David Mackenzie is a Scottish writer/director, and a founder of Sigma Films.
After graduating film school, Mackenzie wrote and directed Young Adam, starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton. Premiering in Un Certain Regard 2003 and playing at Telluride, it won four BAFTA Scotland Awards and four BIFA nominations. Subsequent films include Asylum, starring Natasha Richardson and Ian McKellen, and Hallam Foe with Jamie Bell, which won a Silver Bear in Berlin 2007. Mackenzie also directed Perfect Sense, which premiered at Sundance in 2011 and reunited him with McGregor and co-starred Eva Green. It went on to pick up awards at festivals across the world. His follow up, Starred Up, which premiered at Telluride in 2013, starring Jack O’Connell and Ben Mendelsohn, won multiple BAFTA Scotland Awards and eight BIFA nominations including a win for Ben Mendelsohn.
In 2016, Mackenzie’s box office hit Hell or High Water, a contemporary Western starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster and Jeff Bridges, premiered in Un Certain Regard, and was nominated for four Academy Awards® in 2017, including Best Film.
Mackenzie’s historical epic Outlaw King premiered at Toronto in 2018 and was subsequently released on Netflix. Starring Chris Pine as the legendary King of Scots, Robert the Bruce, it remains the biggest production to shoot entirely in Scotland. In its first four weeks its audience was over 500,000.
