National Post (National Edition)
From big screen to small stream
Outlaw King goes from TIFF to Netflix
The irony of a Netflix film opening the Toronto International Film Festival is not lost on its director, David Mackenzie.
Outlaw King, with Chris Pine as 14th-century Scottish king Robert the Bruce, screened at Roy Thomson Hall and the Princess of Wales theatre last Thursday ahead of two more festival screenings, but will next appear on the streaming service Nov 2.
“I felt it was a really good opportunity to show the film to a large audience and get it out in the world,” says Mackenzie, the morning after the world première. “I felt like there was an opportunity to say: Here we are! The energy was great for me in the room. I was also close by the cast so I was enjoying their reaction because a lot of them hadn’t seen the movie. I only finished it on Monday. We had to really rush to get it ready for TIFF.”
He adds: “One of the great things about opening TIFF with it is putting it out on the big screen in a great theatre — or two great theatres — and seeing it writ large. I’m excited by the fact that the film will also have a life on the big screen as well as the streaming service.”
Netflix is planning a limited theatrical release to coincide with the steaming debut, but the studio isn’t yet certain in which cities it will play. New York and L.A. are likely, Toronto less so.
“Obviously people watching a movie on their mobile phones is not ideal, but it’s not as if the conventional studios don’t have their streaming platforms and their version of watching the movie on whatever format you want,” says Mackenzie.
“The vast majority of my films have unfortunately not had massive theatrical windows,” he adds.
“Most people who do see them tended to be, back in the DVD days, on DVDS, and on streaming now.”
Mackenzie’s last film, and arguably his most popular, was 2016’s Hell or High Water, which also starred Pine and was nominated for four Academy Awards including best picture.
He says he never considered a small-screen look when shooting Outlaw King.
“The esthetics are exactly the same, the width of vision is exactly the same, the aspiration and ambition is the same as far as I’m concerned.”
And to be sure there are sweeping aerial views of the Scottish countryside that were breathtaking on the big screen. That big-screen detail may also have been the reason this critic noticed an odd coincidence; the castle where the character of James Douglas (Aaron Taylor-johnson) attacks his English overlords is the same one where John Cleese rescues an imprisoned Terry Jones in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Mackenzie laughs when I mention it. “I didn’t want to shoot it because it’s been massively overshot,” he admits of the Scottish location.
“But it suited our purposes. And the intact castles, you can probably count them on one hand.”
The Scottish-born director is, perhaps not surprisingly, a fan of Python’s 1975 film.
“It was an anxiety to make a realistic movie set in the same period and for it not to be comedic.”
THE FILM WILL ALSO HAVE A LIFE ON THE BIG SCREEN.