David_MacKenzie

Yep. Jack O'Connell is a big movie star in the making. We were very lucky to have him. He's great. He's in Angelina Jolie's movie Unbroken, American audiences are going to see him a lot, and I guess this is kind of a breakout role for him.

The short answer is I wouldn't really be interested in it. I'm quite down on fantasy at the moment. I sort of feel like there's too much fantasy out there. I'm into reality, or things that are exploring the real. So superheroes, and ghosts and the supernatural, are not really for me. I feel there are enough stories going on in the real world, and I wish people would start to inhabit that more rather than the fancy world, personally. That said, I am very interested in exploring not superheroes but real heroes, and we've got a project that is trying to tell exactly that, about a real historical hero, and exploring what it takes to be a real hero. And I think it's very weird, because movies have worked so hard on creating the kind of fantasy of a hero that it's quite hard to work out what a real hero is.

Well, I first saw Jack doing an audition tape - he wasn't even in the room, and I saw him amongst quite a few of the best young actors in Britain. but there was something about what he did in the tape that I really liked, and I wanted to see more. So eventually I met him, and we explored some material, did a mini-workshop together, which was really interesting. It became very obvious that he was the guy, and he would be brave enough to take the character as far as he needed to take it. And that's very much what he does, he really really goes for it, it's brave and explosive and very powerful, and it almost came from that first meeting - it was an agreement at that point, and the rest was just getting on and doing it.

I can't really answer what my favourite film is. Some films that blew my socks off when I was younger that still resonate with me - there were a couple of movies that really scared me, like THE TENANT by Roman Polanski, DON'T LOOK NOW by the great Nic Roeg, one of my favourite directors, the film that made me want to become a filmmaker was Jim Jarmusch's film STRANGER THAN PARADISE. Which I saw 4 times in one week when it first came out, and it totally blew me away.

Yes, we did. Because we filmed in a real jail that had recently been closed down, and we worked with prison officers from the jail, as well as some former prisoners. And obviously Jonathan's experience working within the system himself was really important to that too.

It was just a big organic absorption process. Everything we were trying to do was to paint as intense & real a picture of life within a London jail as possible. The hierarchy, the rhythms of life, the way things are, you know? Quite a few of the small parts were played by people who used to be in jail in some way. But it's important to remember that it is a work of fiction, it's trying to be a realistic representation, but it is a work of fiction.