As published on Blog do Amaury Jr./Splash UOL

An Academy Award winner for the documentary One Day in September, Kevin Macdonald has moved freely between true stories and fiction, directed Forest Whitaker in his Oscar-winning performance in The Last King of Scotland, and explored music icons in Marley, Whitney and, more recently, One to One: John & Yoko. In The Runner, premiering September 2 on Prime Video, the Scottish filmmaker returns to the thriller genre, turning London into a character as important as Gal Gadot.

The actress plays Maia Marten, a lawyer who receives a call informing her that her son has been kidnapped. To save him, she must run across the city and obey a stranger’s instructions. The structure is familiar, and Macdonald makes no attempt to deny it.

“It has classic genre beats. But, as we know, there are only a certain number of stories in film, so it is always about how I take this familiar, timeless narrative and give it a contemporary twist,” he explained in an interview.

In The Runner, that contemporary twist is technology. The criminal is able to follow Maia’s movements and take control of her routine through her phone — an extreme version, perhaps, but not one so far removed from the dependence already shaping our lives.

“We’re being controlled by our phones, which I think we all feel on some level. You’re taking something that is a metaphor — ‘I feel like phones are controlling my life’ — and making it real. I guess, in a way, it is a kind of satire on how dependent we are on our technology,” the director says.

Macdonald also wanted to move beyond the postcard image of London. The approximately five-mile — or eight-kilometre — route from Hampstead Heath into central London is real and can be retraced by viewers. His assistant even ran it a few times with a camera attached to her head to test the timing and journey.

“I wanted to bring a sense of the real texture of London, the real texture of the Underground and of homeless people, to show that it is not just a tourist version of the city,” he explains.

The greatest challenge came during the final ten days of filming, when Gal broke her foot while running on an uneven surface. The crew had to combine close-ups of the actress pretending to run with footage of stunt doubles. A few months later, once she had recovered, she returned to the set to complete the remaining scenes.

Known for pursuing realism in both documentaries and fiction, Macdonald refused to compromise even when it came to geography. “People were cursing me at times, saying, ‘Can we just shoot somewhere else?’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no. We’ve got to show the real route that she could run in that time.’”