Interview | Director Kevin Macdonald on bringing his documentary instincts to ‘The Runner’ and capturing modern paranoias

Kevin Macdonald

| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Scottish filmmaker Kevin Macdonald has made a career out of studying the human breaking point. From the agonising physical entrapment of Touching the Void (2003) to the real-time hostage terror of the Academy Award-winning One Day in September (1999), Macdonald’s lens consistently permeates the human psyche as characters process claustrophobic, life-or-death pressure.In his latest psychological thriller, The Runner, he taps into technology’s chokehold on humans. At a time when we have handed control of our lives to the phones in our palms, the film highlights the terrifying extent of this dependency and the ways it can be turned against us.“This is a modern paranoia. We’re all terrified of the influence of the technology around us,” Macdonald tells The Hindu in an exclusive conversation over Zoom. “On the London Underground featured in the film — or for that matter, even the metros and buses in India — everyone is on their phone. We all know that we’re being controlled, manipulated, and observed. It’s very easy to go from that sense of slight anxiety to imagining a case in which your phone is actually controlling you like a puppet.

A still from ‘The Runner’