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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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" 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. "

Kevin Macdonald

Film

Thought

Many

" I'm not particularly ethnically Scottish; I have one grandfather who is Scottish, although he's called Macdonald, and you don't get a lot more Scottish than that. The Scottish part of my family are from Skye, and I've always been very aware of that - always been very attracted to Scottish subject matter, I guess. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

Kevin Macdonald

Singing

" 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

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

" Coming from documentaries, my biggest challenge was to understand actors' psychologies. American actors take it all very seriously; British actors don't enter into all this methody way of doing things. "

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

Kevin Macdonald

Worth

Principle

" With 'Black Sea,' I long had an idea that I wanted to do a film about people stuck on the bottom of the ocean. I thought that was a terrifying scenario. "

" I like to take a little of what I learned in fiction and apply it to documentary and vice versa. "

Kevin Macdonald

Documentary

Little

" 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'm a cynical person who's normally attracted to the dark side of things. "

" 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

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

" 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've fallen out very badly with some of the subjects I've interviewed, because they see their lives a certain way; to step into a cinema and see your life depicted in another way can come as a terrible shock. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

" 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. "

" It's obviously presumptuous in some ways to talk about somebody's sexuality who's not here to describe themselves. "

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

" I think there's always been interest in Bob Marley. "