The shadow of Wallace has got to be there – but this is the Robert the Bruce show

THERE is a scene in Outlaw King where Robert the Bruce and his rival John “The Red” Comyn stand toe-to-toe inside Greyfriars Kirk in Dumfries having a heated discussion about the fate of William Wallace, who has been hanged, drawn and quartered on the orders of Edward I.

“Wallace got what he deserved,” barks Comyn. “He wasn’t a man. He was an idea. A destructive and dangerous idea.” It is a powerful moment: a line in the sand separating where the narrative of Wallace ends and that of Bruce begins.

Director David Mackenzie was conscious of making that distinction. “The shadow of Wallace has got to be there in that story,” he says. “But this is not the William Wallace show – this is the Robert the Bruce show.

We had to touch on it, deal with it and move on.”

The idea of making a film about the King of Scots has occupied Mackenzie’s thoughts for some years. It was shelved as he embarked upon other projects – most notably the Oscar-nominated neo-Western crime thriller Hell or High Water – before being greenlit by online streaming giant Netflix.

The big-budget biopic, starring Hollywood star Chris Pine as the eponymous hero, is released on Friday. Mackenzie, 52, is sanguine when asked what first drew him to Bruce.

“Robert the Bruce is a Scottish national hero and I grew up with these stories of him,” he says. “I was desperate to make a heroic movie set in Scotland and it feels like the story of Robert the Bruce has been eclipsed by William Wallace after Braveheart. I tried not to talk about that subject because I want this to be a totally different film. But I have realised that I can’t avoid talking about it.

“There is a slight sense of wrongs to be righted in that the guy who achieved the goals that Wallace was trying to achieve – but didn’t – seems to have got lost in the heroic failure of war. Which is in its own right a slightly Scottish trait to glorify heroic failures.”

Although that is not to airbrush Wallace entirely. Mackenzie, who co-wrote the £85 million Outlaw King, acknowledges how the wave of anger and growing unrest over Wallace’s execution saw Bruce seize upon the opportunity to stake his claim to the Scottish throne.

“Suddenly he [Edward I] started distributing bits of William Wallace’s body all over the country,” says Mackenzie. “It