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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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" Despite the limitations of the bulky 16mm camera and 10-minute film magazines, 'The Anderson Platoon' feels as spontaneous and fresh as any films that have come out of the Afghan or Iraq wars. "

Kevin Macdonald

Film

Camera

Spontaneous

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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 used the same designer and costume designer on 'The Eagle' and 'The Last King of Scotland.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My grandfather died before I started making films, but I definitely learnt this from him: believe in your own judgment and stick to your guns - 99% of the time, you'll be glad you did. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If you can understand, you can feel compassion. "

" 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. "

" You can relate to someone with a flaw. "

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

Kevin Macdonald

Art

You

" The relationship between director and subject can become very intense. It's a bit like therapy, with lots of transferences going on. It's easy to feel guilty. "

" 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 started as a documentary maker, and they're my first love. "

" I went through a period of not watching fiction. "

" 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 suppose that I'm easily bored. "

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

" 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. "

Kevin Macdonald

Car

People

" I love submarine movies. "