Top 50 Kevin Macdonald Quotes

I used the same designer and costume designer on ‘The Eagle’ and ‘The Last King of Scotland.’

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.

I think the parallels of a giant power with overwhelming military superiority and might, with America and Rome, it seems obvious to me.

When you look at almost every submarine movie, to some degree or another, there’s this ‘Moby Dick’ element, this Ahab element to them.

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.

If you want to do ‘Sword & Sandals’ movies, people think that means it equals ‘epic.’

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.

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.

‘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.

I think my brother always wanted to be a film producer.

I think we’re all greedy. Who do you know who says, ‘I have enough! I don’t need any more!’? It’s part of human nature.

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.

‘State of Play’ is a romantic story at its heart.

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.

We’re all fascinated by the way other people live their lives, how they cope with hardship and triumph, what they put in their home movies and family albums.

Although ‘The Anderson Platoon’ was what we would now call an ’embedded film’ – with all the ambiguities that term implies – somehow Schoendoerffer got away with showing things as they really were from a grunt’s perspective.

I’m not doing any more music films!

The things that are hardest to shoot are the things where you want people just to feel very natural, and you want to do love scenes, and you want to do just kids hanging out and trying to get them to relax.

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.

Put someone on a horse looking cold and wet, and they don’t have to act. They just are cold and wet.

When you’re trying to make a film, you’re trying to find a way to love your subject, and you want your audience to love your subject.

Most people in Uganda have something good to say about Amin – ‘He was funny; he gave us pride to be African.’

I don’t read many young adult books.

I suppose making documentaries is like doing journalism on film.

You can relate to someone with a flaw.

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.

I suppose that I’m easily bored.

I did not want to depict Al Gashey as evil. I wanted him to come across as someone who did what he did for reasons that were compelling. Whether or not we agree with him is a different matter.

In my early career as a documentarian, I suppose I was trying to make films which – where it was all about making a big cinematic statement, and I think with ‘Marley,’ I slightly changed my direction and adopted a more mellow approach.

I’m a cynical person who’s normally attracted to the dark side of things.

Documentary makers use other people’s lives as their raw material, and that is morally indefensible.

When we made ‘Life in a Day,’ we asked people around the globe to record their lives on a single ordinary day. When we were cutting that film, we talked about what it might be like if we chose a day that already had significance to people. The result is ‘Christmas in a Day.’

In film, I believe things should either be documentary or drama.

The only obligation you have as a film-maker is to tell your version of the truth and to use your film to illuminate reality. Whatever that means.

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.

I think there’s always been interest in Bob Marley.

Everyone’s got to make one submarine drama in their life.

When I was growing up on Loch Lomondside, one of the first albums I ever bought was Marley’s ‘Uprising.’ I guess that would have been 1980 – just before he died.

I find it really difficult when you make a movie where it is set in Russia and everyone speaks in English. It drives me crazy.

I love Humphrey Jennings. People ask me who my favorite documentary maker is, and he’s certainly in the top three.

The thing with newspapers is that they are a filter. We’re relying on the editors of that paper to be a filter and to tell you that this is worth reading about, this is quality, and this is quite reliable.

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.

It’s so nice to be totally artistically free.

People who die in an untimely way who are artists, somehow that validates their art, we feel. Why culturally we feel that, I don’t know.

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.’

I can’t claim my grandfather’s work has influenced mine directly, but his life certainly inspired me to follow this path.

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.

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.

I went to see ‘Francis Ha,’ which I could certainly relate to. She ends up wandering the streets of Paris all alone – something I’ve ended up doing a number of times in capital cities around Europe.

If you can understand, you can feel compassion.