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As a filmmaker, I'm interminably curious and nosy, but certain times you meet people and think, 'I don't want to push you too hard because I can see this is painful for you.'
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Coming from documentaries, my biggest challenge was to understand actors' psychologies. American actors take it all very seriously; British actors don't enter into all this methody way of doing things.
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I recommend to any of you, that's always a good way to make a film: use the interesting bits.
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I'm not particularly ethnically Scottish; I have one grandfather who is Scottish, although he's called Macdonald, and you don't get a lot more Scottish than that. The Scottish part of my family are from Skye, and I've always been very aware of that - always been very attracted to Scottish subject matter, I guess.
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I suppose that I'm easily bored.
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I don't think of myself particularly as a Scottish director, but you are what you are because the first ten years of your life, and where you spend them, brand you. In that sense, I'll always be a Scottish director.
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The relationship between director and subject can become very intense. It's a bit like therapy, with lots of transferences going on. It's easy to feel guilty.
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You can relate to someone with a flaw.
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Elvis Presley's estate is making 30 million a year, and they say that Marley shouldn't be, but he is from a much poorer part of the world, and a lot more people need the money.
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I like to take a little of what I learned in fiction and apply it to documentary and vice versa.
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John Lennon made wonderful music, which people listen to as music. Nobody around the world is living their life according to the precepts of John Lennon.
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Sometimes people give away more by not saying something.
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The first documentary I saw that tried to show the actual experience of being a soldier in combat was 'The Anderson Platoon,' by French director Pierre Schoendoerffer, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 1967.
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It's interesting to me that the Arab Spring started in Tunisia, and in the marches, people were singing 'Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.'
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It's obviously presumptuous in some ways to talk about somebody's sexuality who's not here to describe themselves.
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I'm a cynical person who's normally attracted to the dark side of things.
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I always loved digging away at the story, trying to find out things that people don't want you to find out and piecing it all together. I love the treasure hunt aspect of it, the thrill of the chase.
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It feels like we're all so familiar now with the traditional three-act structure that, actually, stories that are more complex, more naughty, that allow for disagreement and discussion, are more interesting to us.
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I don't think life gets any better than sitting in the sun while a legend of French cinema tells you stories about making 'Belle de Jour' and other wonderful films, and eating great food.
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The Internet has meant that advertising has migrated; there are hardly any classifieds in newspapers any more because they're all online. If people have a car to sell, for example, they sell it online; they don't go to the newspaper.
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Young people read their news online; they expect to get their news for free.
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It's nice to stretch in different directions and use different muscles. You can get swallowed into Hollywood, where it's all about bums on seats and how commercial a film is.
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I love Humphrey Jennings. People ask me who my favorite documentary maker is, and he's certainly in the top three.
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With 'Black Sea,' I long had an idea that I wanted to do a film about people stuck on the bottom of the ocean. I thought that was a terrifying scenario.