GQ recently interviewed David ahead of The King being released in cinemas this Friday. Here’s an extract of the interview – to read the full interview click HERE:

GQ spoke to Michôd about power, the quality Timothée Chalamet shares with Robert Pattionson and Brad Pitt, and becoming Hollywood’s most notorious hair stylist.

GQ: Do you enjoy giving really handsome actors terrible haircuts?

David Michod: [Laughs.] Yes, I do. It brings me great pleasure. But Rob [Pattinson]’s haircut in The Rover was entirely his creation. And justifiably, with Timmy and The King, everyone was a bit nervous about what we were going to do with his head. But I had faith always that we weren’t going to give him a truly horrific Medieval bowl cut. And even if we had, somehow that Timmy Chalamet kid would find a way of making it hot.

Guy Pierce’s haircut in The Rover might be the worst.

And Guy did it himself. He took a pair of scissors home two nights before we started shooting and just chopped his own hair off. That one was his fault too.

Do you have a favorite?

Rob’s in The Rover was one I actually started seeing on everybody. That was way ahead of its time. That’s how plugged in Rob Pattinson is. But I think Timmy’s in ​The King ​is kind of cool. I’m almost half-tempted to get one myself.

Let’s talk Chalamet! What about him made him a fit for King Henry V?

When Joel [Edgerton] and I first started writing this thing, Timmy didn’t even exist in my mind. It wasn’t until right around the time that we were trying to put the movie together that he entered my orbit. Prior to that, I had been picturing something with a young, strong, strapping man doing young, tough, strong, strapping stuff. Seeing Call Me By Your Name showed me a version of The King that suddenly excited me so much more, which was the story of a true kind of boy king.

There’s something so joyfully present and playful about Timmy that made the character exciting for me: The idea of taking that kid [from Call Me By Your Name]—the idealism and the playfulness—and then dumping this world of responsibility on his shoulders, and then watching it harden him from the inside.

As a director, there are a few themes that you tend to return to. Are you conscious of doing so?

I’m my own worst enemy in that it always feels important to me that whatever I do not feel exactly like the last thing I did. But I am aware of there being certain thematic concerns that seem to be recurring. Things to do with toxically male worlds, or delusional men coming to realize they’re wrong, or naive men coming to realize that the world isn’t as they thought it was. That either suggests to me that I am one of these delusional men or I am afraid of these delusional men.

As a kid, I was drawn to the stories that most frightened me. I remember how powerful those early horror movie experiences were for me, how earth-shattering it felt that a movie could make me feel abject terror. As a kid mischievously watching a horror movie I wasn’t supposed to watch when my parents were out, I would be practically in tears wanting them to come home because I was so afraid. And then when you grow up, it’s not bogey men in hockey masks with chainsaws that frighten me anymore. It’s hubristic, delusional sociopaths in positions of great power.