Kevin Macdonald Quotes
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Documentary makers use other people's lives as their raw material, and that is morally indefensible.
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I suppose making documentaries is like doing journalism on film.
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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.
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When you look at almost every submarine movie, to some degree or another, there's this 'Moby Dick' element, this Ahab element to them.
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I think my brother always wanted to be a film producer.
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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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Put someone on a horse looking cold and wet, and they don't have to act. They just are cold and wet.
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I'm not doing any more music films!
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If there is a tendency in modern television I hate, it is the unstoppable march of the dramatic reconstruction to tell the stories of anything from an ancient Egyptian battle to the early life of Paul Gascoigne.
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When you see how people in the developing world react and how they use a camera, you realise how narcissistic we are and how the filming of ourselves and thinking that we're interesting enough to care about is odd.
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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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It is hard to find the soul of Mick Jagger. It is very hidden. I think his true personality has receded so far behind the facade that he can no longer find the real person himself.
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The tradition has always been that in Roman films, the Romans are always British, and it's usually posh British: Laurence Olivier and his ilk. My take on all this was that it's a metaphor for empire and the end of empire.
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People listen to The Beatles, but while they were muscially influential, they weren't culturally influential in quite the same way. You can go into the back of beyond in a little Indian village, and they will listen to Bob Marley. But they're not going to be listening to The Beatles or The Rolling Stones.
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I used the same designer and costume designer on 'The Eagle' and 'The Last King of Scotland.'
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In some ways, making documentaries is like being a journalist. You interview people and then use the bits you want to use as opposed to the bits they want you to use.
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There's something about the lack of certainty with a documentary, which is exhausting if you do three in a row. It's nerve-wracking.
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I think everything that I've done, I've been involved with for longer. Either you develop it from scratch, or you take something, and you develop it, and you work on the script, but I'm not sure how good I'd be at just sort of taking a piece of material and being a director for hire like that.
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The interesting thing to me is that somehow the future of movies will become a more social thing... I think that people will see them communally and will be talking about them as they're watching them, in a way, and immediately after watching them, and they'll all become the conversation. I think that's pretty interesting.
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For everybody in the world, the answers to the mysteries in your life usually lie in your childhood, your upbringing, and your parents.
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You can get good performances in quite sizable roles from people who have never been in front of a camera, people who maybe have never been in front of a movie theater.
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'State of Play' is a romantic story at its heart.
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When you're an outsider and going into a culture like America, it's easier to stay away from any cliches because you're not really aware of what they are.
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It's always nice to have the same people that you are familiar with and shorthand with, obviously, to be around you.