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" For me, what works well about 'Life in a Day' is that it's emotionally affecting without being manipulative. It really does make you think about the connectivity of the world, the similarities and differences. It shows the experiences we all go through: birth, childhood, falling in love, having kids, getting ill, dying. "

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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. "

Kevin Macdonald

Got

Think

Things

" I love submarine movies. "

" 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. "

" It's always nice to have the same people that you are familiar with and shorthand with, obviously, to be around you. "

" I don't read many young adult books. "

" I'm not doing any more music films! "

Kevin Macdonald

Films

Doing

" 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. "

" The amazing thing about Bob Marley is that there is no moving footage of him at all for the first ten or eleven years of his career. From 1962 to 1973, there's nothing, not a single frame. "

" 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. "

" 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 was fascinated by making a submarine movie, inspired by the Kursk disaster. This idea of being trapped down at the bottom of the sea seemed so terrifying. I was very interested in making a sub film which wasn't a military film. You think, Well, why are they there, then, if they're not in the military? Oh, well, they must be looking for treasure. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Like a lot of expatriate Scots, when you want to be called Scottish, it's useful. I see myself as being without nationality, as a European: my region is Scotland; my nationality is European - isn't that a very Alex Salmond thing to say? "

" 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. "

Kevin Macdonald

First

Growing Up

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

" 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. "

" It's so nice to be totally artistically free. "

" 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.' "

Kevin Macdonald

Documentary

Think

" 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. "

Kevin Macdonald

Born

Small

" You can relate to someone with a flaw. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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