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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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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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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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 suppose making documentaries is like doing journalism on film.
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I think my brother always wanted to be a film producer.
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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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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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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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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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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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I'm not doing any more music films!
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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 love Humphrey Jennings. People ask me who my favorite documentary maker is, and he's certainly in the top three.
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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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I've done a few celebrity-related things, and I think on the first one - about Mick Jagger - I got stung and was not able to make the film I wanted to make.
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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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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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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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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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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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With fiction, I've grown to really love the challenge of lying, the challenge of telling a good tale that isn't truthful, and working with performers is endlessly fascinating. You know, learning what a good performance is, how to get a good performance, how much or how little you need to create emotion or to create character.
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For me, the aim of making any film like this, any film about an artist, would be to send you back to the art.