Kevin Macdonald Quotes
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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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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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Documentary makers use other people's lives as their raw material, and that is morally indefensible.
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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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In film, I believe things should either be documentary or drama.
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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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For me, the aim of making any film like this, any film about an artist, would be to send you back to the art.
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You can go to places in Africa and Asia and find Marley graffiti. In the slums of Nairobi, you see his lyrics painted on walls, and you realise he has this almost religious significance to the underclass of the world. He's a guy born in a hut with no bed, and now he's probably the most listened-to artist in the world. It's fascinating.
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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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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'm not doing any more music films!
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I think my brother always wanted to be a film producer.
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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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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 used the same designer and costume designer on 'The Eagle' and 'The Last King of Scotland.'
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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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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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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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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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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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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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In war films, even more than in other kinds of documentary, we've come to think that shaky, poor-quality footage is somehow more authentic than something classically 'well shot.'
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I can't claim my grandfather's work has influenced mine directly, but his life certainly inspired me to follow this path.
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I suppose making documentaries is like doing journalism on film.