- Director: David Mackenzie
- Cast: Willa Fitzgerald, Lily James, Sam Worthington
