Top 45 Kevin Macdonald Quotes

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.

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.

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.

It’s interesting to me that the Arab Spring started in Tunisia, and in the marches, people were singing ‘Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.’

There were many times during the filming of ‘Touching the Void‘ when I wondered why I had ever thought I wanted to make this film.

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

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.

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.

For everybody in the world, the answers to the mysteries in your life usually lie in your childhood, your upbringing, and your parents.

The great thing about making a film on a submarine is that it’s kind of like making a play. You’ve got this limited environment.

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

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

We should not confuse having a Flip camera with making a documentary.

Sometimes people give away more by not saying something.

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.

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.

I suppose that I’m easily bored.

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.

I went through a period of not watching fiction.

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.

Elvis Presley’s estate is making 30 million a year, and they say that Marley shouldn’t be, but he is from a much poorer part of the world, and a lot more people need the money.

The submarine genre is a category with all its own rules. But shooting on water is famously tough.

I was born at Rotten Row in Glasgow and brought up in Loch Lomond near a small place called Gartocharn. And it’s a bit like anyone: where you’re brought up, you have an irresistible attraction to that place; it defines who you are.

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

For me, the aim of making any film like this, any film about an artist, would be to send you back to the art.

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.

No man, no woman is without their flaws.

I’m not doing any more music films!

As a filmmaker, I’m interminably curious and nosy, but certain times you meet people and think, ‘I don’t want to push you too hard because I can see this is painful for you.’

If there’s a principle really worth sticking up for, I’ll go the whole way.

I suppose that the Western has always been a kind of mold to which you could pour the concerns of the day, but have them seen in the simple terms of the Western, of one alley or whatever.

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.

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.’

I recommend to any of you, that’s always a good way to make a film: use the interesting bits.

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 suppose making documentaries is like doing journalism on film.

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

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.

The first documentary I saw that tried to show the actual experience of being a soldier in combat was ‘The Anderson Platoon,’ by French director Pierre Schoendoerffer, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 1967.

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

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.

The Internet has meant that advertising has migrated; there are hardly any classifieds in newspapers any more because they’re all online. If people have a car to sell, for example, they sell it online; they don’t go to the newspaper.

Young people read their news online; they expect to get their news for free.