Kevin Macdonald Quotes
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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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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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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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I think my brother always wanted to be a film producer.
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I'm not doing any more music films!
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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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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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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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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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I used the same designer and costume designer on 'The Eagle' and 'The Last King of Scotland.'
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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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'Uprising' was one of the first three or four albums I ever bought in 1980 when I was 13, and that had a strong impact on me.
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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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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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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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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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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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'State of Play' is a romantic story at its heart.
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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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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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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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A publisher friend of mine suggested that I write a book about my grandfather, who had just died. I had nothing else to fill my empty days with, so I started work on this book. While researching it - watching lots of movies, talking to moviemakers - I became interested in movies and started making documentaries.