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cottish filmmaker Kevin Macdonald has made numerous Oscar- and BAFTA-winning films over a 30-year career, including The Last King of Scotland, State of Play, How I Live Now and The Mauritanian. His many documen- taries include One Day in September (for which he won the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award), Touching the Void, Life in a Day, Whitney, Marley and One to One: John and Yoko. His new film is The Runner, a visceral, pulse-pounding psychological thriller starring Gal Gadot as a high-powered lawyer whose life is upended when, on her routine morning run in London, a phone call tells her that her son has been kidnapped. The instructions to get him back are simple and merciless: keep moving, follow every command and tell no one. Stop, and he dies. Forced to sprint through the city in a literal race against time, she has to decide how far she'll go to bring her son home. Behind the camera Macdonald as- sembled a creative team that included cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Oscar winner for Slumdog Millionaire), editor Sam Rice-Edwards and colorist Adam Glasman. Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, he talks about the challenges involved and his love of post. What sort of film did you set out to make? "I wanted to make a sharp, adrenaline-fu- eled ride of a film, which is something I'd never done before. And I was originally captivated by this idea of a character who's forced to constantly keep moving, and as a storytelling device, I thought that was a real challenge and quite original. Technically, how do you do that? How do you film somebody who's run- ning the whole time?" What did Gal bring to the party? "She brought a sense of gutsy determi- nation. But also, I think the emotional core of this film is very simple: She plays an ordinary mother who wants to get her child back. But she's not a superhe- ro. She doesn't have incredible parkour skills. She's doing what an ordinary person could do. But she has this drive that is her motherly love. And I think Gal brought that more than anything else. She has four children of her own, so she understands the emotion of what that would be like. So, when we were going off worrying about other things, she brought it back to that central emotion- al lodestar." What did prep entail, and what were the main technical challenges? "Filming on-location in London is very difficult, and yet this whole movie is basi- cally on-location. And because I was de- termined to make it a real running route that you could run in the time it takes in the film, it meant that we had to plan all the real locations months in advance and get permits. But then the various coun- cils would change their minds, and we'd have to change our route or the bridge she could jump off. "The location manager is the real unsung hero of this film. He made everything possible. He allowed us to film on the Tube [London's subway] in a way that nobody else has ever man- aged. And we faced a ton of technical challenges, like recording dialogue and filming when you're running on a busy street with heavy traffic. How do you do that? We tried all sorts of things, like using long lenses and hidden cameras. But a lot of it was done by this amazing, unique, skating camera operator, Myron Mance, who was a brilliant asset for us, as he could skate over rough roads and pavements, and shoot at the same time. So that was the main tool we used for all her running scenes." This is your third collaboration with DP Anthony Dod Mantle. Talk about coming up with the distinctive visual approach and style. "I felt this needed someone with a great photographic eye and an openness to finding beauty in the rough and tum- ble of the street life, but also someone with tremendous energy in the way that they operate and approach things. And Anthony is the most energetic person you'd ever meet. That is what he is famous for, and he's great at combining energy with poetry in an unexpected way, and not being fussy about the light- ing. You couldn't light very much on this film anyway, as it's just impossible, and he used all sorts of different cameras. We shot a lot with a Leica stills camera that we also used as a video camera, as we could take that on the Tube very easily. And we had to come up with all sorts of ways to feel like we were getting inside our character's head, even though she doesn't get to emote very much. So, we used a lot of variable speeds, step print- ing and peculiar close-up angles on her for our expressive mode." Did you do any previs? "Yes, for some of the action stuff on the train and the bridge-jump scene. We storyboarded those sequences, as you have limited hours to shoot, and you've got to be very tight and exact, as you've obviously got big stunts as well. But a lot of the rest of it was very improvisa- tional, using what was available to us on the day." Where did you post? "All in London. We did the picture post at Goldcrest, and I love post, and it's changed so much since I started in the era of film. Anthony shot The Last King of Scotland on 16mm and 35mm, and we used the DI in a really aggressive way, which felt very novel at the time. I've been through the whole process, and I think now you can be lazier in your shoot, and you really can fix things later in post." What were the main editing challenges? "I've worked before with editor Sam Rice Edwards on commercials and some of my documentaries, and he did a brilliant job editing John and Yoko entirely using archival footage. And I thought that you don't need to have edited drama before to do this film. It's about a sense of the kinetic, and the story is so linear that somebody who comes from commercials and docu- mentary is probably better suited to do it than a conventional drama editor. "This was his first feature film, and so much of it is about the music, the rhythm, the propulsiveness, which he understood right away. He wasn't on- set much, but I always talk a lot with my editor when I'm shooting and we'll watch footage after each day's shoot. KEVIN MACDONALD - THE RUNNER THIS PULSE- POUNDING THRILLER WAS SHOT & POSTED ENTIRELY IN LONDON S DIRECTOR'S CHAIR www.postmagazine.com 10 POST SEPT/OCT 2026 BY IAIN BLAIR