The next filmmaker to sit down with DN as part of our British Independent Film Awards interview series with the 2025 nominated directors for The Douglas Hickox Award (Best Debut Director) is Cal McMau to discuss his brutally tense, alarmingly immersive prison thriller, Wasteman. A film that took a decade-long journey to reach the screen, McMau’s debut feature is an uncompromising portraiture of a merciless prison ecosystem, where a convict’s upcoming parole is threatened by his ruthlessly volatile new cellmate. The path to Wasteman began with years of collecting and studying visceral phone footage shot by inmates in real prisons, an archive of authentic life in confinement which became the foundational texture of the film. While McMau’s stylistic, detail oriented work in advertising and music videos proved to be the perfect grounding for the crafted realism of Wasteman and the raw authenticity of the film.
McMau and his team built their oppressive prison set with meticulous detail, seamlessly blending it with location shots to create a wholly believable, claustrophobic world – with the camerawork and direction conquering the challenge of a tight space by embracing it, making the audience feel every cramped movement within the prison’s cells. This commitment extends to the soundscape, built from recordings of concrete and metallic echoes and distant, distorted arguments, immersing the viewer in the constant, institutional tension McMau knew was integral to the film. Featuring standout, BIFA-nominated performances from 2025 BAFTA rising star David Jonsson, whose role in the film goes far beyond his frighteningly vulnerable central character, and Tom Blyth, an actor who harnessed a truly terrifying depiction of a callous and hardened inmate—all the more so due to glimpsed moments of vulnerability—Wasteman is a testament to perseverance and long term vision. In our interview with McMau, we explore the film’s journey from a stalled development doldrums to its phoenix like reignition by a passionate Jonsson—who originally auditioned for an earlier iteration of the project in 2017 and whose passion for the script remained unwavered years later—the intricate, almost balletic choreography of the film’s riot scene, and the profound relief of realising—after a demanding and involved 18-day shoot—that the finale film on screen was exactly the one he had set out to make.
The first time round it was very fraught. I was so desperate to make this thing happen. The second time round, it was much more considered, something truer to what I believed in.
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